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Memphis rape victim sues over backlog of 15,000 untested rape kits. Including her own.

Courtesy of Buzzfeed:

An anonymous Memphis woman has filed a class-action lawsuit against her city for failing to test an estimated backlog of 15,000 rape kits — including her own kit from 2001.

According to the complaint filed on Dec. 20, over the past several decades, thousands of Memphis women have reported their sexual assaults and received rape kits — or “had body fluid samples removed from their bodies and placed within sexual assault evidence kits.” But scores of those kits were sent to the Memphis Police Department and left untested, allegedly resulting in “spoliation.”

The lawsuit was filed by a single mother who was raped multiple times in the early hours of March 30, 2001, when an intruder broke through her window and bound her arms and feet.

The woman says she was treated at Shelby County’s Rape Crisis Center, where her samples were put into a Memphis Police Department Sexual Assault Evidence Kit. But the kit was never submitted for testing, according to the lawsuit, and the intruder was never arrested.

Memphis has previously acknowledged its enormous backlog of rape kits, with Police Director Toney Armstrong saying in November that the department will have 12,000 unprocessed rape kits “even after an initial round of 2,226 kits is tested,” according to Memphis’ Commercial Appeal. (The department received $500,000 in September to test the kits and $1 million to build a facility to house them.)

In an interview with the Commercial Appeal, Deputy Memphis Police Chief Jim Harvey attributed the backlog to several factors, including advances in DNA-testing technology — which meant re-testing old kits that only tested blood types — and outdated procedures, such as police using staplers to bound envelopes of evidence together, or not testing kits when the victim knew his or her attacker. He also blamed the department’s lack of record-keeping abilities on an employee who was responsible for transporting rape kits into storage. That employee has since died.

“[There] may have been some kind of document that Hyun Kim was storing this information in, but we don’t know, because he died,” Harvey said. “And when he died, everything he knew went with him.”

And law enforcement wonders why women are so hesitant to report a rape.

Even in today's so-called "enlightened" era you will find both men and women often jumping to the assumption that "she made the whole thing up,' or "she was asking for it," or "she sent him mixed signals."

Add this to the callousness of police officers, the shaming in the courtroom, and the isolation it often causes among friends and family members, and the real surprise it that ANY woman reports their assault.

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