Fourteen years after a Detroit woman reported a sexual assault, she got her first call back from authorities, says the Detroit News. A suspect's DNA matched a sample taken that long-ago night and sealed in a cardboard box in a Detroit Police Department Crime Lab property room. Today, a 38-year-old man is being tried for that crime. Defendant Antonio Jackson has been married for five years, working, getting on with his life. His lawyer, Michael Komorn, questions "a rush to judgment" based on physical evidence collected long ago, in what he calls "a monumental" backlog. It's the first test of the 400 Project, a random sample of 400 of the 10,559 cardboard boxes called "rape kits" that languished in a property room until they were "discovered" or "observed" during a 2008 walk-through of the room by state police officials and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy.
Four years after authorities began an effort to tackle the boxes, and the thousands of stories and potential crimes languishing inside, the first case of 400 studied is finally coming to trial. "You don't get a problem like this because one person didn't do his job," said Rebecca Campbell, a Michigan State University psychology professor. She is working with prosecutors, police, and medical personnel to diagnose what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it from happening again. Campbell describes a systemic failure of colossal proportions involving many people: relationships between the police and prosecutor, between hospitals and forensic examiners and doctors and lab technicians, each trying to do their jobs.
Read full entry »In 2009, Detroit prosecutors discovered more than 11,000 boxes of potential evidence in rape cases left completely unprocessed. Row upon row of what are called "rape kits" remained untouched on shelves in a police evidence room for years. No DNA evidence was extracted; no DNA evidence was used to catch or prosecute the assailants, reports NPR.
Since then, Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy has led the effort to sort through those 11,000 rape kits and to find the funding to get them processed. "I don't know if they were just forgotten, I don't know if they were ignored, I don't know if they were deliberately put there," Worthy says. She arranged for a federal grant of one million dollars, but says that didn't allow her team to do much more than sort the evidence, match them up with police reports, and begin a database. To process all of the kits, Worthy estimates, would cost about $15 million.
Read full entry »A new iPhone app may help people report sexual violence, reports Youth Today. Circle of 6 uses GPS and text messaging to alert friends to your location if a date goes bad, says Nancy Schwartzman of the app’s developer, the Line Campaign Inc. More than 19,000 users have downloaded the app since its release last month.
Circle of 6 uses pre-installed short message service (SMS) notifications, which are mapped to six friends or family members on a user’s smartphone. Using the phone’s GPS, friends and family can locate the user. Additionally, the app allows users to quickly access national hotlines, as well as immediately notify several pre-programmed contacts that they need advice or someone to call them during the course of a date. Available as a free download at Apple’s iTunes store, the application was honored as the winner of the 2011 White House Apps Against Abuse Technology Challenge.
Read full entry »Do colleges and universities have at least one full-time person working on campus sex-assault? May rape survivors report attacks confidentially and/or anonymously? Does the school's policy cover the sex assault of a man? Is emergency contraception available in the school health center? These are the questions that students across the country are answering through the Campus Accountability Project, an open-access database designed for students, applicants and parents, reports Women's eNews.
The database finds plenty of schools failing to present friendly survivor policies. Of about 250 schools now in the database, 19 don't cover the cost of counseling after a sexual assault or rape, including such well-known universities as University of California-Berkeley and Cornell University. Only 30 offer victims amnesty from punishment for offenses surrounding the assault, such as violating school policy against underage drinking. The fear of being punished for such offenses is considered a major deterrent to bringing a report. The database is produced by a partnership between Students Active for Ending Rape, or SAFER, based in New York City, and V-Day, whose One Billion Rising campaign invites one billion women and their loved ones -- representative of female survivors of sexual violence worldwide -- to gather and dance on V-Day's 15th anniversary, February 14, 2013.
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A Houston jury awarded $20 million in damages yesterday to a rape victim who sued her apartment complex for failing to notify residents about previous sexual attacks on the property, the Houston Chronicle reports. The woman lwas raped and sodomized for more than 10 hours at a west Houston complex in 2009. She charged that complex officials knew about a break-in next door to the woman's unit a few weeks before her ordeal in which a man tried to rape that resident and failed to notify other tenants about a sexual predator.
The woman renewed her lease shortly after the earlier incident without being told about its severity, said her lawyer, Troy Chandler. After a weeklong trial, the jury awarded $7 million for physical pain and mental anguish, $5 million for future mental anguish and $8 million for conduct forbidden by the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Police, on notice about a possible serial rapist, arrested Darryl Martin shortly after the woman's attacker fled and she called 911. Martin, now 24, pleaded guilty to sexual assault and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Read full entry »Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute is questioning the new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Intimate...
Read full entry »New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly was on the defensive two days after reports surfaced that a paralegal accused his son Greg, 43, of rape, reports...
Read full entry »Even years after the disclosure of the still-unfolding child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and the arrest of a former Pennsylvania State University assistant football coach accused of sexually abusing boys, male rape victimization it is rarely discussed — virtually taboo, experts say, because of societal notions about masculinity and the idea that men are invulnerable and can take care of themselves, says the New York Times. “We have a cultural blind spot about this,” said David Lisak, a clinical psychologist who has done research on interpersonal violence and sexual abuse and is a founder of 1in6, an organization that offers information and services to men who had unwanted or abusive sexual experiences as children.
Until just a few weeks ago, national crime statistics on rape included only assaults against women and girls committed by men under a narrow set of circumstances. Now they will also include male victims. One Justice Department report found that 3 percent of men, or one in 33, had been raped. Some experts believe that one in six men have experienced unwanted sexual contact of some kind as minors. Male rape victims "have high rates of P.T.S.D. and depression — but the majority don’t get help,” said Dr. Saba Masho, the lead author of a Virginia study on the subject and an associate professor of epidemiology and community health at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Read full entry »In an editorial, the Los Angeles Times commends the FBI for its proposal to expand its definition of rape. The FBI definition, more than 80 years old, defines rape to include only incidents that involve "carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will." This is so outdated that many of the cases that local law enforcement authorities categorize as rape never get listed in the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Reports. A new definition, expected to be adopted by spring, defines rape as a crime against a woman or man that involves any vaginal or anal penetration by any object or body part. It also includes oral sexual penetration as a rape act. It drops the word "forcibly," and states that these acts are a crime if they occur without consent.
The Times says, "This overdue change is not just symbolic. Academics, legislators and public officials rely on the statistics when crafting laws and setting policy. What's more, understating rape's occurrence, women's advocates say, not only misleads the public about the prevalence of the crime, but also hinders funding for enforcement and treatment programs...A new definition also would trigger a change in public reporting by those local law enforcement agencies that have not modernized their own descriptions of rape." That includes the L.A. police department.
Prosecutors in Memphis' Shelby County are obtaining indictments in many "John Doe DNA" rape cases in the hope of stopping the clock on the statute...
Read full entry »Whoever the Potomac River Rapist is — if he’s still alive — he probably attacked nine women in in the Washington, D.C., area in the 1990s. Eight were raped, including a 28-year-old biochemist he beat to death with a slab of rock. The other victim fought off a rape attempt until the assailant cracked her skull with a radio and fled. Detectives have his DNA, but they don't know his name, says the Washington Post.
The definition of rape that dictates how local police departments report crimes to federal record keepers is expected to change — for the first time in more than 80 years — in early 2012, says the Baltimore Sun. The final step of changing the Uniform Crime Report definition of rape was acknowledged Wednesday, when FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee he approved expanding a definition that critics say was too narrow.
"[I]t was in some ways unworkable, certainly not [ ] fully applicable to the types of crime that it should cover," Mueller said in response to a question from Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., about why it was important to update the rape definition. "I approved a change to that definition, and my expectation is it will go into effect some time this spring." "Revising the definition of rape would result in a higher and more accurate number of rapes that are reported nationwide each year," said Baltimore police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. Women's advocates accelerated a push for an updated definition, prompted partly by reporting by the Sun showing how city police had misclassified rapes and sexual assaults for years. Critics say that the current definition is too narrow and leaves crimes uncounted in police statistics, resulting in fewer resources for victims and law enforcement.
Read full entry »The Houston police backlog of untested rape kits totals between 6,000 and 7,000 - 50 percent more than what officials previously acknowledged, according to a memo from Chief Charles McClelland reported by the Houston Chronicle. The department for years has insisted that the backlog of untested rape kits was around 4,000. The backlog is likely to continue growing.
Police receive 930 new rape kits each year and is able to test only 30 to 40 a month. Johnny Mata of the Greater Houston Coalition for Justice said, "There's people in jail that may be innocent. There's women that may be fearing for their lives. It's unacceptable." The city council voted to accept a National Institute of Justice grant of $821,814 to deal with the untested kits. Most of the money will go toward determining the reasons rape kits go untested and how to cut the backlog more quickly.
Read full entry »Mother Jones tells the story of how it happened that Texas Gov. Rick Perry pardoned a dead man, Tim Cole. The Texas criminal-justice system has long had...
Read full entry »Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board ads that went up on Halloween appeared to blame heavy-drinking women for date rape, and their friends for not watching out for them, says the Philadelphia Inquirer. The ad never mentions the fictional rapist, but scores of real assault victims were traumatized by the images and words the agency used. The ads, funded by state liquor sales, featured a pair of naked legs on a tiled floor with underwear down at the ankles.
"Date Rape: See what happens when your friends drink too much," one ad read. Another read "Sexual Assault: That's what Anne's attorney will call it a month from now. She said no, but he kept going. And now, your friend is on his bathroom floor, bruised and victimized." Almost immediately, the board started fielding complaints from rape victims, and it removed the ads this week. "They felt like they were reliving it," spokeswoman Stacey Witalec said of the victims who had contacted the agency. "I've spoken to them personally, and my staff has spoken to them. They were making an impression."
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