Selects: How Rape Kits Work

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Speaker 10 Hey, everybody. Happy Saturday.
Chuck here with the Selects pick for the week. And this week, it's a pretty heavy one, everyone.
This is about rape kits. And the episode is How Rape Kits Work.

Speaker 10 And this is from April 2nd, 2019. And the reason that I chose this Select is because it's just a super important topic about the funding of rape kits.

Speaker 10 the lack of funding rather for rape kits and the backlog of processing rape kits. And it's something that should be known far and wide, so that's why I picked it for this week's episode.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
There's Jerry over there. And now whatever chipperness you might hear in my voice can decline from here on out

Speaker 10 Yeah, man, this this is another one of those that's a

Speaker 3 tough topic.

Speaker 10 It's not gonna be loaded with jokes.

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 3 I Can't I couldn't I can't think of a single one and anytime like I started it'd be like oh, maybe we should come with jokes. No, it's not like we do that anyway.

Speaker 10 Right. Like this would be a good place for a joke.

Speaker 3 Right. Let me get our writers on it.
Insert joke here in brackets.

Speaker 10 Yes, obviously,

Speaker 10 I mean, if you saw the title about rape kits,

Speaker 10 hopefully that is the trigger warning you need, but we might as well just say it out loud.

Speaker 10 A trigger warning for this one.

Speaker 3 That's all we need to say, I think, right? We're pretty much. I mean, we're talking about rape, sexual assault in general.

Speaker 3 And specifically, I want to say, Chuck, I've had on the list for a really long time rape as a topic itself. I think it definitely deserves it.

Speaker 3 But it's, I've just been kind of walking past it every time I go down the list, you know? Right.

Speaker 3 I think it's due, especially especially after this one. Yeah.
But it's almost like we needed to do this one first, or else it wouldn't be stuff you should know. Right.

Speaker 3 If we didn't do something tangential afterwards, bigger topic. Sure.

Speaker 3 So we'll do that eventually.

Speaker 10 Yeah. And also, this comes out.

Speaker 10 This is one of those happenstance things. As I was researching and reading this stuff, I was like, oh, you know what? We should check and see when

Speaker 10 Sexual Assault Awareness Month is.

Speaker 10 And it turned out it's April.

Speaker 10 And it turned out that April 2nd, the day that this drops,

Speaker 10 is Day of Action.

Speaker 10 So they encourage people to wear teal on April 2nd, which is today.

Speaker 3 I'm almost wealthy. And you're wearing teal tours.
I'm wearing, well, it's a mint green, but it's awfully close to teal.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it's weird how this is all coming together like this.

Speaker 3 You know what Action Day should be for Sexual Assault Awareness Month? What? It should be like a purge.

Speaker 3 Like the movie.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's what it should be.

Speaker 10 I haven't seen the movie, but I get it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I haven't either, but I know the premise.

Speaker 10 And that Sexual Assault awareness month is carried out by nsvrc.org the national national sexual violence resource center

Speaker 3 and also

Speaker 10 I know that we're doing a lot of precursoring here okay but there is one section here on what to do if you've been sexually assaulted

Speaker 10 two dudes yes explaining this like just do this like we're not taking it that lightly you know right like it we know that it is extremely difficult to do anything, much less like follow all the exact steps.

Speaker 10 So many sexual assaults and rapes get unreported for a thousand reasons. So we're not taking this lightly, but this is our job.
This is what we do. And this is an important topic.
So

Speaker 10 please excuse two dudes explaining a section on what to do when you're sexually assaulted.

Speaker 3 But I think that also raises another point that I want to touch on too, Chuck. Sexual assault doesn't just happen to women.
Sure. It happens to men.

Speaker 3 The trans community is also a big target for sexual assault, unfortunately. So while it is largely women, from what I've seen, women between 18 and 35,

Speaker 3 it hits all demographics and targets

Speaker 3 across the spectrum of human beings,

Speaker 3 including men.

Speaker 3 So I wanted to say that as well.

Speaker 10 All right. Now on with the show.

Speaker 10 Should we do the history part first, I think?

Speaker 3 I was thinking so. I think we should say what a rape kit actually is.
Oh, that's something something we always do wrong. But we're doing it right, though.
We've hit everything right so far, I think.

Speaker 3 I think.

Speaker 3 A rape kit, and I'm so sorry, everybody, to keep saying rape kit.

Speaker 3 They're also called sexual assault evidence collection kits. You can understand why people call them rape kits.
But from here on out, maybe we'll just try to say kit. Sure.

Speaker 3 They are really simply a box. I saw shoebox size.
Ed says microwave oven size. Guess it depends on the oven.
It's a big old box. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And inside this box is all the stuff you need to collect the evidence of a sexual assault.

Speaker 10 Yeah, that a professional uses.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 10 This is not like a home thing.

Speaker 3 No, but it does include such thorough step-by-step directions that someone who's not specifically trained to do this can

Speaker 3 can carry out this kind of examination. I wonder if anyone does this.

Speaker 10 Like, can you buy these and perform this at home if you're to

Speaker 10 a thousand reasons why you wouldn't go into a hospital?

Speaker 3 I think that you

Speaker 3 can. You can buy them from medical supply or law enforcement supply places.
Both of them sell kits, and they're actually relatively cheap. I saw between $5, $15, $25.

Speaker 3 So yeah, you totally could. Is it still evidence, though? Probably not.
The defense would just shoot holes in it all day long, and the jury would be like, I'm sorry.

Speaker 10 Which they're already looking to do.

Speaker 3 Part of the process of collecting this evidence and combining it all together to create this kit is it begins a chain of custody.

Speaker 3 And if you do it at home and then bring it in, they're going to be like, come on.

Speaker 10 Right. And there are a lot of problems with the chain of custody that we're obviously going to cover as well when you leave it to the professionals.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 10 It's just a big mess.

Speaker 3 It is a big mess.

Speaker 3 But it's still, more often than not, it seems to be,

Speaker 3 it seems to have been a good invention. Sure.
And that is a thing. It is an invention.

Speaker 3 And it wasn't always around. It's actually a relatively new invention.

Speaker 3 It wasn't until, I think, 1978 that the first ones actually came into official use by the, I believe, the police department in Chicago and then later on Illinois, which served as a bit of a laboratory for it.

Speaker 3 And it was so successful that within another year, it started to spread around the country. Yeah.

Speaker 10 And just, I mean, it sounds like it's hard to believe, but just collecting

Speaker 10 and having the tools in a box and collecting the evidence and putting it in a box for storage, just that alone coming around

Speaker 10 went a long way toward

Speaker 10 helping victims be taken seriously.

Speaker 3 Yeah, legitimizing rape and sexual assault.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I mean, it's sad, but that's the case. When they were first brought out, they were called Vitulo kits in a lot of circles, V-I-T-U-L-L-O.

Speaker 10 And Louie or Lewis. I never know.

Speaker 3 I'm thinking since he's in Chicago, Lewis. Louis or Vitulo.

Speaker 10 I thought you were going to say Louie because Chicago.

Speaker 3 I think it'd be I-E if it were in Chicago, Louie. All right, well, we'll go with Lewis.
Let's just call him Chicago Lou. Chicago Lou Vitulo.

Speaker 10 Now he sounds like a mobster. Yeah.
Chicago Lou Vitulo.

Speaker 3 I think the Vitulo is really not helping.

Speaker 10 No, but he was not a mobster. He was actually worked in the Chicago PD's Forensic Crime Lab.
He was a sergeant and lieutenant who

Speaker 10 did not invent the rape kit, but he was charged with sort of codifying it and putting his stamp because he was one of the first people in law enforcement that was trying to create a standardized procedure.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he was already a very well-respected forensic investigator. And so for him to say, hey, I'm a big city forensic investigator, widely respected, and this thing is the bomb.

Speaker 3 This is a great invention. We should all start using it.
And here's how. It really helped spread and give it a boost early on.
But even though they were called Vitulo kits,

Speaker 3 it's not to say like he was like, yeah, I invented this. Colin Vitullo.
Not at all. I think he was just

Speaker 3 known in the mind of other law enforcement agents that they associated him in these kits.

Speaker 3 So that's what everybody else called it. But really, if you want to nail down an inventor of the rape kit, it was a woman named Martha Marty Goddard.

Speaker 10 Yeah, Goddard. And Betula, I read some interviews with his grandkids, and it's like a really proud legacy.
They still get letters from people and from women.

Speaker 10 Goddard, she has unplugged. Like I saw one interview with her where they talked about, and we're going to cover this heavily later, but the kit backlog,

Speaker 10 she didn't even know about it because she's like, no TV, no internet, no newspapers. She really just sort of checked out.
And she was like, that's really sad to hear about that.

Speaker 3 It is very sad. So I saw a quote somewhere that I think is Vitulo's grandkids said that he would be spinning in his grave if he knew about this backlog, which we'll get to later.

Speaker 10 So Goddard was a survivor of sexual assault, and she got together with some other victims, basically.

Speaker 10 The writing was on the wall, like that, you know, things weren't being taken seriously in many police departments.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she saw firsthand that

Speaker 3 they weren't collecting evidence correctly, that they weren't taking it seriously, which is still a huge problem. Right.

Speaker 3 And she's she decided to do something about it.

Speaker 10 Well, the first questions, and still in a lot of areas, probably the first questions still are like, well, what was the situation? What were you wearing?

Speaker 10 And if it starts with, well, I met a guy at a bar, then you're sort of discounted, like out of the gate.

Speaker 10 Very, very sad and very unfair. But she formed a group called Citizens for Victims Assistance in the 1970s and went to work.

Speaker 10 Like she said, she was doing 16-hour days visiting hospitals, talking to cops, going to police stations, lawyers, judges, basically learning and working on everyone she could about how to get a better system going.

Speaker 10 Right. But she needed money.
And she got that from, of all places, the Playboy Foundation.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Hugh Hefner's Foundation. His daughter, Christy, was friends with Marty Goddard.
And

Speaker 3 I think Playboy gave her 10 grand, which is equal to about 42 grand in today's money.

Speaker 3 And that was enough to go start assembling these kits. Because one of the points from the outset of these kits was that they be inexpensive because

Speaker 3 they wanted to remove as many barriers as possible for hospitals to start implementing these things widely. And one really easy way to do it was to say, here, these are virtually free.

Speaker 3 Or in some cases, these are free because this community group raised a bunch of money to purchase the implements of these kits, put them all together, and now here you're you just use them.

Speaker 3 That's all.

Speaker 10 Which is a success story in and of itself when you know how like big pharma works in the medical community in America.

Speaker 10 Like I could have seen this being like, well, these swabs and envelopes and combs, this will be $7,000 per kit. Yes, because we put it all in a box for you.

Speaker 3 Marty Goddard got in the way of that from the outset.

Speaker 3 And still to this day, I mean, that's why they're not any more than five to twenty five dollars even from like a medical supplier yeah amazing yeah

Speaker 3 she is a hashtag hero

Speaker 3 are we doing that now uh-huh hashtagging it yeah we're late to the game my friend as always

Speaker 3 have you heard about this hashtag thing sure you got to go like

Speaker 10 two fingers on each hand hashtag okay see i knew you'd get a funny in there um so the they were developed before dna evidence was even around um so this was back when it was just like hair and fiber, fingernails, stuff like that.

Speaker 10 Still very valuable. And

Speaker 10 I think one of the kits that's sort of common these days is what's known as the Southwestern Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit.

Speaker 3 It's like the gold standard.

Speaker 10 I guess so. And it's called Southwestern, obviously.
It was in Texas. The Attorney General's office there in 1998 kind of created this one.

Speaker 10 And that's sort of, like you said, the one that people look or base theirs on.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because I mean, they took the groundwork that Marty Goddard came up with, going from to all of what you call in the corporate world and BuzzSpeak, all the stakeholders in the process of apprehending and convicting people who

Speaker 3 sexually assault other people. Yeah.

Speaker 3 You know, scumbags.

Speaker 10 You can just say monsters. Yeah, monsters.

Speaker 3 And she figured out exactly how to put this together and laid the groundwork. And then from what I understand in the late 90s,

Speaker 3 the Texas Attorney General's Office said,

Speaker 3 let's purify this. Let's make it even better.

Speaker 3 Like using what we know. And then that's what's in use largely today.
Although you're going to find different kits,

Speaker 3 there's no actual standard. It's a de facto standard.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the same point,

Speaker 3 different hospitals you go to, even in the same state, are going to follow slightly different procedures. They might use slightly different kits.

Speaker 3 But some states have said, no, this is important important enough. Like, here is how you do this.
Here is the law of how you conduct a rape kit examination.

Speaker 10 Yeah. And so Goddard and Vitulo,

Speaker 10 you know, his stamp of approval, her working hard to get these things, you know, built from the ground up,

Speaker 10 the work that they did together was like really set the standard in the late 70s for this across the country just becoming.

Speaker 10 just more a more normalized way to collect evidence and take it more seriously. Right.

Speaker 3 It was a big, big deal. Big one, yeah.

Speaker 3 Not just literally having, you know, all of the implements you need to conduct this investigation, but just the very presence of these sexual assault evidence collection kits.

Speaker 3 The fact that they exist says law enforcement was saying, okay, yeah, this is a bigger deal than we've been treating it. Right.
You want to take a break?

Speaker 10 Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 3 We're going to take a break, everybody. I don't know if you just heard, but we'll be right back.

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Speaker 3 All right, Chuck. So the very reason that these kits exist is because sexual assault is a very unique kind of crime in that the victim, the body of the victim is a crime scene.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 A walking, talking crime scene. I mean, like, if you're murdered or something and like your body is dumped somewhere, your body is still a crime scene.

Speaker 3 But you're walking around moving, you can actually contaminate the very crime scene from your assault just by doing things that any normal human being would want to do after being sexually assaulted.

Speaker 3 For sure. So, it's in that sense a very unique kind of

Speaker 3 crime scene. And that's what sexual assault evidence collection kits are for: is to step-by-step, methodically, systematically collect that evidence and

Speaker 3 preserve it so that it can later be analyzed and used in court.

Speaker 10 Yeah, so these are the recommended steps if you've been a victim. And like I said, there are a thousand reasons that you would not want to do any and all of these things.

Speaker 10 And we totally get that. But

Speaker 10 and I think Ed puts it in a really good way in this article. He said to receive the best possible care

Speaker 10 just medically for yourself and to have the best chances of collecting good evidence.

Speaker 10 It needs to be within a 24-hour window, ideally.

Speaker 3 It's critical. The 24-hour is critical.
And then apparently up to three days, it's still viable. But after three days, most experts are like, it's not going to get anything.

Speaker 10 As far as DNA, which is the real, you know, really what you're looking for.

Speaker 3 You will be

Speaker 10 very upset and you may be in literal shock.

Speaker 10 You may have had one or more panic attacks. All of these things make it very difficult to carry out like logical steps.

Speaker 10 But experts say that the first thing you want to do, obviously, is get somewhere safe as soon as you can.

Speaker 10 Get away if your attacker is around and try and find someone an advocate for you, whether it's a friend or a family member who can kind of be with you in the first

Speaker 10 hours after this horrific event has happened.

Speaker 10 Go to the emergency room. Even if you're not injured, quote unquote, physically, like you really should go to the emergency room as soon as you can.

Speaker 3 This is a big one,

Speaker 3 not just because the emergency room is where you're going to have this kit administered,

Speaker 3 but also because it takes such tremendous

Speaker 3 reserve to draw on such tremendous reserves to take yourself out of the comfort and safety of your home, which is probably where you went, to not take a shower, which is another huge step too. Right.

Speaker 3 And to just say, I'm going to go to the emergency room and undergo this procedure and let a a bunch of strangers poke and prod me and tell them about what just happened.

Speaker 3 That's the ideal of what you're supposed to do.

Speaker 3 But if you look at it in that respect, that's just such a

Speaker 3 huge thing on top of what just happened.

Speaker 3 That this is required of you to catch the person who just did it.

Speaker 3 I mean, from a bystander's perspective, it just makes you want to catch them even more, you know? That that's on top of the assault as well.

Speaker 10 Yeah, because it's not like the trauma is over for you. Right.
And anyway, anyway, it may never be. But

Speaker 10 go to the ER as soon as you can. If it's not right,

Speaker 10 if you go to sleep and wake up the next day, you can go to the emergency room then. Like, it's just important that you go whenever you feel like you can do so.

Speaker 10 And like you said, it's

Speaker 10 probably the least intuitive thing you could imagine to not want to shower and bathe yourself.

Speaker 10 But that gets rid of a lot of evidence.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 it's terrible.

Speaker 10 But

Speaker 10 they say, please do not shower. Yeah.

Speaker 10 They say, please.

Speaker 3 Please. The capital P.

Speaker 10 If you

Speaker 10 should keep the clothes you're wearing on if you can. If understandably you can't or don't want to,

Speaker 10 save them.

Speaker 3 Yeah, put them in a bag and take them to the ER with you.

Speaker 10 Oh, yeah. If you have the wherewithal to change clothes, and this is something that they will have you do in the hospital, have you stand over like

Speaker 10 butcher paper or maybe even a towel.

Speaker 10 If you have the wherewithal to do that wherever you are, whether it's at home or in a hotel or someplace, put that in there too, because when you're changing your clothes, that's when

Speaker 10 DNA evidence can. can fall out, whether it's a hair or whatever.

Speaker 3 Skin particles. Right.

Speaker 10 Just collect everything you can and put it in a bag. Certainly do not wash those clothes and then take those with you to the emergency room.
Yeah. And then the last thing,

Speaker 10 you should know just because you're going to an emergency room and even if you are tested with this forensic kit

Speaker 10 you're not required to file a police report ever.

Speaker 3 That's a big one.

Speaker 10 But especially right away, it's not like they're going to have a cop in there grilling you.

Speaker 10 You can file this police report whenever you want to.

Speaker 3 Yeah, if you are not comfortable filing a police report right then, you can do what's called a Jane Doe or imagine a John Doe examination where they just go through all the steps and collect all the evidence, but you never see a cop.

Speaker 3 They don't call the police until after you've left.

Speaker 3 So that's a big one for a lot of people. Sure.

Speaker 3 Ed points out, though, in some states, there is still a statute of limitations of between 10 and 21 years, although some states have removed the statute of limitations for a felony sexual assault.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 there can be a clock. ticking,

Speaker 3 but we're talking 10 years at the least, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, yeah, you don't have to, this isn't something you have to knock out that day

Speaker 3 if you don't want to, if you're not ready to. Yeah.

Speaker 3 When you go to the ER for

Speaker 3 this kind of examination, you are signing up for a few hours. This is going to take a few hours.
It's not a quick procedure.

Speaker 3 And there's something else that you should know that I really hope won't discourage you, but you should go into it knowing it is

Speaker 3 an invasive procedure.

Speaker 3 They have to collect evidence from everywhere

Speaker 3 that the guy who did this to you, or the person who did this to you, was. Right.

Speaker 3 And they're also going to ask you, they're going to take an oral history and they're going to ask you to basically recount the worst thing that's ever happened to you within 24 hours after it happened.

Speaker 3 And then they're going to go over all of the spots with things like swabs and tweezers and combs and things like that to collect this evidence.

Speaker 3 And it's going to take a while, but you should expect to be treated very gently and with a tremendous amount of respect from the people who are going to administer this examination.

Speaker 3 And I would guess to a hospital, there will be counselors available there to be there with you if you don't have like a friend or a family member there with you or anything.

Speaker 10 Yeah, and rural areas are where they still need to do a lot of catch-up work in hospitals and things like that.

Speaker 10 But if you're in any major city, there will be almost 100% chance that you'll have what's called a sexual assault nurse examiner on staff.

Speaker 10 This is a nurse who has received extra training on how to administer this exam.

Speaker 10 Like we said before, like any nurse can do this and do a great job.

Speaker 10 But if you have a S-A-N-E, a sane trained person on staff, then that's who you'll be seeing.

Speaker 10 And, you know, like I said, in rural areas, they're just... It's just tough to staff up for things like this.

Speaker 10 So they're still doing all they can to get grant money and stuff like that to get these people trained up.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's just a question of extra funding because if you give a hospital funding that's set aside for sane nurses, you just created a new position in a hospital that wasn't there before.

Speaker 3 And you've given the nursing staff there an incentive to go further their education, invest in their education so that they can have this better job in the same hospital and help people as well.

Speaker 3 So it's really just a question of funding. Yeah.
That's it, you know?

Speaker 10 I mean, a lot of this stuff sadly is a question of funding.

Speaker 3 Yeah. L luckily there is enough agitation at the bottom up

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 the pocketbooks have kind of loosened up over recent years.

Speaker 3 It is something that

Speaker 3 hasn't been, it's been as a result of agitation and bad press rather than, you know, this is the right thing to do.

Speaker 10 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 10 Consent is a big part of the entire procedure. They're going to ask you basically before everything, like, hey, I have a speculum here.
We need to do a vaginal exam.

Speaker 10 Is that okay with you? And you can say no to any and all of this stuff. This is all up to you on how you want to proceed with this.

Speaker 3 And they're going to ask for your consent for the whole procedure first, and then step by step before each step, they're going to ask for your consent as well.

Speaker 3 And they're going to explain what's coming up, like you said.

Speaker 10 Yeah. And as far as the interview portion,

Speaker 10 this is really important stuff as far as what will eventually wind up with investigators

Speaker 10 and the questions about, like,

Speaker 10 were you on drugs or had you been drinking?

Speaker 10 Like, this isn't to set you up for future, you know, grilling by a prosecutor necessarily, but like, if you may have been drugged or you may have had a drink spiked or something like that, right?

Speaker 10 So, all of this is like just super, super important.

Speaker 3 So, they need to know, they need to say, hey, future lab tech, test for rufanol

Speaker 3 or something like that,

Speaker 3 whatever.

Speaker 3 If you were in a bar and you suddenly woke up on the side of the road. Right.

Speaker 3 That's the kind of history they're taking for you for those reasons, not,

Speaker 3 you know, what were you doing in a bar by yourself? Yeah, yeah. That's not what this is.
Again, this is not a detective asking you or performing this exam.

Speaker 3 They might not even be aware of your case yet.

Speaker 3 This is a trained nurse, or at the very least, a registered nurse who is performing this with one would expect a tremendous amount of like compassion and respectfulness.

Speaker 10 Absolutely.

Speaker 10 You're going to be giving blood and urine samples. This is super important to provide a DNA baseline.

Speaker 10 They will pluck hairs from your scalp. They will swab your mouth.

Speaker 10 They will use a comb to collect pubic hair.

Speaker 10 There will be, you know, we already mentioned a genital exam, whether it's vaginal or anal.

Speaker 10 They really, like you said, they just they have to go over with a sort of a fine-tooth comb everywhere where the assault happened.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so they're going to ask you awful questions like, were you penetrated anally? Was an object used? Did the perpetrator lick you or kiss you or anything like that? Right.

Speaker 3 And depending on these questions, they're going to investigate further. But

Speaker 3 they're going to follow certain steps that no matter what.

Speaker 3 But then if you say, yes, the guy licked my face on like my left cheek right there's gonna be a swab on your left cheek that they otherwise may not have included in the normal steps yeah and again this is like

Speaker 10 I mean, I can't imagine having to relive something like this. And there are

Speaker 3 within like 24 hours, ideally 24 hours after it happened. Like the worst thing that happened to you in your life.
Let's talk about it. Here, point to where it happened.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 You know, it's from a stranger.

Speaker 10 Well, and there are plenty of interviews that we both read where, you know, women said it was, it was reliving it.

Speaker 10 And I felt like I was being, being, even with the great care given, like I was being assaulted all over again.

Speaker 10 It's just so important to try and try and do if you can, if you can get there.

Speaker 3 If you can't, there's no blame. There's no judgment.
Like it's, that's a, that's a normal reaction.

Speaker 3 This is a lot to ask from somebody, but this is what it takes to to collect the evidence and preserve it in a way that you can catch the person who did this.

Speaker 10 Yeah, they're going to test for,

Speaker 10 well, it's not required actually to test for STDs, but they will ask you

Speaker 3 about STDs I would imagine ask if you want to be tested sure they will offer emergency contraception yeah as well and you're not going to be charged for that procedure or the kit here's the thing go or you shouldn't be no you won't be not for the not for the the the administration of the kit right which is that's great that's substantial I mean it's a $16 kit but this is also four or five hours of an ER nurse's potentially a highly trained ER nurse's time.

Speaker 3 So that's great they're not charging you. But what's a shame, what's shameful, I should say, is that you will still be charged for any treatment of injuries.
Say like

Speaker 3 you were

Speaker 3 hit and you need to be treated with stitches or whatever. You'll get a bill for stitches.

Speaker 3 If you say, yes, I do want antiviral drugs because I'm afraid of having contracted an STD, or I do want emergency contraception, they'll say, here's your prescription.

Speaker 3 And the pharmacist will charge you for that.

Speaker 3 That's not okay. As a society, we should not ask rape and sexual assault victims to pay for their own medical treatment directly coming from a rape or a sexual assault.

Speaker 3 We should bear that burden ourselves, and then it should give us that even slighter additional incentive to go get the guy who did it. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Nobody should pay a cent. And then even worse than that, and I'm sorry, I realize I'm standing on a pretty big soapbox right now, but worse than that, Chuck, prior to the Affordable Care Act,

Speaker 3 you could not,

Speaker 3 it was possible that you would be denied future

Speaker 3 health care coverage, insurance, if you were the victim of a sexual assault or rape who went to go get treatment

Speaker 3 because they treated it as a preexisting condition. Unbelievable.
A preexisting condition was rape. Can you believe that?

Speaker 10 Sadly, I can.

Speaker 3 All right, step down.

Speaker 10 They're going to take this kit. They're going to seal everything up.
They're going to store it.

Speaker 10 Everything is like, you know, all the clothing and everything and all the swabs are dried out and labeled. And

Speaker 10 then it's sealed back in that original box. That's part of the,

Speaker 10 I guess, the genius of this kit was that everything that comes out of it goes right back in. And it is also the storage device

Speaker 10 where it's, you know, labeled. And then it's all shipped to local law enforcement, and then it's stored

Speaker 10 quite possibly till the end of time, sadly.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Or destroyed.
We'll get to both of those things.

Speaker 3 And ideally, and under just about any procedure, every single person who takes custody of that is supposed to sign the label on the outside of the box. So there's a clear chain of custody.

Speaker 3 And it goes from the ER nurse to the

Speaker 3 cops to the prosecutors, to the lab, to the prosecutors, and so on. But there's supposed to be a clear chain of custody so that there's no questions about whether it was tampered with or anything.

Speaker 10 I always, that's the one thing that weirds me out about any kind of blood sample I'm ever asked to give or any kind of procedure I'm ever tested for, is when I see them take my blood or whatever specimen and they're writing on the little thing

Speaker 10 and it leaves the room. I don't know why my first thought is always like, well, they're going to mix that up with somebody,

Speaker 3 Which is not true.

Speaker 10 But I'm always just like, all right, well, it's out of my vision. So I don't trust it.

Speaker 3 Right. I don't know what that is.
It probably stems from having been switched at birth in the hospital. That's the only explanation.

Speaker 10 All right. We're going to take a break and we're going to come back and talk after this about the horrific problem of rape kit backlog and destruction right after this.

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Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 10 So we told you the history of the kit, how it works,

Speaker 10 your ideal scenario for what you should do if you're ever a victim.

Speaker 10 And the great ending to this story would be is,

Speaker 10 and then those kits go off and they all get tested.

Speaker 3 100% conviction rates.

Speaker 10 And they have great conviction rates.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 3 there's no long rate.

Speaker 3 No long rate.

Speaker 10 Sadly, that is not the case.

Speaker 10 And this is all over the news for years now, as it should be. But,

Speaker 10 well, first of all, this is what happens in the ideal scenario. They do store this.
It is tested in a DNA lab.

Speaker 10 And then it's checked against the CODIS, the CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System. That's the database from the FBI of DNA profiles of bad people.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 if a hit comes up, then you have a pretty good chance then of finding this person.

Speaker 3 The other thing about CODIS is this: when you submit a sample, a DNA sample to CODIS from a crime like a sexual assault, and there's not a hit, that sample, you know, you just go, okay, sorry, CODIS, can I have my sample back?

Speaker 3 Like that sample stays there. Right.

Speaker 3 And so future detectives say they have a suspect or somebody who comes in, and as a matter of routine, they run the suspect's DNA, which I think like just a matter of course now.

Speaker 3 When you're charged with a crime, they swab your cheek and then run it through CODIS. That DNA may be hit.

Speaker 3 And all of a sudden, this thing, like you got caught robbing somebody's house, but now you're up for a rape charge from two years ago because your DNA was entered through this rape kit.

Speaker 3 So even if you don't get a hit, that doesn't mean that there's not going to be a conviction. That's not like the rape kit was all for naught.

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah. You know?

Speaker 3 For sure.

Speaker 10 Sadly, that's not the way it always works.

Speaker 10 In the 2000s, there started to be some,

Speaker 10 there were some reporters digging around, found a story, and found out out that there are

Speaker 10 tens of thousands of rape kits all over the country sitting in warehouses and sitting on shelves for years and years and years, untested.

Speaker 3 It was so bad, Chuck, that it became known as the backlog. Right.

Speaker 3 Like some dating back to the 90s, where they just, like you said, sitting in warehouses untested. And at first.

Speaker 3 When I think some reporters started digging this up and found out like, whoa, this is not okay.

Speaker 3 widespread is this? And started looking around and found it's like everywhere. And some towns are worse than others.
Like, Akron, Ohio had something like 3,000, I think.

Speaker 10 2,000 kits in Akron, Ohio alone.

Speaker 3 So Detroit had, sorry, Akron, I didn't mean to put more on you than you had. I was confusing you with Phoenix.
Phoenix had 3,000 kits. Dallas had 4,000.
Memphis has 12,000. Wow.

Speaker 3 And in Detroit, a few years back, somebody wandered into a police storage facility and was like, oh, there's 11,000 untested rape kits that have just been, that we just forgot we had.

Speaker 3 Here's the problem with that. There's a couple of problems with it.
But the first one, Chuck, is that every single one of those kits represents a person who found the wherewithal to

Speaker 3 drag himself or herself to

Speaker 3 the ER.

Speaker 3 and go through this hours-long procedure and suffer a second violation, basically, is what it feels like.

Speaker 3 In order to give the cops the evidence that they need, and the cops didn't even bother to send it to the lab.

Speaker 3 That is a third violation.

Speaker 10 Yeah, and the other problem is that this could be like while they're sitting in there,

Speaker 10 and this... often sadly is the case is that these people commit more sexual assaults.

Speaker 10 When they could be behind bars. Yeah.

Speaker 3 In Detroit, so there was 11,000 untested kits they found. Yeah.
Let's say that each one was a different perpetrator.

Speaker 3 The recidivism, that's a bonehead word, the recidivism rate, they think, for sexual offenders of sexual assault, is between 5% and 32% over a 15-year period.

Speaker 3 So if those kits sat there untested for 15 years, that means that an additional 550 to 3,520 rapes were carried out by the same people whose DNA was was in those kits, untested. Unbelievable.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so that's that's unacceptable, right? And as a result, Congress was like, here's $150 million to get rid of this backlog.

Speaker 10 That should solve it.

Speaker 3 It did. It helped a lot, right? It got the labs going and everything like that.
It's still not enough. Right.
The problem is, it funded labs. That's what everybody said: well, the labs are overworked.

Speaker 3 What are you going to do? So they got more technicians, they got more labs, and the backlog got worked through in a lot of cases. In Detroit, in particular,

Speaker 3 the prosecutor, one of the prosecutors there named Kim Worthy, who's another hashtag hero of this story, has been like, this number is going down.

Speaker 3 We're going through those kits, and it's systematically and methodically.

Speaker 10 That's what it takes. It takes someone or a body of people, like specific, not just like throwing money at something, but like specifically following up on the ground.
Right.

Speaker 3 Okay. So the funding went toward the labs, but that left another half of this formula, which is a big one, the cops.

Speaker 3 right so this backlog got moved through the labs but that doesn't mean that the cops followed up on the results and including cases where there were hits in CODIS later later research by reporters found that like a lot of these cases in the backlog that got worked through hadn't been followed up on yeah which is another problem yeah there have been some federal guidelines laid down since then specifically the Safer Act of 2013 sexual assault forensic evidence reporting different states have new laws in place

Speaker 10 Like in New York State, it is law now that requires kits to be sent in within 10 days of collection and tested by the lab within three months.

Speaker 10 And they set up a timeline for processing backlog kits.

Speaker 10 But it's, you know, it still depends on what city you live in and what state you live in

Speaker 10 because it still happens.

Speaker 3 It still happens a lot.

Speaker 10 It says here

Speaker 10 in 2011 report from the National Institute of Justice, um 18 of all unsolved rapes between 2002 and 2007 involved this kind of evidence that had never been processed right

Speaker 3 18 yep and so in the cops defense here they're they're they're basically saying most of them are saying okay so great that was great you guys funded the lab we're still overworked and understaffed and out of room out of room literally to store these kits so here is another thing right so the all this stuff went, all this focus went on the backlog.

Speaker 3 As a matter of fact, the third hashtag hero from this story is Mariska Hargate

Speaker 3 from Law and Order SVU.

Speaker 3 Just from doing Law and Order SVU, her eyes were so open to this whole backlog problem that she started a foundation called the Joyful Heart Foundation that is basically dedicated to getting rid of the rape kit backlog.

Speaker 10 Yeah, well, actually, that's a larger foundation, but within that is inthebacklog.org.

Speaker 10 And here's what you can do, everyone, since it is National Awareness Month.

Speaker 3 First, put on something teal.

Speaker 10 Put on something teal on April 2nd. Go to inthebacklog.org and click on take action.
And there are a number of things you can do, but at the bottom, there is a donation button and donate.

Speaker 10 I set up a monthly today that, as far as I'm concerned, I'll donate monthly till the day I die. Sure.
Which hopefully is a long time.

Speaker 3 Long, long time. Hashtag long time.

Speaker 10 Yeah, but just go to inthebacklog.org. If you don't have money to give, there are other things you can do under the Take Action banner.
Right. For sure.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 back in 2016, while everybody was talking about the backlog, worrying about the backlog, doing something about the backlog,

Speaker 3 the Fayetteville, North Carolina chief of police held a press conference and said, hey,

Speaker 3 the city attorneys told me not to do this, but I feel

Speaker 3 a moral responsibility to tell the public this. But we destroyed about 300 untested rape kits

Speaker 3 in cases where the statute of limitations hadn't run out.

Speaker 10 Yeah, this isn't sitting on a shelf. This isn't untested.

Speaker 10 This is we threw them away.

Speaker 3 They were incinerated. That evidence is gone forever, and it was never sent off to a lab, and the statute of limitations was not up in these cases.

Speaker 3 That was huge. That was a big, a big deal.

Speaker 3 And he committed his town, his police department, to going through all those cases, contacting the victims, and seeing if they could still build a case for all of them. They made it a priority.

Speaker 3 But it opened Pandora's box around the country.

Speaker 3 And CNN got a speculum of their own and started crawling around law enforcement agencies all over the country and saying, Hey, have you guys ever done that? Have you ever destroyed rape kits?

Speaker 3 What's your policy for that? Right.

Speaker 3 When's the last time you did it? Were any of them still within the statute of limitations? And they found out that it happens a lot, actually. Yeah.
Like a lot.

Speaker 3 Police,

Speaker 3 to make room in evidence rooms, they will destroy rape kits.

Speaker 3 Some of them have official policies in place. Some of them is just a detective deciding that the case isn't going anywhere and will say, yeah, you can destroy that rape kit.

Speaker 10 Sometimes it's a misunderstanding of what the statute of limitations is.

Speaker 3 Yes. But these kits have never gone on, have never gone, have never been tested and never will be tested.
That evidence is gone forever. And that is even worse than the backlog everyone has concluded.

Speaker 3 And I think rightfully so.

Speaker 10 Yeah, this, and like you mentioned earlier, just having this stuff entered into CODIS is huge because let's say you do nab someone and it turns out that they it comes up with like six hits from sexual assaults over the years.

Speaker 3 Like

Speaker 10 I mean, prison sentences aside,

Speaker 10 the value that that has for a victim to know that that person was caught and is finally going to pay for their crime right is uh can't be measured, you know.

Speaker 3 Right. And also,

Speaker 3 like if you go through this procedure and you you still don't get a hit in CODIS, but that DNA evidence is in COTIS, this if this perpetrator gets caught down the line, you've contributed to a much stronger conviction against them and probably a bigger sentence because you've helped establish a pattern of criminal behavior.

Speaker 3 And in fact, that's how they caught the Golden State killer, I believe, is from this backlog of rape kits being put through. And that guy popped up.
I think they got him for like 12 or 13 rapes

Speaker 3 during his serial killer career

Speaker 3 through this backlog being moved through. And that opportunity is lost if you just destroy this evidence untested.

Speaker 3 Secondly, it also gives, it ruins any opportunity for a wrongfully convicted person who was convicted previously before DNA evidence was used.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I mean, that's happened a lot.

Speaker 3 Yeah. If you destroy this evidence, it may, it removes that possibility as well.
So I think the Justice Department issued some guidelines that say

Speaker 3 you should hold rape kit evidence for a minimum of 50 years or the statute of limitations, whichever comes first.

Speaker 3 And then that's that. And everybody said, that's really great, but we really only legally have to listen to our state's guidelines, which are all over the place.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I wonder if any kind of like penalty and and accountability would help.

Speaker 3 Well, I think CNN like crawling up everybody's butt is helping for sure. I think it's it's kind of opened some people's eyes.
And that was the same thing that brought so much attention to the backlog.

Speaker 3 So hopefully the same attention will come to this too. And we can start funding police departments around the country to like

Speaker 3 carry out the legwork on this.

Speaker 10 I just have one more thing. If you just and I imagine you could do this in any given week or day now, if you just type in rape kit and hit hit news on your search engine,

Speaker 10 many articles will come up like that day of cases like this.

Speaker 10 Just today, there was one, Austin Police Department could potentially reopen dozens of rape investigations after getting a backlog, results from a backlog of almost 2,700 untested kits.

Speaker 10 I believe they got a grant.

Speaker 3 from

Speaker 3 New York.

Speaker 10 I'm not sure how that happened, but they got like a million bucks from a grant from Manhattan

Speaker 10 to Austin, Texas.

Speaker 3 They're like, we got a lot of money. You want some of it, Austin?

Speaker 10 Maybe, but that allowed them to test like almost 2,700 kits. Another story, a Tucson man was convicted of raping seven women over a 12-year period

Speaker 10 after police received a grant to test rape kits. And it said, and it changed a mindset over which kits get tested.
And then Orlando, Florida. Man is now in jail today.

Speaker 10 He fled the state and found him in Puerto Rico. And once again, this was a long, unsolved rape case that they, you know, they finally cracked open that kit, tested it, and bam, this guy comes up.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 10 And they got him in Puerto Rico.

Speaker 3 Yep. Still a territory, Doofus.

Speaker 3 If you want to know more about rape kits,

Speaker 3 just do what Chuck said and search it on your favorite search engines news, okay?

Speaker 10 Yeah, go to inthebacklog.org for sure. Even better.
Just poke around there for a while.

Speaker 3 And put put on something teal.

Speaker 10 Yes.

Speaker 3 And in the meantime, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 10 I don't think I have anything teal.

Speaker 3 You can borrow this sweatshirt. Okay.
It's mint, but it's awfully close.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I'm not good with my colors. Emily thinks I'm partially colorblind.

Speaker 3 I think you might be, too. Might be.

Speaker 10 So I'm going to call this ASMR.

Speaker 3 We've been getting a lot of follow-up on this. Oh, really?

Speaker 10 From people that...

Speaker 10 Get that tingly feeling and people like me that throw open their mouth a little bit.

Speaker 3 How is this working?

Speaker 10 Hey guys, been listening for a long time. I'm always intrigued by the topics.
I'm a crafter, and your show always keeps my mind moving so my creativity can flow in the background.

Speaker 3 Nice.

Speaker 3 I appreciate it. That's the ideal situation.
Crafting.

Speaker 10 Yeah. I seriously thought I was the only person to experience ASMR.
Friends I've talked to about it in the past think I'm crazy. No one around here knows anything about it.

Speaker 10 I love the feeling I get when I can activate the sensation. The best way I describe it is like for me getting goosebumps inside my skull.

Speaker 3 It's pretty good. That's a great one.

Speaker 10 I wish I knew what that felt like.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I do too. You know? I envy that.
I want this sensation. I don't have it.

Speaker 10 The first time I found something that triggered it, I was working in a small office in a basement of a hospital.

Speaker 10 It was getting repainted, and the sound of the paint roller and the people near me in the office set it off. First, I thought it was strange, but I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 10 As our office started to grow, I began wearing headphones on a regular basis and listened to the entire collection of Bob Ross painting, which I famously or not famously but I go to sleep to that sometimes on Netflix.

Speaker 3 So you're not you don't have a problem with Bob Ross? Oh no I love it. Okay.
Very soothing to me.

Speaker 10 But I don't think I mean I don't think he's ASMR is he?

Speaker 3 Yeah, is he? Yeah he's we didn't say that in the episode? I didn't think so. Yeah he's like a legendary ASMR trigger

Speaker 3 for some people.

Speaker 3 Legendary. All right.

Speaker 10 I listened to the entire collection and found the soft sound of his voice and stiff bristles on the canvas caused the the same reaction.

Speaker 10 Helped me greatly with my anxiety and general stress in the office, actually. I even created a playlist of people painting and would listen to it when I was stuck in traffic.

Speaker 10 As I'm writing, I'm listening to your episode. And yes, swallowing sounds can give me the tingles, too.

Speaker 3 Bob Ross swallows a lot when he's painting.

Speaker 10 Gulp. And his mic is on his collar.

Speaker 3 I've never been. I'm so excited, guys.

Speaker 10 What,

Speaker 10 the swallowing? Yeah. No, you might have to have headphones on for that.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 10 I'm so excited, guys. You have changed my life.
Thanks so much. Goosebump-headed Candice

Speaker 3 Tali.

Speaker 10 Or Katali.

Speaker 3 Is in there? Yeah.

Speaker 10 That's your real name. That might be

Speaker 10 her surname. I gotcha.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 10 Bearandmermaidart.com. Nice.
I'm going to shout out your craft site. It's like jewelry and things.
Yeah. It's not Bear and Mermaid Art that I could see.
I gotcha. It's just a whimsical name.
Gotcha.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there's like, it's something about painting like slows people down. Like when you're painting and you're talking, you're just that much calmer.

Speaker 10 No one paints fast.

Speaker 3 There's this dude, like if like some artists will paint, do Instagram live and paint. Oh, yeah.
And I don't know if you remember him or not, but the

Speaker 3 Gregory Jacobson, he was the artist who came backstage at our Chicago show last time. Yeah, okay.
He did this for years.

Speaker 3 For a year. He had like some show coming.
And he would just sit there and paint.

Speaker 3 And Yumi started watching him originally and then she got me into it and it was just him painting he wasn't even in the shot normally it's just his hand painting but he'd be talking about what he's doing and maybe answering some questions and i never really thought about it before but it is like super laid back yeah something about painting makes you slow just slows you down well you know you swallow loudly you never hear from a painter an artist that's like I'm in a hurry.

Speaker 10 I got to go knock this painting out real quick.

Speaker 3 True. Let me put some

Speaker 3 flux flares on there.

Speaker 10 Or maybe, I don't know. I guess you could be under a deadline.

Speaker 3 He was under a deadline for a remote critic. He had some huge show coming up, and I guess then he decided, well, I think I'll add this extra complication to this crazy deadline.

Speaker 3 But yeah, it was interesting. Thanks a lot, Candace,

Speaker 3 Nay,

Speaker 3 if you want to get in touch with us, you can go to our website, stuffyshodnow.com, and you can send us a good old-fashioned email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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