Carolyn Cole/Getty Sometime after 2 a.m. in a dark exam room at the San Francisco General Hospital, a sexual assault nurse examiner turned on a handheld blacklight. Heather Marlowe looked down at her body. Her stomach and thighs were glowing. The nurse took swabs, and reassured her that when police analyzed her rape kit, they would have plenty of DNA to test. Marlowe felt dazed, in a state of shock.
In 2016, Marlowe filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, accusing the police department of mishandling sexual assault reports like hers by neglecting to process rape kits, allotting too few resources to sexual violence investigations, and failing to properly train and supervise personnel—all of which, the lawsuit argued, had a “discriminatory impact” on women.
What we think of as the national “rape kit backlog” actually consists of two sets of kits. The first is in crime labs, which maintain an enormous queue of unprocessed DNA evidence—about 169,000 requests at last count, including an unknown number of rape kits. The second group consists of those the police never submitted for analysis. “These kits never even made it to the labs,” says Marlowe, who argues that “backlog” in this case is a euphemism for police neglect.
Then there are the technical difficulties, such as statutes of limitations, which limit the amount of time survivors have to bring legal claims. Marlowe didn’t find out that San Francisco had a stockpile of untested rape kits until 2014, and she sued the city for discrimination within the two-year window provided in this type of lawsuit.