WHAT AN EXAMINATION OF PREVIOUSLY UNTESTED SEXUAL ASSAULT KITS TELLS US ABOUT THE PATTERNS OF VICTIMIZATION AND CASE OUTCOMES FOR BLACK WOMEN AND GIRLS

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Sexual Assault Kit (SAK) Initiative has to date, resulted in nearly 130, 000 previously ‘backlogged’ (untested) kits inventoried and close to 70, 000 kits tested. Until this initiative, these backlogged kits have languished for decades in evidence storage facilities across the U.S. and, in doing so, allowed suspected rapists to remain free to continue to sexually assault victim-survivors. Unfortunately, these untested kits tell a story of the too-often forgotten sexual assault victim-survivors. These victim-survivors are almost all women and girls (90-95+%) and disproportionally from marginalized populations-specifically Black Indigenous Womxn of Color (BIWOC). These backlogged kits serve as a contemporaneous and physical reminder of a failed criminal justice response to all sexual assault victim-survivors but explicitly for women and girls of color. In this chapter, we focus specifically on what data from the SAK initiative in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (primarily within the city of Cleveland) tells us about patterns of sexual victimization and case outcomes for Black women and girls compared to non-Black women and girls. In doing this, we highlight the disproportionate experiences of sexual violence for Black women and girls, why cases failed to reach prosecution, and how historical patterns of neighborhood disinvestment (e.g., “redlining”) and residential segregation may impact these phenomena. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scholarly product from data on previously untested kits to specifically explore racial/ethnic differences in the associated sexual assaults. Our findings provide an opportunity to explore the sexual victimization of those whose kits and (more often than not) cases were forgotten about by the criminal justice system.