Message from Mariska Hargitay: The Shame of
Rape-Kit Backlogs
Law & Order’s Mariska Hargitay speaks on the consequences of the rape-kit backlog.
Over the course of my 12 years playing detective Oliv-
ia Benson on Law and Order: SVU, I have learned a
great deal about the reality of rape in the United Stat-
es: One in four women will experience sexual violen-
ce in her lifetime. Most victims never report their rape
to the police.
With only 24% of reported rapes result
-ing in an arrest, perpetrators have over a 75% chance
of escaping punishment for rape.
For all of us who care about justice for rape victims —
advocates, law enforcement, legislators, and the public
— these facts are hard to stomach. In an upcoming
episode, Law and Order: SVU will feature another
difficult reality of rape in the United States —
the fact that experts, including the Department of
Justice and members of Congress, have estimated that
there may well be hundreds of thousands of sexual-
assault evidence kits (“rape kits”) sitting untested in
police and crime labs throughout the country.
Women are guilty of choosing the wrong men, men
are not guilty of hitting women. With rape, unlike
other crimes, the crime scene is the victim’s body.
When a person reports a sexual assault, she — or
he — will be asked to undergo a rape-kit exam — a
four- to six-hour process to collect DNA evidence
from her or his body. Rape-kit testing can identify an
unknown assailant, confirm a suspect’s contact with
the victim, corroborate the victim’s account of the
assault, identify serial rapists by connecting crime-
scene evidence from separate incidents, and exoner-
ate innocent suspects.