Looks like you're not the only one to think that movements like #metoo are the real problem:
Meanwhile, serial rapists run free, because the police don't take victims seriously and thousands upon thousands of rape kits sit in warehouses untouched (WARNING: descriptions of sexual assault in the full article):
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/an-epidemic-of-disbelief/592807/)
Each year, roughly 125,000 rapes are reported across the United States. Sometimes the decision to close a case is surely correct; no one wants to smear an innocent man's reputation or curtail his freedom because of a false report. But in 49 out of every 50 rape cases, the alleged assailant goes free—often, we now know, to assault again. Which means that rape—more than murder, more than robbery or assault—is by far the easiest violent crime to get away with.
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At the time, if you were raped in Cleveland and you were poor or otherwise vulnerable, police would likely make a couple of phone calls and move on. You can see this play out in the police files documenting the response to Nathan Ford's early attacks. All of Ford's victims who came forward had forensic exams, but detectives were more likely to shelve the kits than send them to a lab. Rarely did a detective visit the victim, witnesses, or the crime scene. If a victim couldn't come to police headquarters on the detective's timetable—because she couldn't find transportation or child care or get time off from work—she was labeled “uncooperative.” The case was closed. In other instances, the detective wrote that he couldn't locate the victim, and this was enough to end the investigation. Yet when investigators reopened sexual-assault cold cases 20 years later, they almost always found the victim within a few hours.
When the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office hired a team of researchers at Case Western Reserve University, in 2015, to pore through police files and other records connected to thousands of untested rape kits in Cleveland, they quickly spotted the same pattern. In a random sample of cases, mainly from the mid-'90s, they found that the notes from many police investigations barely filled a single page. In 40 percent of cases, detectives never contacted the victim. In three out of four, they never interviewed her. Half of the investigations were closed in a week, a quarter in a day. As for rape kits—the one type of evidence that might definitively identify a rapist—police rarely sent them to the lab for testing. Granted, testing a kit could cost more than $5,000 in the late '90s and 2000s. But during part of that time, the state was paying police departments to send in evidence. And even when the cost of testing a kit dropped to less than $1,000, police still tucked away the evidence in storage. Ultimately, Cleveland would accumulate some 7,000 untested kits.
Nathan Ford's rampage wasn't enough to persuade the Cleveland police to begin addressing the rape-kit backlog. What did persuade them was a serial killer. In October 2009, the police discovered the bodies of 11 women buried in the home and backyard of Anthony Sowell, a convicted rapist. Over the years, some of Sowell's intended victims had escaped and reported his attempts to rape them. But the police had never thoroughly investigated their claims. At least one woman had completed a forensic exam. The police had tested the rape kit—but only for drugs in her system, not for the rapist's DNA.
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When the members of Cleveland's task force began shipping rape kits to the state lab, they didn't imagine they'd end up fomenting a small revolution in criminology. Yet those evidence boxes uncovered new clues about the behavior of sexual assailants and overturned some basic assumptions—about how often they offend, whom they attack, and how they might be captured.
Rachel Lovell, the lead researcher at Case Western, reviewed the results of the tests and found herself with a new and superior class of information. In the past, most research on rapists relied on prison records or “self-reports”—that is, surveys of people who answered questions anonymously about their behavior. But here, in her hands, were the biological name tags of thousands of men who had committed a rape and walked away. It was a larger and far more objective sample of sexual offenders. It was the difference between a pencil sketch and a color photograph.
What struck her first was the sheer number of repeat offenders: Of the rape kits containing DNA that generated a CODIS hit, nearly one in five pointed to a serial rapist—giving the Cleveland investigators leads on some 480 serial predators to date. On a practical level, this suggested that every allegation of rape should be investigated as if it might have been committed by a repeat offender. “The way we've traditionally thought of sexual assault is this ‘he said, she said' situation, where they investigate the sexual assault in isolation,” Lovell told me. Instead, detectives should search for other victims or other violent crimes committed nearby, always presuming that a rapist might have attacked before. “We make those assumptions with burglary, with murder, with almost any other crime,” Lovell said, “but not a sexual assault of an adult.”
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The federal government estimates that police departments have warehoused more than 200,000 untested sexual-assault kits. But no one really knows, because cities and states fight to keep those numbers secret. The Joyful Heart Foundation, an advocacy group started by Mariska Hargitay, who stars in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, has identified more than 225,000 kits through public-records requests. But given that 15 states and many large cities have declined to even count the untested rape kits in their possession, the group believes there may be several hundred thousand more.