New Jersey is creating a database for sexual assault survivors to track their own cases

For sexual assault survivors in New Jersey, tracking the status of their forensic exam kits — the hair, blood, urine, and other DNA samples collected after an assault — has long meant calling labs or law enforcement, sometimes having to rehash details of the attack, or providing other personal details over the phone.

“That process in and of itself can be re-traumatizing, and could prohibit survivors from actually making those phone calls when the act of picking up that phone can be so anxiety-inducing,” said Patricia Teffenhart, executive director of New Jersey’s Division of Violence Intervention and Victim Assistance.

But that practice will soon change, Teffenhart said, as the Garden State plans to roll out a “survivor-centered and trauma-informed” database that will let survivors of sexual assault monitor the status of their own cases and find out where their exam kit is located at any time – and whether it’s been tested.

The database, Teffenhart, said, will be open to any survivor who has undergone a forensic exam, regardless of whether they person has decided to pursue criminal charges.

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Funded by a $2 million grant from U.S. Department of Justice’s National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, the database will also permit New Jersey to create its first centralized tracking system, allowing officials to analyze data around exam kit evidence, including the number of kits collected each year.

Officials are in the process of selecting vendors for the database, working with law enforcement partners and gathering census data, with hopes of having a portal available to survivors by next spring, Teffenhart said.

At least 40 states, and Washington, D.C., have launched similar portals or are in the process of doing so, according to End the Backlog, a website run by the nonprofit sexual assault survivor advocacy organization Joyful Heart Foundation.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic lawmakers this year proposed a bill to implement a similar database, open to survivors and authorized users. Entities collecting evidence, including medical providers and law enforcement agencies, would be required to participate, state House Reps. Brian Munroe, Tim Brennan, and Lisa A. Borowski said in a memo.

“Although Pennsylvania has come far in ending the rape kit backlog, with only 186 kits awaiting testing at the end of 2021, there is still more that can be done to ensure all entities involved in the delicate testing of sexual assault evidence are held accountable for reporting that evidence in a timely manner,” they wrote.

In Michigan — which implemented a statewide sexual assault kit-tracking system in 2018 after more than 11,000 untested kits were found in an abandoned warehouse — the Track-Kit database has allowed a compliance center to follow up with law enforcement and labs if a kit is overdue for testing. Most health care or law enforcement using the system are now meeting, or nearly meeting, statutory deadlines, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said. As of February, 2,412 survivors had logged in to Michigan’s system at least once to track the status of their kit, the spokesperson said.

The forthcoming database in New Jersey is part of a larger effort to make the state’s system more friendly to survivors, Teffenhart said. Last year, Attorney General Matthew Platkin issued a law enforcement directive extending the retention of evidence from five years to 20 years, which Teffenhart said is a “really big step in making trauma-informed decisions for sexual assault survivors.”

Teffenhart noted that many survivors don’t come forward immediately after an assault, meaning that under the old guidelines, their evidence kits may not have been retained by the time they were ready to press charges.

“They’re still processing it internally,” Teffenhart said. “All of the best data has affirmed that they need more time.”

Platkin’s directive also set guidelines for securely storing and testing kits, and explicitly prohibited police officers and prosecutors from refusing to test evidence solely because they believed that the sexual act was consensual, there are no identified subjects, or because a survivor lodged a complaint against a current or former partner.

Sexual assault is the most under-reported crime in the country, according to the FBI, which makes the number of assaults that occur in New Jersey nearly impossible to track, Teffenhart said. New Jersey’s 2020 Uniform Crime Report listed 1,281 instances of rape reported to police statewide. But, said Teffenhart, existing statistics “don’t really shed a light on how prevalent victimization is.”

With the expected centralized database, Teffenhart said officials hope to get a clearer picture of how many kits are stored and processed, “creating better layers of transparency” for survivors.

“Perhaps,” she added, “we can shift that dynamic and actually have more survivors feel comfortable coming forward to report their crimes and then perhaps us being able to hold more people accountable for the harm that they caused.”

If you or someone you know is a victim or witness of sexual violence, help is available. In New Jersey, call the statewide 24-hour hotline, 800-601-7200, or the national sexual assault hotline: 800-656-4673. A list of additional local resources can be found here.