Rape kits website and ad are delayed by months

State and county officials are months late in launching a website and producing a public service announcement informing victims of sexual assault about an effort to test hundreds of rape kits that have sat in evidence rooms for years untested.

The website was expected to be launched in December, according to a working group report submitted to the state Legislature that same month, while the public service announcement was supposed to be ready in February.

Six months later the website is still being worked on, and the public service announcement hasn’t been shot, according to officials from the Honolulu Police Department and the state Attorney General’s Office, who said they hope that both will be ready in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, law enforcement officials have been sending hundreds of kits to labs on the mainland for testing and have begun getting results back. It’s not clear how many of the alleged victims of sexual assault know that their kits were never tested after they submitted them to law enforcement at the time of their assault, or whether they are aware of the effort underway to test the kits.

State Sen. Laura Thielen (D, Hawaii Kai-Waimanalo- Kailua) said it’s important to start the public notification process so that victims can be informed about what’s going on and better prepared if their kit matches someone in a federal offender database, potentially advancing their case.

“I think if we were to begin notifying and talking about and publicizing and having information available on the website about the testing of these kits — proactively, prospectively, going forward — people who had undergone that forensic exam one to 15 years ago will hear about this in public announcements, will hear about it in the news, and contacting them may not be such a startling thing under those circumstances because they would have mentally been thinking through some things themselves about what had happened,” she said.

The kits contain swabs of bodily fluid, hair samples and other potential DNA evidence collected from the bodies of victims in the hours or days after they were assaulted.

The county police departments revealed last year that they had only tested 13 percent of the 2,240 rape kits submitted to them, dating from the 1990s to 2016. Law enforcement agencies agreed to test more than 1,400 of the kits in December; however, the Attorney General’s Office said this week that they are no longer sure of the final number.

One of the challenges to processing rape kits that have sat in evidence rooms for years and sometimes decades is how to inform victims. Studies have shown that for some victims who have moved on with their lives, the experience can reopen past trauma.

As part of a comprehensive plan for reforming testing protocols — required under Act 207, which was signed into law last year — a working group composed of county police officials, prosecutors, officials from the Attorney General’s Office and sex abuse treatment centers devised a twofold victim notification plan in December.

Officials developed a detailed protocol for directly notifying victims whose kits result in a match in the national offender database that could advance their cases. The second part of the plan includes public notification through the website and public service announcement.

The website is supposed to include information about what kits are being tested, how the results will be used, what survivors of sexual assault can expect and how a survivor can reinstate a complaint if it was previously withdrawn. The website is also expected to include an email address and phone numbers so victims can submit questions.

The Attorney General’s Office, which is overseeing the rollout of the website and public service announcement, said the website should be launched this month and that the public service announcement should come out soon.

“The work of gathering everyone’s input and putting it into the appropriate format on the website just took some time,” said Joshua Wisch, a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office, by email. “We note … that Act 207 did not require the creation of a website, but the stakeholders wanted to do so to provide more ways of sharing this information with the public.”