Wayne County Gets $100K to Help Clear Backlog of Rape Cases

Money donated by a Virginia-based social media company will help Wayne County Authorities clear another dozen cases stemming from the 2009 discovery of 11,000 untested rape kits abandoned in a Detroit police storage unit. But there are 630 more potential cases sitting on Prosecutor Kym Worthy’s desk. (Photo via the Joyful Heart Foundation)

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A Virginia-based international social media company is donating $100,000 and challenging other corporations and individuals to do the same to help Wayne County authorities clear a backlog of more than 11,0000 untested rape kits.

MOKO Social Media said in a statement Tuesday it has launched the MOKO Door Foundation with a $100,000 donation to support the work of Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who has been seeking donations to help her cash-strapped office test the kits, discovered abandoned in a Detroit police storage unit in 2009.

MOKO’s is the largest donation to date since January, when Worthy and the Michigan Women’s Foundation began the fundraising drive through Enough Sexual Assaults in Detroit (Enough SAID).

Ian Rodwell, CEO of MOKO Social media, said in the statement that the partnership with Worthy’s office will “help end the shameful backlog of rape kits and bring justice to the victims” of sexual assault, and is part of a larger effort by the company, its affiliates and the MOKO Door Foundation to “shine a light on injustices – and bring tangible results.”

Related:

• Kym Worthy: Untested Rape Kits Illustrate Funding Crisis
• Detroit Discovers at Least 100 Serial Rapists After It Finally Gets Around to Processing Thousands of Rape Kits
• Untested Rape Kits, ‘Rape Insurance Law’ Combine in Chilling Message: Patch Editor’s Notebook

The group will work with other organizations, such as “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” actress Mariska Hargitay’s Joyful Heart Foundation’s Endthebacklog.org and other charities to bring more attention and resources to the issue.

Hargitay appeared with Worthy last year when the prosecutor announced proposed legislation setting deadlines and establishing other guidelines to speed up the processing of rape kits.

Detroit isn’t alone in ignoring the rape kits. According to the Joyful Heart Foundation, which tracks the rape kit backlog nationally, hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits are languishing around the country – though no one knows for sure how many are untested, where they all are and how old they are.

Only a handful of states have adopted reform laws requiring an inventory of untested kits and creating an accountable system to track and test those kits.

630 Cases Could Proceed with Enough Resources

Wayne County authorities are chipping away at the mountain of untested kits.

Testing has been completed or is in progress on more than 9,000 of the 11,000 kits, and DNA samples are being matched against the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).

As of April, more than 1,133 suspects – including 255 serial rapists – have been identified because their DNA was already on record from a previous violent crime. DNA from the kits tested has been linked to other crimes committed in 30 states and the District of Columbia.

But the big challenge now is a lack of resources to investigate and prosecute the offenders. So far, 15 convictions have been secured – but Worthy already has 630 cases on her desk that could proceed to investigations and prosecutions if sufficient resources can be identified.

The money from MOKO Social Media will be enough to investigate and prosecute roughly a dozen cases, which could bring justice for many times more victims. Studies have found that the vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by repeat offenders; an average rapist has committed at least 10 acts of rape, battery, and child physical and sexual abuse.

“Words cannot adequately express how huge this is,” Worthy said in a statement. “We currently have over 600 cases where there have been DNA hits waiting to be investigated. This donation will help us get many of these cases moving.”

Worthy: More Investigators, Prosecutors Needed

Worthy, who has been open about her own rape while a student at the University of Notre Dame, has an inkling about what victims feel when their rapists go unpunished. She chose not to report her assault – naively so, she says now – because she feared a trial could derail her law school studies and career.

“I believed I would be ostracized, and I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my studies,” she told the Detroit Free Press in January. “Now I realize how naive that was. It is a decision I regret very much because maybe he’d done it before. Maybe he was a serial rapist.”

In an interview with Patch last summer, Worthy said bringing rapists to justice “is a human issue.”

“You had potentially 11,000 victims, overwhelmingly women, overwhelmingly women of color, overwhelmingly from the city of Detroit, and if you can’t care about this issue, then I don’t know what you care about as a human being,” Worthy said.

Worthy has said she needs money to hire 25 additional investigators and 10 additional prosecutors, according to The Detroit News.