Do You Wish to Prosecute the Person Who Assaulted You?: Untested Sexual Assault Kits and Victim Notification of Rape Survivors Assaulted as Adolescents

ABSTRACT

In jurisdictions across the country, sexual assault kits (SAKs) have not been consistently submitted for testing and many cities are now submitting large quantities of SAKs for forensic DNA testing. As a result, some survivors will be asked to re-engage with the criminal justice system, a process that may raise complex issues for victims who were adolescents at the time of their assaults. The authors examine the experiences of 15 adolescent victims whose SAKs were not tested, and their decision-making pathways regarding reengagement with the criminal justice system years after the initial investigation. Findings reveal that characteristics of the initial assault, victim-blaming experiences, and the social support appear to be related to the decision to re-engage with law enforcement years after the initial assault. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescent victimization
• policing/law enforcement
• sexual assault

Notes

1. Sexual assault represents a broad spectrum of sexually violating acts, up to and including rape, which is a specific type of sexual assault defined as forced vaginal, anal, or oral penetration by a body part or object (Koss & Achilles, 2008; National Center for Victims of Crime, 2010). Given the fact that all victims in our sample described experiences of penetrative rape (oral or vaginal), the terms sexual assault and rape will be used interchangeably.

2. The terms victim and survivor will be used interchangeably to reflect that sexual assault is a violent crime against a person that requires great strength and courage to survive (see Campbell & Townsend, 2011).

3. There was one outlier present in the sample of 15 young women who does not fit within this statement of “all survivors.” This young woman adamantly wanted to pursue prosecution despite experiencing a coercive, nonstereotypical assault, having trouble conveying her story to law enforcement, and experiencing severe secondary victimization. In fact, this survivor was still living with her abuser at the time of victim notification (four years after the original police report was made).

Additional information

Funding

The compilation of the records analyzed in the current study was supported by Grant 2009-EF-S6-0053 awarded by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice, to the Michigan Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Board. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.