In 1996, when she was seventeen, Helena was abducted by a stranger from a car wash, driven around barren areas of Los Angeles County, and repeatedly raped. Immediately afterward, Helena reported the crime to the police. She made this courageous decision despite the parting threat from her assailant that he would come to her home and kill her and her family if she told anyone about the rape. Before he abandoned her to shiver in her car in a vacant industrial lot, he took Helena’s driver’s license with her home address on it, so she knew he had the information he needed to follow up on the threat. Still, as she told me fourteen years later with a tinge of sadness, “I believed in the criminal justice system, and it never occurred to me not to ask the police for help. Of course, at the time, I had a very different idea about how they would handle my case than how things actually worked out.”

When Helena reported the rape to the police, she—like many in the United States who inform a hospital, the police, or a rape treatment center of a sexual assault within a week of the crime—was asked to have a sexual assault forensic evidence kit collected at a hospital. The examination is a lengthy, invasive four-to-six-hour process in which a medical professional swabs, plucks, and brushes into envelopes any DNA left in or on a rape victim’s body. The envelopes are sealed and then placed in a cardboard box. The cardboard box is referred to as a “rape kit.”

After Helena reported her rape, it would be more than a decade before she heard again from the police. For thirteen years, Helena phoned the police department handling her case, and for thirteen years, her calls went unreturned. Then one day, in early 2010, she read a newspaper article about the rape kit backlog in Los Angeles, which quoted me and my report on this subject. Helena found my contact information, and a few days later called me at my office at Human Rights Watch. “I think my rape kit is in the backlog in Los Angeles,” she told me by way of introduction during our first phone call, “and I would like to know if I can get it tested.