The Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault and the Maine State Crime Lab are working on a pilot project in Kennebec and Penobscot counties to find out how hospitals there are able to efficiently process sexual assault forensics kits and avoid backlogs.
Coalition Executive Director Elizabeth Ward-Saxl says law enforcement agencies and hospitals are currently storing hundreds of unprocessed kits. She says the reasons vary, from prosecutors declining to move forward with cases or survivors changing their minds about pursuing charges.
Ward-Saxl says the Maine State Crime Lab has a small backlog of kits to test now, and if a victim decides they want their kit to be processed they shouldn't have to wait more than a year for answers.
"If a survivor says, 'I really want to have my kit tested,' we want to make sure they can do that, and promise them it's not going to create a 6-month to a year backlog. We need to know we have enough staffing over at the crime lab to ensure a kit can be processed in a reasonable amount of time," she says.
Ward-Saxl says the goal of the pilot project is to find a software program that can track where sexual assault kits are in the system, include details that law enforcement, prosecutors and hospitals want and assess how many trained staff are needed to keep up with demand. There is no record of that now.
A one-year U.S. Justice Department STOP grant is funding the pilot. Ward-Saxl hopes to implement a statewide rollout of the improved tracking system sometime in 2025.
