New Jersey has taken a significant step toward closing one of the most painful gaps in the American criminal justice system. A new state law now requires that every rape kit collected in New Jersey be tested — ending a practice that left thousands of survivors waiting years, or indefinitely, for answers about their own assaults.
At a glance
- Rape kit testing mandate: New Jersey’s law requires all sexual assault forensic evidence kits to be submitted to a lab within 45 days of collection and tested within six months.
- Backlog elimination: Advocates estimate tens of thousands of untested rape kits had accumulated in police storage across the U.S. over decades — New Jersey’s law directly targets that backlog within the state.
- Survivor notification: The law also establishes rights for survivors to be informed about the status of their kit, giving them a measure of agency that the system had long denied them.
Why untested kits matter so much
A rape kit — formally called a sexual assault forensic evidence kit — is collected by medical professionals in the hours after an assault. It contains DNA and physical evidence that can identify perpetrators, connect crimes across jurisdictions, and provide crucial support for prosecution.
For decades, those kits sat untested in police evidence rooms and crime labs across the country. In some cities, the backlogs numbered in the thousands. Survivors submitted to invasive hours-long collection procedures and received nothing in return — no answers, no arrests, no accountability.
The reasons for the backlog were multiple: underfunded crime labs, lack of mandatory timelines, and a systemic failure to treat sexual assault cases with the same urgency as other violent crimes. RAINN estimates that sexual violence is already among the most underreported crimes in the U.S., and the knowledge that evidence might never be tested only deepened survivors’ distrust of the system.
What the New Jersey law does
The legislation sets clear, enforceable deadlines. Law enforcement agencies must submit kits to a forensic lab within 45 days of collection. Labs then have six months to complete testing. Tracking systems must be maintained so survivors can check the status of their own evidence.
Crucially, the law applies regardless of whether a survivor chooses to file a police report — a provision that recognizes the reality that many survivors delay reporting or never report at all, while still wanting their evidence preserved and processed.
New Jersey joins a growing number of states that have passed similar legislation. End the Backlog, a project of the Joyful Heart Foundation, has been a leading force in this national movement, helping pass rape kit accountability laws in more than 40 states since the early 2010s.
A national movement built by survivors
The push to end rape kit backlogs has been driven substantially by survivors speaking publicly about their experiences. Mariska Hargitay, founder of the Joyful Heart Foundation, helped bring national attention to the issue after being contacted by thousands of survivors following her work on the television series Law & Order: SVU.
Earlier breakthroughs came when cities like Detroit and Cleveland — where audits revealed backlogs of thousands of kits — committed to systematic testing. Research from the National Institute of Justice found that testing backlogged kits in Detroit led to hundreds of new DNA hits and the identification of serial offenders who had continued committing crimes while their evidence sat unprocessed.
Those results made the moral case into a practical one: testing rape kits does not just deliver justice for individual survivors. It takes dangerous people off the streets.
Limits and what still needs to happen
Passing a law is not the same as solving the problem. Enforcement requires sustained funding for crime labs, ongoing oversight to ensure deadlines are met, and cultural change within law enforcement agencies that have historically deprioritized these cases. Advocates note that systemic bias in how police assess the credibility of survivors — particularly survivors who are Black, Indigenous, unhoused, or involved in the sex trade — has contributed to the backlog in ways that a testing mandate alone may not fully address.
Still, the law represents a concrete commitment: that evidence collected from a survivor’s body will be treated as the serious forensic material it is.
For the survivors who waited — some for years, some for decades — that commitment is long overdue. For those whose kits will be collected in New Jersey from this point forward, the wait should be measured in months, not lifetimes.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Good News for Humankind
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
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- The Good News for Humankind archive on criminal justice
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