Earlier this year, solutions journalist Tina Rosenberg took a deep dive into WLP’s ongoing work holding police accountable for properly investigating sexual assault for a feature “Rape Victim Advocates Get a Role Alongside the Police.”
This week, our work was featured again for making a difference in 2018.
From the New York Times:
Getting the police to prosecute rape is a problem everywhere, but few police departments were quite as bad as Philadelphia’s before 2000. The department declared hundreds of rape cases each year to be “unfounded”— without investigation.
Carol Tracy is the director of the city’s Women’s Law Project. In 1999, she pushed a new police commissioner, John Timoney, to let advocates for rape survivors read through the case files. Police and advocates often saw one another as adversaries, if not enemies. But a series of meetings with Ms. Tracy convinced Mr. Timoney. “We didn’t want to punish people and do a ‘gotcha,’” she said.
The next year, Ms. Tracy and five or so colleagues went to the sex crimes unit’s headquarters and spent three days reading through the files, flagging questionable practices. That review still happens every spring.
Over time, police practices have greatly improved, Ms. Tracy said. And now the advocate reviews are starting to spread — for example, to the New York Police Department.
While reading the files, Ms. Tracy noticed that the F.B.I. defined rape as “carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” If that sounds archaic, it’s because it was written in 1929. “That came as news to all of us,” she said.
Ms. Tracy and the Women’s Law Project wrote to Robert Mueller, who was then the F.B.I.’s director, asking the bureau to amend the definition. That started a national movement to expand the definition of rape as a crime to be taken seriously — which didn’t happen until 2012. “It comes back in so many ways for me how marginal sexual assault has been to public policy,” Ms. Tracy said.
You can read about the other advocates making a difference in 2018 here.
We are grateful to be included among passionate advocates, and for your support of our work.
Most recently, we worked with CNN to review police files for “Destroyed,” an expose and in-depth investigation into police departments that have thrown untested rape kits in the trash before the statute of limitations have run out. Since the piece went live, we have been fielding calls from reporters and advocates all over the country eager to work together toward justice for rape victims.
We do not have dedicated funding for this work beyond individual contributions from people like you. If you can, please consider supporting this work. Thank you as always for all that you do, and enable us to do.
The Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing the rights of women and girls.
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