Few country sex assault cases tried
Short staffs, inadequate training, poor resources cited for deficiency.
When Eloise House opened on Grove Boulevard in Southeast Austin in 2015, its founders had expected that in its first six months they would see maybe 100 people. A small, manufactured building painted bright blue and decorated with sunflowers, Eloise House offers free sexual assault forensic testing for victims 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Kelly White, co-CEO of the SAFE Alliance, which runs the facility, said she was surprised when in those first six months they saw about 300 people. One weekend, she remembers, they tested 15 victims.
“It’s just been astonishing the number of people coming in,” White said. “There is so much more than we anticipated.”
SAFE Alliance offers a variety of resources to sexual assault victims in Travis County, including counseling, but White said the organization is constantly battling for funding to keep its head above water.
“We have such a lack of resources for every single thing we do,” she said. “If a program can have a wait list, it has a wait list.”
It’s a complaint echoed by most professionals who work with sexual assault victims in the Austin area, and it’s reflected in a study released in March.
A coalition of law enforcement, victim services advocates and other groups — the Austin/Travis County Sexual Assault Response and Resource Team — produced a 73-page needs assessment that showed anemic prosecution rates for sexual assault, with hundreds of cases reported and only a handful going to trial — numbers on par with what officials were seeing more than 15 years ago. Most professionals also said they didn’t have the time or training to properly do their jobs.
The study relied on data and interviews with 51 professionals and 24 sexual assault victims to identify shortcomings in the criminal justice system and hopefully boost the number of sexual assault arrests and convictions.
Law enforcement professionals, victim services counselors and community advocates all complained about short staffs, inadequate training and poor resources, with 65 percent saying they did not have the time to adequately address their work. That proportion grew to 85 percent when victim services personnel were asked whether they could meet the long-term needs of their clients.
“We knew that the system was underresourced,” Emily LeBlanc, co-chair of the sexual assault resource team, said of the study. “I do think it is compelling that every single discipline said they didn’t have the resources to do their job effectively. We are essentially triaging cases. We aren’t serving victims in the way they need to be served.”
Rape-kit backlog
Some predict the problem will only get worse as pathologists begin to wade through a backlog of nearly 2,700 rape kits that have not yet been tested since the Austin Police Department shut down its DNA lab in 2016 because of outdated procedures.
Kachina Clark, who manages Austin police’s victim services unit, said those kits represent potentially hundreds more victims who could need additional counseling as prosecutors finally take up their cases.
For many of them, discussing events that happened as far back as 15 years ago can revive the original trauma, causing significant grief and emotional turmoil, Clark said.
In anticipation of the increased caseload, the city last year gave victim services $50,000 to train as many as 50 counselors in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, or EMDR — a method proven effective for treating trauma survivors. In return, each counselor has agreed to provide 50 counseling sessions at no cost over the next three years for a total of roughly 2,500 sessions.
Training begins this summer, meaning counselors will be ready to work as soon as October.
Across the board, sexual assault victims have reported a need for more long-term counseling.
Austin police have four dedicated counselors to work with sexual assault victims — up from two positions a year ago, Clark said. But the city’s Commission for Women, which advises the City Council on women’s issues, is recommending five more.
Austin police counselors work with victims through the criminal investigation, but they refer ongoing care to other organizations, like SAFE, which is now reporting a decline in its own counseling funding.
White said many of the philanthropic dollars that support the organization are focused on prevention programs instead of therapy, to educate young people about sexual and domestic violence, and hopefully stop it before it starts.
“We are looking at alternative avenues and trying to figure out if there are other sources of reimbursement to address counseling,” White said. “If we are not able to find that funding, if somebody leaves we are not going to refill the positions.”
SAFE plans to expand Eloise House to nearly double its size to handle forensic testing.
Reporting challenges
White said she hopes the influx of victims, increasing each year, is because more people are reporting sexual assault.
Statewide, about two out of every five Texas women will experience some kind of sexual violence in their lifetime, but only 9 percent will report it to police, according to University of Texas researchers.
As few as 0.4 percent of cases result in prosecution and 0.2 percent lead to incarceration, researchers have found. It’s a problem local attorneys and law enforcement attribute largely to victims deciding not to pursue charges.
“That’s a victim prerogative,” said Beverly Mathews, a prosecutor with the Travis County district attorney’s office, who also leads a law enforcement working group called the Inter-agency Sexual Assault Team. “There’s a large number that drop out at the law enforcement stage and the prosecution stage. One of the things ISAT is working on is helping a victim feel more able to stay with the process if he or she chooses to.”
A snapshot provided in the needs assessment showed that between July 2016 and June 2017 Austin police received 1,268 calls for assistance related to sexual assault, which resulted in 1,161 investigations. However, in the first part of the reporting period, these figures included such crimes as indecent exposure and public lewdness in addition to rape and sexual assault, which were left off in the second half of the reporting period.
Austin police numbers show 447 sexual assault cases in this time frame.
During that same time, the Travis County district attorney’s office prosecuted 40 sexual assault cases: 11 were dismissed, 20 pleaded to lesser charges or other felonies, eight pleaded guilty as charged, and only one was found guilty by a jury. The figures include cases referred from other law enforcement agencies in Travis County.
None of the figures includes child victims.
The groups admit there are factors that complicate the data. Definitions of what qualifies as sexual assault vary. Sometimes a case gets filed one way and changes during the investigation. Cases handled by the district attorney’s office also aren’t necessarily resolved in the same calendar year they were filed, often taking two years to make it through the system.
“Being able to compare data from one agency to the next has been a big obstacle for the” sexual assault response team, LeBlanc said. “We really need to be able to compare apples to apples to know where we are really losing the victims so we can identify why. I don’t always believe it’s because the victim withdrew. That has not been my experience.”
LeBlanc said no matter how you look at the numbers, they are concerning, especially considering most victims in the study said they reported their assaults to police out of a concern for public safety and to keep others from being hurt.
“Prosecution is not the right route for every single victim, but it is for more than 1 percent of them, especially when they say the reason they reported it in the first place was to protect other people,” she said.
An overwhelming number of study respondents — 94 percent — said the state statute has problems and the law as written does not adequately address sexual assault. They said the statute of limitations on sex crimes is too short, the definitions of consent and incapacitation are unclear, and the law places too much of a burden on the victims.
LeBlanc said she hopes the partners in the team’s study will look at how the findings affect their own agencies and collaborate on improvements.
“The one thing I will say that I was pleased to see was that 75 percent of victims felt believed. Nationally and historically, we have often heard that the reason they don’t report is fear of not being believed,” she said. “At least in Travis County, when they do report, more often than not they felt believed. They thought everyone was on the same team. That really spoke to the power of that collaboration.”