Unfair Park from p5 her rape kit sat on a shelf for 20 years. “I didn’t just deal with the rape kit back- log,” she says. “The two cops that came out, they asked me three questions that still burn my soul. It’s like they’re etched in me: ‘Are you sure it wasn’t your boyfriend?’ ‘Are you sure you didn’t let them in the window?’ ‘Are you sure you’re not having sex and don’t want your mother to know?’” The questions led her to disdain law en- forcement for decades. “At first I didn’t realize the hate I had for police officers growing up,” she says. “But in my world of advocacy, I realized we have to train them to be trauma-informed and survi- vor-centered.” In other words, officers must be trained to respond and care for victims. Otherwise, in Masters’ opinion, they must “step out of the way.” Masters has spent years advocating for trauma-informed training, and there’s evi- dence that the law named after her has helped the state make significant progress. For instance, labs run by DPS reduced their number of untested kits by over 1,000 between the end of 2020 and the end of June 2022. Additionally, Dallas County has tested nearly 4,000 kits since 2019, a number that further shames the lack of progress the city made for survivors like Masters early in the 2000s. That said, private labs are still in high demand as counties and cities, which pay for the tests, look for resources, and many counties are simply violating the law. Masters and the bill’s author, Rep. Victo- ria Neave, acknowledge their work is far from finished. “There’s still a lot of work to do in ensur- ing counties know their legal obligations,” Neave tells the Observer. In the wake of the recent Dobbs ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, which de- creed that the Constitution does not provide a right to an abortion, the state’s persistent backlog has once again garnered headlines. Yet even before the Supreme Court’s ruling, Texas’ own restrictive abortion bill — and Gov. Greg Abbot’s remarks that Texas will work to “eliminate all rapists” — drew atten- tion to the state’s backlog challenges. “This law undermines so much of what we achieved,” Masters told The Daily Beast in 2021 after Abbott signed Senate Bill 8, which bans nearly all abortions as early as six weeks in a pregnancy. The law, which does not allow exceptions for rape, sexual abuse, incest or fetal anomaly, incensed Masters, who is a member of the Governor’s Sexual Assault Survivors’ Task Force. “We already feel like we’re rendered pow- erless by the sexual assault,” she added in the 2021 interview. “And now here you come, taking more power, taking our options away.” Nearly a year later, on the phone with the Observer, Masters was still perturbed by the governor’s comments. Her laugh belies de- cades of pent-up anger, which often comes out when faced with red tape and incompetence. “I know our governor is saying we’re gonna eliminate rapists, but I was hoping he was misquoted, because that’s impossible,” she says. “We have no way of dealing with the evil that dwells in men or women.” Masters is far from alone in her anger at 6 6 the government. This was 2018, the year before the La- vinia Masters Act went into effect. After tak- ing a moment to catch her breath, Masters says, she “went off on the poor little man.” “‘First of all, it’s not your money,’” she re- members telling him and, by extension, the crowd. “‘It’s not coming out of your pay- check. Second of all, you don’t know if they’re alive or not. If they’re not, you still owe the family.’” Afterward she told Neave, “‘If this county has this mentality, how many other counties have the same mentality?’” Both agree that the state may have to get AP Photo/Pat Sullivan In a late June story for The New Republic, journalist Katie Herchenroeder noted, “It’s not just abortion clinics that will be affected by the Dobbs decision. In particular, advo- cates told me, it will hurt rape crisis centers, which provide emergency contraception, fo- rensic exams, counseling, and sexual educa- tion — while also advocating for justice for survivors, including ending the immense backlog of rape kits across the country.” T he experts, investigators and lawmak- ers interviewed for this story reveal there are a few key reasons Texas still has a backlog of untested rape kits. One is the lack of education and awareness show- cased by the dead-of-night traffic stop Mas- ters endured near San Antonio. Another major reason speaks to why Texas had such a large backlog in the first place: apathy. “My perception is women weren’t a pri- ority,” Neave says. “We learned some law en- forcement would hang on to the kits and not submit them for testing.” To Masters, “it’s obvious” agencies sim- ply weren’t trying hard enough until survi- vors and lawmakers like Neave and Wendy Davis started making noise. “At least we’re trying now, because it’s ob- vious you weren’t in the beginning, and I was very upset about that, because we were for- gotten,” Masters says. “If they processed 100 kits a year, it seemed [to them] like they were making progress, and that’s unacceptable.” Another issue is money. In the early days of her advocacy, lack of funds was a common refrain Masters heard from practically every county official she engaged. Amy Derrick, an administrative chief in the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, echoes Masters. “Everyone will tell you they need more money,” Derrick says. The Lavinia Masters Act has helped Dallas County keep up with the rate of new kits, but even with the $50 million invested by the state in 2019, labs run by law enforcement still don’t have the man- power they need. “The labs need more people and more equipment, and they also need more people to choose this career path,” she says. Soon, both of Dallas County’s rape kit backlogs will be sent to private labs. Der- rick says there are even a significant num- A sexual assault evidence kit is logged in the biology lab at the Houston Forensic Science Center in Houston. ber of rape kits that could qualify for a lab like Othram, which uses an advanced gene- alogy process known as forensic-grade ge- nome sequencing to build a profile of a suspect, search for relatives, then nab crim- inals and solve decades-old cold cases. Oth- ram used that technique to help Dallas police last month arrest a suspect in the 1989 murder of Oak Cliff resident Mary Hague Kelly. Yet an interview with Othram officials indicates the Texas government has thus far been largely uninterested in in- vesting in their technology; one company rep said Sen. John Cornyn’s office is “one of the only offices left on the Hill who hasn’t opened their door to us for a conversation, even for 10 minutes.” “Cornyn is known for supporting DNA technology, and unfortunately, he is one of the senators we have not been able to get on the phone with,” says Kristen Mittelman, Othram’s chief business development officer. (Cornyn wrote a 2021 op-ed decrying the state’s rape kit backlog). “He is still writing bills only supporting legacy technology,” Mit- telman says. “That’s extremely disheartening, and I don’t understand where the disconnect is there. We are building the road, the path- ways to clear all these backlogs, to not live in a world where people wait decades and de- cades to find what happened to their loved ones. What’s necessary is government buy- in.” Cornyn’s office did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment. In some dispiriting ways, the issues of fi- nance and apathy are conflated. Take, for in- stance, a small county Masters once visited (she declined to provide its name). She was invited to speak to a local crisis center in the county, and before her speech, a police lieu- tenant took the podium. “For whatever reason, he felt com- pelled to talk about the kits,” Masters says. “My blood pressure rose, and I was ready to jump across the table, because he said they have kits from the ’70s and ’80s, but they weren’t going to ‘waste their money’ on processing, because ‘those people are probably dead.’” tougher on counties that don’t comply. In fact, Neave says a state law enforcement agency that does not comply with the La- vinia Masters Act could have some grant funding pulled by the state government or the governor’s office. However, data from late 2021 shows that over 1,000 kits had been sent to labs between September 2019 and late November 2021 but not analyzed within the 90 days required. “I don’t believe the numbers,” Masters says. “I believe they’re greater, because some counties may not report their numbers. Some of them are just being straight defiant, and some of them are just lazy, and they fig- ure ‘Look, we’re a small town, and we’ll do it in our own time.’ And that’s the culture we help form by leaving kits on the shelf.” While labs like Othram do critical work to solve cold cases, they alone can’t solve states’ flawed response to sexual assaults. A recent study by the Kaiser Family Founda- tion found that, in many cases, survivors end up paying hundreds of dollars for the medi- cal work conducted after their assault. Fed- eral law requires that the cost of conducting a rape kit be covered by the state, but only 14 states will cover the cost of actually process- ing that kit. Texas is not one of those states. Texas also does not cover the cost of a post- rape pregnancy test, a test for STDs, or STD medication. A survivor of rape in Texas may be forced to shell out money for contraceptives and a test for sexually transmitted diseases, and even after all that, their own county may not process their rape kit. M asters’ longtime disdain for law en- forcement made the governor’s task force a team of strange bedfellows. The team includes several of people from the worlds of politics and criminal justice and, by Masters’ own admission, she “made a lot of enemies.” “When I first started on the task force, I came in being me, and being me means having that voice that will not be silent any more,” she says. “The life I once lived in silence was dark and tormenting. To think that no one hears us or sees us ... those days were past us. My days of being a victim and sitting on a shelf are over. That is not fair.” “‘If these were your daughters and your mamas and your sisters,’” she told the task force, “‘you would be doing everything in the world.’” She is proud of the voice the task force has helped give survivors like herself, and she is now thinking bigger: She wants legis- lation like the Lavinia Masters Act on the federal level. >> p8 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 AUGUST 11–17, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
