Rape kits are seen in a 2017 file photo. Rick Bowmer / AP File photo

The Cumberland County District Attorney’s Office announced on Dec. 9 that it was awarded a nearly $2.5 million three-year federal grant for the Cumberland County Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. The grant will allow for an inventory of all sexual assault evidence collection kits, also known as “rape kits,” in Cumberland County, and testing of all appropriate kits, allowing for the prosecution of eligible cases.

“Maine is the last state in the country to apply for one of these grants. So, we’re really thrilled that Cumberland County is going to be kind of leading the way for Maine,” said Cumberland County District Attorney Jacqueline Sartoris.

Historically in Maine, a small fraction of sexual assault kits have been tested, according to the District Attorney’s Office, and there is no system for tracking the kits. The Sexual Assault Kit Initiative grants are administered through the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance and support the district’s community response teams to inventory, track and promptly test previously unsubmitted sexual assault kits. Every state in the U.S. – aside from Maine – has had at least one district embark on this work through a SAKI grant.

Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris. File photo / Portland Press Herald

The Cumberland County District Attorney’s Office will work with multiple partners through the grant, including Maine State Police Crime Lab, the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office, Sexual Assault Response Service of Southern Maine, and the Office of the Attorney General. The grant will fund the hiring of one full-time prosecutor and one full-time law enforcement officer to investigate these cases.

Over the first six months of the grant’s administration, every sexual assault kit in Cumberland County will be inventoried. As there is no system to track kits in place, it is unknown how many kits are in evidence rooms across Cumberland County and Maine. Maine is one of 14 states to never audit untested kits.

After six months, the District Attorney’s Office and project partners will determine which kits to test for DNA evidence in a third-party lab. If the advisory team has probable cause to believe a crime has occurred, the results will be loaded into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index, a database that allows law enforcement agencies to compare DNA profiles of suspects and link crimes.

From there, officials will be in touch with the survivors of sexual assault who submitted the kits, who can decide if and how they want to move forward with the case. Some may not have received notice about their sexual assault case for years. Some of the kits could be over 10 years old, said Sartoris.

“Victims say ‘I don’t want to engage in this.’ Or they may say, ‘What took you so long? I have been waiting to hear about this for a long time,’” said Sartoris.

All multidisciplinary teams who will work on this project, including law enforcement, will receive training on trauma-informed practices from SARSSM.

“(We’re) understanding that for some victims, this can be very re-traumatizing. They haven’t heard anything about this in years and years … and suddenly somebody’s contacting them on the phone and saying, ‘Hey, you know, can we come talk to you about this traumatic event that you maybe have put behind you or tried to put behind you?’” said Sartoris.

“So we recognize that there’s a lot there that we’re going to just be really careful about,” she said.

Cumberland County prosecutor Tina Panayides volunteered hundreds of hours drafting the SAKI grant application, talking with project partners and learning from districts in other states who already found success with the grant. She said her work volunteering as chair of the Sexual Assault Forensic Examiner Advisory Board motivated her to pursue this grant. 

“In that capacity I heard from nurses, advocates and others who work in this field about a ‘black hole’ where about 80% of kits sent out for exams are not returned to the lab,” said Panayides.

“Taking that knowledge back to my work as a prosecutor, it was clear to DA Sartoris and I that applying for this grant was the necessary next step to move this work forward,” she said. 

When it comes to survivors and their sexual assault kits, knowledge is power, said SARSSM Executive Director Erin Flood.

“There’s choices taken away when somebody inflicts harm upon somebody else, and that loss really resonates, in addition to all the other impacts of sexual violence and assault,” said Flood.

“So what this allows for survivors who choose the pathway – the tracking of the kit – it supports their own empowerment process, because it allows them to determine where their kit is currently, from the time of collection to the time that it’s submitted to law enforcement, and then to potential forensic testing,” she said. “It reenforces the survivor’s agency.”

While the grant will allow for a complete inventory of sexual assault kits in storage at the time of the grant application, the kits collected past that date will not be part of the tracking and testing program. Sartoris said that they just hope there is not another three-year backlog of untested kits at the end of the grant funding.

Despite a shift in practices toward testing more sexual assault kits as they come into evidence, there is a limit on staff bandwidth and funding to test and track all kits without a statewide program in place, said Sartoris. Maine, along with 13 other states, does not have a statewide kit tracking system despite pushes for reform. This fall, a pilot program for tracking new kits began in Kennebec and Penobscot counties and could be a model for the statewide program.

“It’s certainly our hope that at the end of those three years, Maine will be doing that statewide,” said Sartoris.

Sartoris promised to commit more resources toward investigating and prosecuting crimes of sexual violence when seeking election as Cumberland County District Attorney in 2022. Once elected, her office created a sexual assault team consisting of prosecutors, victim witness advocates, and trial assistants.

“Every single time I spoke about why I was running, I identify that part of being a prosecutor who may be considered progressive is making progress on addressing injustices that have been left to fester and to create additional harm,” said Sartoris.

She acknowledges the difficulty of prosecuting these crimes within our current justice system, noting the low rates of conviction in sex crimes that go to trial, which is a fraction of crimes that are reported. Yet regardless of if a conviction is reached, she said that this grant and the work to come next sends a message to survivors of sexual assault in Cumberland County.

“This work is worth it, and this work will allow us to say to sex assault victims, ‘We’ve taken your cases seriously. We have investigated and prosecuted wherever we can,’” said Sartoris.

“And where we couldn’t investigate and prosecute, maybe it’s because that’s not what the victim wanted at that point. But one way or the other, we know that victims will know they’ve been heard, will know that what happened to them matters, and I think that that’s worth it,” she said.