When someone becomes a victim of a sexual assault in Wisconsin, there is a chance the rape kit collected at the hospital will never be processed as evidence.

Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault said Friday over 1,000 rape kits have gone untested in southeastern Wisconsin alone.

The group calculated the number based on an investigation last July of ten police departments in southeastern Wisconsin that found one of three rape kits collected since 2007 has never been sent for testing, said Jacqui Callari-Robinson, Director of Prevention and Health Services at the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

“If it is found that rape kits are not being tested as evidence, how is that keeping victims of sexual assault safe”? Callari-Robinson said.

If victims cooperate with law enforcement and go through protocol for forensic evidence to be collected from them, this evidence should be tested, Callari-Robinson added.

“Victims want evidence to be processed to make a conviction, and we stand behind victims and what they want,” Callari-Robinson said.

The path from collecting a rape kit to processing it as evidence is often more complicated, however.

When police officers are responding to what looks like a sexual assault, they encourage victims to have a rape kit collected, said Joel DeSpain, spokesperson for the Madison Police Department.

But when a rape kit is collected, it does not go straight to the police, DeSpain added. The kit is something kept in case the victim decides to report the sexual assault. If it is not reported, the exam does not become evidence.

Sexual assault nurse examiners can gather physical evidence from the victim’s body and clothes the perpetrator might have touched, DeSpain said.

However, police and hospitals are breaking no laws by not processing all rape kits into evidence.

The only state that does mandate evidence processing from sexual assault examinations is Illinois, which recently passed legislation requiring all rape kits to be processed by police departments if they are gathered.

The disparity in rape kits that are collected and rape kits that are processed as evidence could point to the difficulty many victims have in reporting sexual assault, according to Kelly Anderson, executive director of the Dane County Rape Crisis Center.

“Between 60 percent and 90 percent of sexual assaults are never reported,” Anderson said. “We are talking about a minority of faces when talking about reported sexual assaults.”

Although police will almost always send the rape kit if the victim was assaulted by a stranger, most sexual assault perpetrators are not strangers to the victims, Anderson said, in which case a rape kit is not always relevant because it shows sexual contact occurred, not if the sexual contact was consensual.

According to Anderson, when rape kits are not processed into evidence, some victims of sexual assault might think their cases are not being taken seriously.

“As this news is coming out that not all rape kits are being processed as evidence, it is important that law enforcement take a stand and encourage reporting sexual assaults because it is something they value and will handle appropriately,” Anderson said.