Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. The

series Unbelievable has taken Netflix by storm. It's about a woman in the United States

who'd reported she'd been raped and whom the police didn't believe. The show looks

at how DNA and data can help solve rape cases and find offenders.

I think he's done this before. Aurora, 18 months ago, intruder, black mask,

backpack, tighter up to photos. To date has now been caught.

But to catch criminals you need to collect data and analyze it properly. In today's

programme we're going to tell the story of how important rape data was collected,

but ignored and what was revealed about the nature of the crime in the US when the data was

analysed. In the United States when someone reports they've been raped they usually undergo

an examination where DNA evidence is collected for investigations and prosecutions. Then the so-called

rape kit is sent for testing or at least that's what's supposed to happen. Ilsa Connect is a

director at the Joyful Heart Foundation, a charity which works with victims of sexual assault.

New York City was the first jurisdiction to find a large number of untested kits. They were sitting

in a warehouse in Queens. None of them had ever been tested and there were 17,000 of them.

Many people now refer to these untested kits as the backlog as many of them date back decades.

After New York the same story began to come out in other areas. Houston came and 10,000

pleasant Detroit, 10,000 pleasant and Memphis, 20,000 across the state of Texas, over and over and

over again in communities across the country. Right now we do not know how many untested kits there

are sitting on shelves across the country. Our best estimate is more than 200,000.

It might seem bizarre that an evidence kit wouldn't be tested, analysed and added to the

crime database. Why would the authorities let such a backlog build up? Well part of it was a culture

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