A new bill Gov. JB Pritzker has signed into law better accommodates survivors of sexual assault during the reporting process, but police are struggling to find the numbers to make it happen.
The Sexual Assault Incident Procedure Act has been changed to require law enforcement to inform anyone who reports a sexual assault that they may request that statements or interviews be done with an officer of a preferred gender.
This means survivors now have more agency over the reporting process. However, implementing this change is much easier on paper than in actuality.
Women only make up 14% of sworn officers and 20% of recruits in the U.S. There is no guarantee a female officer will be at the station when a survivor comes in to make a report, or that the station will even have a female officer on staff, especially in smaller police departments.
The Illinois State University Police Department currently works with a staff of 32 sworn officers. Seven of these officers are women. However, Deputy Chief Nichol Bleichner is the only female investigator, and she would have to do any and all interviews should someone reporting a sexual assault request a female.
“It really takes somebody special to want to be able to be an investigator for that because it's it gets pretty detailed in in people's lives when you're trying to investigate a sexual assault, and some people just that's not their thing,” Bleichner said.
The nearby City of Lexington has around 2,100 residents. The police force has a staff of seven, all males. In order to accommodate a request for a female officer, Police Chief Tim Edmiaston said he’d have to consult the McLean County Sheriff's Department, which handles overnight patrols in the city.
“My opinion is we need females in law enforcement,” Edmiaston said. “We need different ethnicities in law enforcement because diversity is not just about dealing with your diverse community, right? Having a female officer is not just about being able to deal with female officers. Different ethnicities, different genders have different thought processes, and it brings diversity into thought processes and to running an organization as well.”
The bill does have a caveat for departments like Lexington. It states that this procedure should be enforced at police stations that employ officers of more than one sex or gender. This means smaller departments with all male officers, for example, would be exempt.
Police stations generally operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and it’s not possible for everyone to be on staff at all times. State lawmakers added a “reasonable" availability clause to the bill, and the specifics of how this would be implemented is up to the discretion of each police department.
To Bleichner, the term reasonable may require flexibility.
“Reasonable is if you can, then you should,” Bleichner said. “But for us, it's just going to be a time of day, day of the week, time of the year, [etc.]. It’s going to depend on a lot of details for us to accommodate that.”
While the bill does not explicitly state survivors have the right to reschedule interviews should their preferred officer not be reasonably available, both Bleichner and Edmiaston would be willing to do so.
“Well, we generally wait 24 or 48 hours, sometimes a little longer before we talk to them, after the incident has occurred,” Bleichner said. “So it's not something that needs to be immediately addressed."
Both ISU and Lexington PD’s male officers are trained to handle these sexual assault reports, completing training for them every three years. Both Bleichner and Edmiaston are confident in their male officers’ abilities to handle these situations with professionalism, sensitivity, and care should a survivor choose to do their interview with them.
“If their request is not possible, then yes, the second option is going to be to try to reassure them, ‘Hey, I understand what you're going through. I've been through conversations with people; I've been through training,’ to try to make them more comfortable,” Edmiaston said.
Sexual assault is not exclusively a women’s issue, it happens to non-binary people, transgender people, and men. While someone who identifies as non-binary or transgender would not be able to get an officer of that same identification, they still can request an officer of the gender they’d feel most comfortable with, male or female.
Regardless of the availability of female officers, survivors are allowed to have a support person in the room with them during interviews and statements. This could be a trusted family member or friend, or a sexual assault advocate.
State Rep. Sharon Chung [D] of Bloomington co-sponsored the bill. She said she believes the gender availability issue could be solved by communication and teamwork among police departments.
“If there might be more women, say, in Bloomington and they need somebody at the Sheriff's Department in McLean County to interview somebody, you know, these are sorts of things that maybe we can try and see if there's more cooperation,” Chung said. “And I know that they work really well together, but this is maybe one of those things that we can really try and figure out what best practices are.”
Chung acknowledged that some police departments would have a harder time accommodating this new law than others. To her, finding the perfect way to make this work means playing the long game.
Chung said increasing gender diversity in the police force is more of a secondary bonus of this bill. At the root of it are sexual assault survivors.
“We're trying to figure out how to encourage survivors to come forward and to feel comfortable and to feel supported as they go through the investigative process,” Chung said. “And one of those ways is to see if they can have somebody, a support person there, [or] somebody who's been trained as well with trauma-informed training, are there to really help make the survivor feel really safe throughout the whole process.
It’s not unusual to see the justice system failing survivors of sexual assault. For every 1,000 sexual assaults, 50 reports lead to arrest; 28 cases lead to felony convictions, and 25 perpetrators are incarcerated, according to the nonprofit Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.
This means that 98% of alleged perpetrators walk free. Only 310 of every 1,000 survivors will report.
This bill, however, was made for the benefit of survivors. NaStasha Powers, assistant director of the Stepping Stones program at YWCA McLean County, sees this as a huge win.
“I think that before this started, it was a conversation, right? Someone said, hey, this is an issue,” Powers said. “And because this is an issue, we need to do better; we need to do better for survivors. And that conversation literally magnified to this bill being passed and survivors feeling heard.”
Powers said should this bill help increase the number of survivors who report, social ideas around the issue may start to evolve as well.
“I think that it would also, in the right communities, bring people together to be able to see that sexual violence is not an individual issue, but it's a systemic issue,” Powers said.
There is a litany of reasons why survivors choose not to report their sexual assault, according to Powers. Most common are a fear of not being believed or thinking it was their fault. According to Powers, another common reason is choosing peace over fighting.
“Think about a person being a victim of sexual assault, and then the case going for two to three years ... it's not just the criminal justice system that they're navigating after sexual assault,” Powers said. “It's internally, it could be the school system, it could be work, it can be maybe their offender was a neighbor. All of those different things that they're trying to navigate while still going through the criminal justice system for two, three years. It's hard. It's heavy. And so a lot of times, survivors literally hit capacity.”
Even with the many reasons not to report, Powers commends police officers who’ve taken the cases of those who did.
“I'm grateful for McLean County and the law enforcement team that we have that they're doing the work to make sure that it is a better space for survivors,” Powers said. “We want to eventually get to the point where there is no survivors, right? But unfortunately, that's not the space that we're in right now. And so because of that, I want to put emphasis on the fact that they're doing the work; they're taking the strides to go forward.”
