In August 2009, a group of local officials were on a routine tour of a police storage warehouse in Detroit when an assistant prosecutor noticed a mountain of boxes overwhelming the shelves. Curious, an official asked what was inside. Little did they know that the question would lead to the discovery of thousands of unprocessed rape kits.

These rape kits—which included DNA and other potential crime-solving clues collected from victims of alleged assault—were sitting in the warehouse, gathering dust, some of them for years. While a few had been investigated, most had never been submitted for testing. After they were discovered, prosecutors launched more than 1,000 investigations based on the evidence kits, identifying 817 serial rapists who had attacked multiple victims. (A report on why the rape kits had gone untested found the police were “cutting corners” and failing to follow protocol.) As of December 2017, 127 suspects associated with the cases from the warehouse had been convicted.

PHOTO: Courtesy of HBO

Untested rape kits in evidence room

The massive mishandling of evidence—and, by extension, miscarriage of justice—that occurred in Detroit is not an anomaly. Similar stories have unfolded across the country over the past decade. Back in 2009, there were 6,132 untested kits in Los Angeles and more than 12,000 were found in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2013. Florida officials are still working their way through the 8,600 uncovered back in 2016. And just this February, an audit in North Carolina revealed a backlog of 15,000. Today, nearly ten years after the discovery in Detroit, advocates estimate that hundreds of thousands of rape kits across the country remain untested. But this spring, efforts to end that backlog are being amplified thanks to a familiar face: Mariska Hargitay.

Years of playing Detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims’ Unit inspired Hargitay to assume a second role as a real-life advocate for survivors of sexual assault and other crimes. In 2004, she founded the Joyful Heart Foundation to support survivors of sexual assault. And on April 16, she’s bringing the backlog to an even wider audience with I Am Evidence, a documentary on the crisis produced she produced, that will debut on HBO.

“Behind every kit there’s a person waiting for justice,” Hargitay tells Glamour. “Testing kits sends a fundamental message and message to survivors that says you matter. What happens to you matters and your case matters—and not testing the kits sends a message you don’t.”

The award-winning film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, captures the heartbreaking scope of the problem as well as the ways it impacts both the delivery of justice and the psyches of the survivors whose cases have languished. Hargitay says she hopes the film will “spark outrage” and action on the issue.

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“People assume that when a woman goes through a four- to six-hour, often retraumatizing, examination of collecting evidence—when her body is a crime scene—that that box gets tested. That is not the case,” Hargitay says. “Justice isn’t being served,” she adds. “Everyone deserves justice.”

The failure to properly track and test the evidence can create major problems for police and prosecutors trying to get attackers off the streets. Untested kits may mean crucial DNA isn’t going into a national database that could be used to apprehend serial rapists commiting crimes across state lines. Beyond that, the treatment of the evidence—and, by extension, the cases and women and men they are tied to—can have an even bigger, sometimes chilling effect on survivors and their willingness to come forward following a violent crime: without confidence that they will be believed and their case will be investigated properly, some survivors might never report their rapes.

“I call it all the time ‘the neglected child of violent crime,’ because if we were talking about homicides—cold case homicides—we wouldn’t be having this discussion. People would throw resources at it,” Kym Worthy, a Michigan county prosecutor whose efforts to address the backlog in Detroit are featured in the film, told Glamour in an interview. “But because it’s sexual assault—because it’s a crime that happens overwhelmingly to women—people just don’t care.”

Those attitudes are even more prevalent and problematic when it comes to sex crimes targeting predominantly Black and Latino communities, Worthy says. More than 80 percent of the untested kits in Detroit were reportedly from crimes committed against people of color. “You’re not going to find many blonde-haired, blue eyed women [in the backlog],” she told the Detroit Free Press in December 2017, “because their kits are treated differently, their cases are solved. That’s just the way it is in this country.”

“If you look at this issue across this country you will find that most of these [untested] kits are found in communities of color…” Worthy tells Glamour. “As prosecutors we know that and we know that people look at crimes that happen of victims of color, especially women, differently and treat them differently.”

But the backlog problem is also a basic one for all survivors: police departments and crime labs often lack clear policies and sufficient resources to deal with the evidence. Some states, including Massachusetts, reportedly don’t require testing or tracking of the kits at all. To address these lapses, Hargitay and her Joyful Heart Foundation have been pushing for comprehensive rape evidence reform legislation—including mandatory testing of new and old kits, enhanced funding, and an annual audit—in all 50 states by 2020.

They’ve seen encouraging progress in recent years. In 2016, 19 states took some sort of action to address the issue. Last year, Texas became the first state to adopt the comprehensive package proposed by Joyful Hearts. And on the federal level, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen successfully pushed for passage of a Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, which codifies survivors’ rights to have their evidence kits preserved.

“As painful as all of this is, and we have so much work to do, this is fixable if we change these laws,” Hargitay says.

But it’s worth noting that there may be even more deeply entrenched factors behind the backlog that are harder to solve: a culture of victim blaming and a lack of understanding about how the trauma of assault impacts those who are attacked. Too many police officers still doubt victims if the case doesn’t fit into a neatly confined narrative. And many people, Hargitay and Worthy say, don’t fully appreciate the trauma that survivors of violent sex crimes have experienced. “We don’t really think about the pain and the endurance that each victim has,” Worthy, who has spoken about her own assault during law school, says. “It is bravery beyond measure.”

While the documentary began filming back in 2014, its widespread release happens to coincide with the crescendo of the #MeToo movement that has increased awareness of how pervasive harassment and assault truly are. Hargitay and Worthy see that broader dialogue as a step in the right direction. And I Am Evidence serves as a raw and crucial contribution to that conversation: a powerful testament to the importance of the bearing witness to survivors’ experiences and the deep pain the mishandling of these cases can cause.

Two women featured in the film, one from Ohio and one from California, were attacked by the same long-distance trucker more than 2,000 miles apart. Helena, who lived in Los Angeles, waited more than a decade for her assailant to be identified because of an untested evidence kit. By the time that finally happened, the statute of limitations on prosecuting him for rape had passed. In the documentary, she says, through tears, “I can’t understand what was so unimportant about me.”

Hargitay and Worthy hope that seeing survivors tell their stories and seek justice in the documentary will leave a lasting impression a wide audience. “Every time someone sees this film we are talking about a potential juror,” Worthy says.

Beyond that, they hope the film sends a message to survivors that their experiences matter.

“I’m just so grateful that we’re turning up the volume on survivors’ voices, on women of colors’ voices, on voices that have been marginalized that, thank God, are hopefully …not being marginalized anymore,” Hargitay says. “Women’s voices need to be heard.” And projects like I Am Evidence are giving them the megaphone they need.

I AM EVIDENCE debuts MONDAY, APRIL 16 (8:00-9:30 p.m. ET/PT) on HBO. The film will also be available on HBO On Demand, HBO NOW, HBO Go and partners’ streaming platforms.