Over the weekend, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California vetoed legislation that would have made California the first state in the nation to collect comprehensive data on the physical evidence collected from rape victims that is sitting in police storage facilities. The bill, AB1017, which sailed through both houses of the...

Julie was a graduate student at the University of Chicago when, in 2007, she was raped by a man she had been introduced to that night as a friend's new boyfriend. They were at a bar, and he was "acting weird toward me. He kept touching me and I kept...

A year ago I interviewed the mother of a young woman from Wisconsin who had been raped by a man she met while visiting her cousin in Los Angeles. It had been eight months since the rape, and the rape kit -- the physical evidence -- in her daughter's case...

As a researcher on the rape kit backlog in the US, I have interviewed many survivors of rape. Still, this experience did not prepare me for the story I heard in January from a disabled woman in North Dakota who was brutally raped by an acquaintance.

While this woman...

The release of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) this week showing huge increases in the incidence of domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault barely made the news. For those who closely follow sexual violence statistics in the US, though, the numbers were alarming.

The reported incidents of domestic violence...

There was a time when public debate about the death penalty in the United States focused on concerns about racial discrimination, lack of competent counsel for indigent defendants, and executing the innocent. But with the Supreme Court set to hear oral arguments early next year on whether lethal injection is...

Sex offender laws may be doing more harm than good. That is the conclusion Human Rights Watch came to after two years of intensive research into sex offender registration, community notification, and residency restriction laws in the United States. Our research convinced us that politicians failed to do their homework...