Meaghan Ybos – Memphis Flyer

A full day of events addressing issues of sexual assault and domestic violence is planned for Thursday, June 25th, but the intended audience isn’t the demographic most affected by those crimes.

Rather than focus on women for these events, the Sexual Assault Kit (SAK) Taskforce is inviting men to be guests at its quarterly “community conversation” event. That public forum will be immediately followed by the annual Walk a Mile in Her Shoes event, where men are asked to don high heels for a one-mile awareness walk.

“Men have been basically silent on the issues of domestic violence and sexual assault. And the silence is what creates the permissive space for abusers to be abusive,” said Kevin Reed, the Shelby County judicial commissioner over the domestic violence court and a member of the SAK Taskforce.

David Wayne Brown

Participants in a past Walk a Mile event

The taskforce, which was established in January 2014 to deal with the city’s rape kit backlog, has been hosting quarterly public forums since its formation. The first few meetings lacked a theme, but they’ve begun narrowing the intended audience. Taskforce coordinator Doug McGowan said they invited women’s groups last time, and the next meeting will focus on student groups. But men’s groups are invited to this upcoming meeting, scheduled for 3 p.m. on June 25th at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts.

“Men have to understand that we have a role to play. We want to come up with ways that men can be part of the solution, whether that’s holding each other collectively accountable or teaching the next generation of young men the expectations for behavior relative to domestic violence and sexual assault,” McGowan said.

The Memphis Area Women’s Council (MAWC) is behind the annual Walk a Mile event, which is in its fifth year. The walk kicks off at 5 p.m., immediately following the community conversation meeting. Participants will walk from the Cannon Center to the FedExForum Plaza, and while high heels aren’t required, they are encouraged.

“We as women aren’t giving up any responsibility or energy to change this. We’re saying that men have to unite with us,” said Deborah Clubb, executive director of MAWC and a member of the SAK Taskforce

After the walkers arrive at FedExForum Plaza, Mayor A C Wharton’s office will hold a press conference to announce the city’s launch of the Memphis Say No More campaign, a public-awareness campaign that will feature local celebrities and ordinary Memphians speaking out against rape and domestic violence on billboards and posters around town.

The events aren’t without critics. Meaghan Ybos, a rape survivor and activist, said the June 25th events won’t do much to solve the city’s rape kit backlog crisis.

“If Memphis wants to end rape, they can start by prosecuting rapists,” Ybos said. “It’s nice to have PSAs, but the problem in Memphis isn’t that people are unaware that these things are happening. People are very aware that we’re being raped. It’s the police that need to change.”

The SAK Taskforce reported last week that 53 percent of the total inventory of rape kits had been fully analyzed or are at labs awaiting analysis. Of that percentage, only 15 percent have been completely processed for DNA, but that number isn’t often publicly touted. Investigations have resulted in 98 requests for indictments of known individuals or DNA profiles.

When the taskforce began their work of getting the kits tested, there were a little more than 12,300 backlogged kits. Ybos has been critical of the city’s progress, and she says the city shouldn’t be combining the numbers for tested kits with those still awaiting testing at labs.

“That’s a slap in the face to victims because they’re misleading us by claiming progress for something that hasn’t been done yet,” Ybos said.

But Clubb said the tests sitting at labs are at least further along than they were before, when they were piled up for years in the city’s backlog.

“The labs can only do what they can do, and we’re using four labs,” Clubb said. “Other cities and counties are trying to get stuff to labs too, and rape kits aren’t the only thing the labs are trying to process. We can’t speed it up, but we’re staying on it.”

Two victims of convicted serial rapist Anthony Alliano went public last week in hopes of putting a human face to their lawsuit against Memphis and Shelby County agencies for a long delay in testing their rape kits.

Meaghan Ybos and Madison Graves met with reporters and photographers in an open news conference after some Memphis media outlets had excluded their names from coverage of their lawsuit that was filed earlier this month. The names of sexual assault victims are often withheld from news stories to protect the victims’ privacy.

Ybos and Graves are two of the three victims named in the lawsuit that is seeking “redress for special damages” since the victims say they have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder and lived in perpetual fear for nearly a decade until Alliano was finally arrested in May 2012.

All three of the victims in the new lawsuit gave body fluid samples and DNA evidence to investigators after they were raped, according to the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. The evidence was placed in sexual assault kits and transported to city and county agents for testing, the suit says. But the local governments “failed to timely submit, responsibly handle, and make due diligence” on about 12,000 such rape kits.

Graves said Wednesday she wanted to “be the shining light for other girls who were too scared to come forward.”

“I want the kits tested, and I want girls [who have been sexually assaulted] to know that it’s okay and that you’re not disgusting and you’re still a human,” she said.

Ybos was assaulted on May 19, 2003, and Graves was assaulted two days after that on May 21st. Ybos was 16 at the time, and Graves was 12. Their descriptions to police about their attacks were “the exact same,” Ybos said, even drawing the same knife that Alliano used in the attacks. They have even been told they look alike, they said, both of them with long, dark hair and slender builds.

The suit was filed last week and no court date has been set, according to the victims’ attorney, Daniel Lofton. He said the victims are suing for monetary damages but have not yet attached a dollar figure to the suit.

Ybos and Graves said they hope the suit sheds light on the systemic failures that allowed their attacker to remain at large for nearly 10 years. They also hope the suit changes the procedures that local law enforcement uses in future sexual assault investigations.

“If you report your assault to law enforcement and you don’t get the result that you think you should, don’t think it’s because of you; it’s because the system is that way,” Ybos said. “It’s not your fault, and it’s not anything you’ve done or anything because of you. We hope some change can come from this disaster.”

Another lawsuit regarding the untested rape kits was filed against local government agencies this past December. That federal, class-action lawsuit was filed by an unnamed Memphis woman who said she was raped in 2001, and her identity will never be revealed. That suit says local law enforcement must test all rape kits. The new suit filed by Ybos and Graves takes a less extreme position.

“We don’t expect you to solve all crimes, and we don’t expect you to have a perfect system. That’s a fantasy,” said Lofton. “But if any of these cases could have been effectively prioritized, it should have been this one.”