The last edition of this column had me describing the wide contrast in South Africa between its potential for saving lives with DNA and its miserable failure to leverage the power of the technology in spite of having a very sophisticated laboratory system. It was a column about the contrast between potential and actualization. That construct, potential vs. actualization, is what measures many aspects of a society. It calibrates things like priorities and resources. But I suppose, most importantly, it measures will. Political will, societal will, personal will. When we are not considering the capacity to problem solve, whatever that problem may be, we are measuring the will to identify and solve that problem.

Take a second and go to the Google home page. Type in “rape k”—not the whole thing, not “rape kit,” just “rape k”—and see what happens. I’ll wait.

The anticipatory algorithms that I will never understand, the ones that try to guess what you are thinking and throw that option up at you before you finish typing, immediately associate “rape k” with “rape kit backlog.” Before you can finish typing k-i-t, Google thinks there is a high enough likelihood that you are interested in the “backlog” of rape kits that the drop down box offers it right up to you. Google doesn’t offer you “Rape kit based convictions” or “rape kit backlog reduction” or even “rape kit funding.” It just offers “rape kit backlog.”

It’s not a very scientific observation, but it is an observation that sheds some light on our own conflict between potential and actualization. If you go through with the search and actually click on “rape kit backlog” it’s easy to see why the omniscient Google powers that be think you are interested in them. There are pages and pages of news stories spanning years, even decades, about our system’s failure to test rape kits. And in that failure we also fail to support victims, empower police, and ultimately we fail to prevent rape.

Two weeks ago, I gave a presentation at a SART seminar sponsored by the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office and the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center. And while I had worked extensively with the Victim Witness Coordinator on the run up to the seminar, I actually saw her for a total of about two minutes the whole time I was there. Why? Because the Prosecutor’s Office was in the middle of trying Anthony Sowell for murdering 11 women in Cleveland, and she had more important things to do than to figure out whether my PowerPoint had been loaded or not. But ironically, it took me only 10 minutes with a prosecutor from the DA’s Office to learn that an untested rape kit in the Sowell case had caused a firestorm of criticism and subsequent inquiry into the issue. Apparently, a rape kit collected in 2009—but never sent out for testing—linked Sowell to an attack on a woman. He was charged later that year with killing 11 women and attacking several others.