Rachel Lovell, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Criminology and Director of the Criminology Research Center at the Levin College shatters misperceptions about sexual assault and assists government in its efforts to solve cases. 

For survivors of rape and sexual assault, reporting to the police and working with investigators and prosecutors means reliving one of the most traumatic experiences of their lives. When officials don’t believe them, survivors often feel like they’ve been violated once again. 

Dr. Rachel Lovell, Assistant Professor of Criminology and Director of the Criminology Research Center at the Levin College, has read through decades-old local police reports on sexual assault and has found that offenders exploit blind spots and biases in the criminal justice system. 

“In the reports, when you read them, even some of the perpetrators are saying, ‘Go ahead and tell the police. No one will believe you,’” Lovell says. In some of those same reports, she adds, it appears that police either don’t believe survivors, or if they do, they don’t prioritize their cases. 

Cases often fail to move forward because of understaffed police sex crimes units and victim hesitation and disengagement, Lovell says. For decades, many law enforcement officials haven’t submitted sexual assault kits (SAKs) for testing, resulting in a national backlog. Victims may need to sit for four to six hours while medical professionals examine them to prepare a kit. 

Lovell’s work with law enforcement, prosecutors and victim advocates in Northeast Ohio began during the state’s effort to test all backlogged SAKs linked to assaults that fall within Ohio’s 20-year statute of limitations. 

Since Cuyahoga County officials partnered with Lovell in 2015, they have been able to notify survivors respectfully and in line with current research standards, says Mary Weston, supervisor of the county prosecutor’s office’s cold case/GOLD Unit. Lovell also worked with the prosecutor’s office to develop a written policy for notifying survivors about reopened investigations and prosecutions. 

“She helped us develop what kind of statistics we should be keeping an eye on, what numbers we should track,” Weston says. “It helped us in the long run when it came to reporting our statistics for our grants, and as time has gone on, it’s allowed us to really be able to assist other jurisdictions who are trying to develop task forces.” 

Lovell, who joined Cleveland State in 2021 and previously worked at Case Western Reserve University, has served as the principal investigator on research projects with Cuyahoga County prosecutors and Akron police. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) has issued more than $17 million in funding to Cuyahoga County prosecutors and Akron. 

For the past eight years, Lovell has led research for the Cuyahoga County SAK Task Force, which includes multiple government agencies and the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center.  

By March 2018, Ohio law enforcement agencies had tested their entire backlog of nearly 14,000 untested SAKs in prosecutable cases dating back to 1993. That includes over 7,000 kits in Cuyahoga County and more than 1,400 in Akron. 

The Cuyahoga County SAK Task Force has achieved more than 850 defendant indictments and a 94% conviction rate of people who sexually assaulted or were accused of assaulting over 1,000 victims. Lovell says these are the most indictments and convictions out of any of the roughly 80 SAKI sites, adding that Cuyahoga County has the most detailed sexual assault database in the country. 

Since DNA forensic analysis became widely used in the late 1990s, SAKs have been key in suspect identification. “In some cases it’s the only evidence that links the suspect to this rape, but it was sitting in an evidence room facility, not being tested.” Lovell says. “So, once that was tested, these kits could hit to each other. Once they started hitting to each other, because DNA from a suspect is in multiple ones, then you can start to see these different patterns emerge.” 

Using Task Force data, Lovell and her research teams have found that most sex offenders are arrested for separate felonies, sexual or non-sexual, before or after they commit a sexual assault. They also discovered that nearly one third of serial sex offenders assault both strangers and non-strangers and that many serial offenders do not have a specific modus operandi or victim preference. 

In parallel, Lovell serves as the lead researcher on the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office’s Lawfully “Owed” DNA Initiative, an effort to collect DNA from felony suspects and perpetrators. 

To see why this is important, look no further than serial murderer-rapist Anthony Sowell. Lovell says if DNA collected from Sowell in the 1990s had been analyzed sooner, rapes and murders likely could have been prevented. Prison officials took his DNA while he served a 15-year sentence for rape in the ’90s, but that sample never made it into the federal DNA database. 

“Meanwhile, at least two women had reported to Cleveland Police that they had been raped and told them the house that he took them to, but the victims didn’t follow up and Cleveland Police didn’t follow up on those cases,” Lovell says. “He then went on to kill several other women after those reports.” 

Weston says the Sowell case was a driver in reforming how Cuyahoga County officials respond to sexual assaults. Old police reports that read as if the officers don’t believe a survivor can be shocking, she says, but she adds that Cleveland police’s practices have changed. 

“They don’t have enough sex crimes detectives, but that’s always been the problem,” Weston says. “But they’re being trained better; I feel like they have better opportunities over there for training, and it’s gotten better over there in terms of how victims are treated when they come in off the street and talk to detectives and investigators about what happened to them.” 

Lovell also advocates for Ohio to remove its statute of limitations for rape, which in 2015 the state extended by five years in cases involving DNA. 

Testifying to the Ohio senate in 2020, she highlighted discrepancies between sexual assault fact and fiction. She said then that research shows false rape reports are rare, only comprising between 2 to 10% of reports, and that the Task Force found only about 4% of victims recanted. 

Assisting survivors means acknowledging their pain, and the additional hurdles they have to jump over to help lock up offenders and save lives, Lovell says. “It’s somebody’s intimate trauma,” she says. “And we all have a role in supporting the people around us who have experienced that.” 

If you or somebody you know was raped or sexually assaulted, reach out to the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, serving Cuyahoga, Lake, Geauga and Ashtabula counties, or contact Hope & Healing, serving Summit County.