Despite an initiative by Vice President Joe Biden and a Manhattan prosecutor's $35 million grant, tens of thousands of rape kits continue to go untested in the United States.

An investigation by USA Today and 75 associated newspapers found at least 70,000 neglected kits at more than 1,000 police agencies across the country. But "the agency-by-agency count covers a fraction of the nation's 18,000 police departments, suggesting the number of untested rape kits reaches into the hundreds of thousands," the publication noted.

Rape kits contain forensic evidence collected from sexual-assault victims, which can take as long as four-to-six hours. The process can yield DNA evidence that help identify and convict a suspect or, in some cases, exonerate the wrongly accused.

For rape survivors like Joanie Scheske, the widespread neglect of the kits in unacceptable.

"Every single one of those rape kits is a person, and (their) family and friends," Scheske said. "It's like a baby's mobile: You touch one piece and it moves all the others. It's not just one person. Everyone that their sphere of influence touches is affected by what happens to a victim."

The backlog, meanwhile, seems to not have been eased by Biden's $41 million budget proposal that aimed to continue the rape-kit initiative, which the vice president announced last March.

"Testing rape kits should be a priority for the (U.S.)," Biden said then in a visit to the Maryland State Police Forensic Science Laboratory in Pikesville, according to the Baltimore Sun. "If we're able to test these rape kits, more crimes would be solved, more rapes would be avoided."

Other stakeholders had also tried to make a dent into the backlog. Last November, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced that his office would contribute part of an $8.8 billion settlement with French bank BNP Paribas for rape victims to "know that we, as a nation, are doing everything in our power to bring justice to them," the AP recalled.