Content warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault and rape.
In the hours after a sexual assault, the survivor’s body is treated as a crime scene. For this reason, the survivor has the right to show up at a hospital and expect to be given a full forensic exam. A nurse will bring her into a room, open up a rape kit and pull out instructions, swabs, envelopes and other tools. The kit helps guide the nurse through what is typically a five-hour process of documenting the wounds on the survivor’s body and collecting DNA that could help to establish the identity of the attacker.
An FBI database stores the DNA information collected from thousands of kits – and can be used to reveal the path of a serial predator who has attacked a string of victims.
Our rape-kit evidence system is incredibly fragile and often falls short of its promise. And yet, it is a modern miracle.
While working on my book, The Secret History of the Rape Kit, I uncovered a hidden story of the 1970s activists who built this rape-kit system; they began their fight at a time when rape was often treated as an “unproveable” crime. So a revolution in forensics required more than technological advance. Anti-rape activists had to push for an entirely new idea: If you took the time to listen to the survivor and examine her wounds, her torn clothes and the fluids on her body, you could in fact prove that she had been assaulted. Evidence — like semen or skin cells — could be used to find out what had really happened.
To truly appreciate how far we’ve come, it’s important to understand not just the anti-rape movement of the 1970s but also the brutal pre-history of the modern evidence exam. For centuries, legal authorities performed “medical” tests on women’s bodies in order to judge the character of the victim herself. Was she a witch? An adulteress? A slut? A liar?
In this excerpt from the book, I recount that strange and disturbing pre-history.
In 1662, in a small English town, two widows swung from the gallows, put to death for practicing witchcraft. The judge who presided over the trial, Sir Matthew Hale, had ruled that sorcery was not only real but also punishable by law. Hale went on to invent a legal definition of rape, and his seventeenth-century ideas about sexual assault still echo today. He reasoned that a married woman was her husband’s property; the husband, therefore, owned his wife’s body and could lawfully force himself upon her against her will. Hale famously pronounced that rape is “an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved”—a line that would shape sexual-assault trials for centuries to come.
In Hale’s time, suspected witches were subjected to tests in order to determine whether they possessed powers of sorcery. When tossed into the water, did a suspect float? If so, it proved she was a witch. By the nineteenth century, doctors had developed similar physical exams in order to determine whether a woman was lying when she accused a man of rape. For instance, her genitals would be examined for signs that she was an honest virgin or a deceitful harlot. In 1868, Reynolds’s Newspaper reported on one such exam of a female accuser. “The surgeon who had examined the prosecutrix . . . gave such evidence as left no doubt that the prosecutrix could not have been so innocent as she had represented herself to be. [Magistrate] Mr. Cooke said no jury would convict on such evidence, and he should discharge the prisoner.” In this case, it seems, she was deemed to have been “damaged goods,” and thus not a reliable witness. The man she accused was released from prison.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the forensic exam was still used to determine the moral character of the female accuser. A 1949 textbook on forensics argued that it was nearly impossible to force sex on a woman:
The authors concluded that a woman who had truly been raped would be covered in stab wounds and bruises. If she complained about being forced into sex without show ing serious injury, it was understood the woman was falsify ing her testimony.
In other words, sexual-assault forensics began as a system for men to decide whether a woman deserved to be considered a victim at all. It had little to do with identifying a perpetrator or establishing the truth.
Even in the early 1970s, forensic examination remained a formality, a kind of Kabuki theater of scientific justice. When a patient arrived at an emergency room seeking care after an assault, police officers isolated and cross-examined her. It was then up to the discretion of the examining officers to determine whether she was lying or telling the truth. A Chicago police training manual from 1973 instructed cadets that “many rape complaints are not legitimate. . . . It is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge against an unfaithful lover or boyfriend with a roving eye.” According to the manual, “An actual rape victim will generally give the impression of a person who has been dishonored”—meaning, presumably, that she should appear ashamed, rather than angry and defiant.
In their examinations, police routinely asked women what they’d been wearing, whether they’d acted in a seductive manner to provoke an attack, and whether they had enjoyed the sex. Even in those cases when the exam turned up proof that the victim had been violently assaulted, the opinions of the police officers often mattered far more than the evidence itself.
The new forensic evidence system that emerged in the 1970s was intended to flip the power dynamics of the medical examination. It would no longer be used to shame the person who accused someone of rape or to determine whether she was a liar. Instead, it promised to treat a victim with dignity, as an eyewitness whose body might reveal real evidence of a violent crime.
You could argue that the most important element of the rape kit wasn’t even inside the cardboard box. This kit worked effectively only when it was used by professionals trained in a scientific system of data collection. That’s what makes it so hard to identify exactly when and where the first rape kit was developed. Its true power came from a new set of ideas.
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Marty Goddard understood this hidden power of objects, and she realized that she could use it to change the conversation about sexual assault. She wasn’t going to head out into the street and wave a sign. Instead, she’d sneak her radical ideas into public consciousness by introducing a new technology.
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