In the 1970s, the rape kit began as a simple box with some envelopes, a comb, nail clippers, and a few other basic tools. The contents of the kit have evolved somewhat since then, but the technology to analyze samples has evolved astronomically. And, through and through, the rape kit has stood for the idea that every survivor has the right to go to a hospital, get a full forensic exam, and have their evidence taken seriously. On today's episode, we talk about how the rape kit became a reality and the woman who championed the rape kit into the tool it is today. We also discuss what the future of the rape kit could look like, how the rape kit backlog has grown of control in some states, and what activists are doing about it.
Transcript of this Episode
Deboki Chakravarti: Hello and welcome to Tiny Matters, a science podcast about the little things that have a big impact on our society, past and present. I鈥檓 Deboki Chakravarti, and I鈥檓 joined by my co-host Sam Jones.
Sam Jones: Hi Deboki. We want to start with a heads up that this episode will be discussing rape and sexual assault. We won鈥檛 be talking about anything in graphic detail, but since it is a sensitive subject, we just want you to be able to know in case you鈥檇 rather check out our back catalog or listen to something else. OK. On to the show.听
Deboki: When I think about big important inventions in the world, I do this thing that I assume other people do too, where I assume that what makes them a big important invention is the fact that they鈥檙e some sort of advancement in technology. Like you have the听 light bulb because people put together all this new knowledge about electricity. Or you get CRISPR, which only exists because people learned so much more about how DNA is modified inside of cells.
Sam: And there are so many more examples, many of which we鈥檝e talked about on Tiny Matters. For instance, in forensics. Way back we talked with Deborah Blum for our episode on the rise of forensic toxicology at the turn of the 20th century, during a time when chemistry was making so many advancements that poisoners were no longer operating with impunity and getting away with murder.
Deboki: And today, Sam and I are here to talk about an invention that is incredibly important to forensics. But it鈥檚 not representative of some, 鈥済reat advancement鈥� in how we understand science, but is rather a great advancement in how we understand people, and particularly survivors of sexual assault.
Pagan Kennedy: The rape kit as it began in the 1970s was a very simple box with some envelopes and maybe a comb and some clippers for clipping nails and just some very basic tools in it.v
Deboki: That鈥檚 Pagan Kennedy, a science writer and author of The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story, which tells the story of how the rape kit came to exist in a setting that hasn鈥檛 always been welcome to it.
Pagan Kennedy: I think it's an object, but it's also an object that stands for an idea, which is that every survivor has the right to file, go to a hospital, get a full forensic exam, and have their evidence taken seriously.
Sam: Today on Tiny Matters, we鈥檙e going to talk about how that idea became reality, and the woman who championed the rape kit into the tool it is today. We鈥檒l also talk about the evolution of the kit and how DNA fingerprinting brought it new purpose, and what the future of the rape kit might look like.
For Pagan, her interest in the topic began around 2018, when you might remember that rape kits were in the news quite a bit. At the time, activists and reporters were raising awareness of a backlog of kits just sitting around, that had gone untested.
Pagan Kennedy: I was just seeing the kit in the headlines, and because I write a lot about design and invention, honestly, it was not surprised at all that these kits were being thrown away or warehoused 鈥� that seemed pretty on brand for our criminal justice system. But the more I stepped back and thought about it, it seemed incredible that there was a national forensic system for sexual assault that was so incredibly sophisticated and that at least in theory would serve every survivor. Immediately my go-to question is always, how did this evolve? How did this start? And that was how I fell down the rabbit hole.
Deboki: Even today, getting people to understand what rape actually is can be so difficult, so it feels weird to say this, but it wasn鈥檛 that long ago that things were even worse. For example, it wasn鈥檛 until 1993 that marital rape became a crime in all 50 states1.听
Going back to the 1970s, when the rape kit was on the verge of being invented, Pagan told us that it was commonly believed that child sexual abuse was really rare.听
Pagan Kennedy: And then the police handbooks and things like that would all say that most of the women who accuse rape are liars. So just, you can figure out who the pure ones are and collect evidence from them, but you should just weed out all the liars, and you're the judge and jury basically as a police officer. So obviously this is not an evidence-based evidence system if everybody can be pre-judged.
Sam: But at this time, there was also a large anti-rape movement emerging in the country.
Pagan Kennedy: And the funny thing I found while working on my book was actually at this time, there were little experiments with rape kits around the country, just small ones, because when they did pursue a case and collect evidence, it was just so disorganized because you had to coordinate between the hospitals and the crime lab.听
So there were people who tried to create rape kits, and this is where I really step in as somebody who's interested in the politics of design. So there's nothing magical about the rape kit idea. It can be very bad. And there's one I found from possibly the earliest one ever, I don't know. From 1973, I found the instructions and it tells the police officer that if the victim is a quote sleazy prostitute, then the police officer doesn't have to collect evidence. So that's just baking in the bias that needed to be taken out of the system.
Deboki: But the kit that often gets the credit of being the first rape kit is called the Vitullo Kit, which was named for a Chicago police officer named Louis Vitullo.听
Pagan Kennedy: When I started this whole thing, I started with the question, who invented the rape kit? And I went onto Wikipedia, and at the time it said Louis Vitullo.
Deboki: But as Pagan dug more into the story of how the Vitullo Kit came to be, she found that much of the work in creating and advancing the kit was done by a woman named Marty Goddard.
Pagan Kennedy: The story really starts in an old falling apart townhouse on Halsted Street in Chicago full of hippies who were running this helpline for what was then called runaway teenagers who were thought to be kind of kids who'd run away to be hippies. And Marty Goddard was there.
And she was very much kind of a fish out of water there because she was this divorcee, very put together woman with big goggley glasses and wearing the classic seventies business woman attire in her silk shirt and her suit and her briefcase. And so she volunteered to field some of the calls. And as she was doing that, this picture began to emerge of a hidden epidemic of child sexual abuse because she was hearing from all these kids, they hadn't run away to be hippies or join the circus. These kids were fleeing abuse in their homes.
Sam: As Marty began to realize the depth of this problem, she joined the anti-rape movement that was emerging at the time, which led to her being put on a task force to look into why there were so many sexual assaults, and why they weren鈥檛 being investigated. She began interviewing people who worked in hospitals, crime labs, and police departments to try and figure out what was going on.
Pagan Kennedy: And she saw tremendous abuse of the victims, of course, but also just these totally fixable problems where nobody had told the nurses what the crime lab wanted, so they wouldn't know to collect certain kinds of evidence, or they'd collect the slides the wrong way, or they'd slice open the clothing and instead of putting it carefully in a bag so that you could see a stab mark or something. So nobody was communicating. And so that's how she got the idea of building this system.
Deboki: There鈥檚 an example of the Vitullo Kit in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and like Pagan told us at the beginning, it鈥檚 pretty simple2. If you look it up online, you鈥檒l see a box with a white label, and in blue writing you鈥檒l read 鈥淰itullo Evidence Collection Kit for Sexual Assault Examination鈥� along with more lines to take in the name of the survivor and details about who collected the evidence and where. There鈥檚 also some swabs, combs, paper bags, and glass slides, plus various forms and instructions.
Pagan Kennedy: So you had this whole system where by the nurse or somebody from the crime lab could stand up in a white lab coat and say, look, this is how we did the tests. This is everything we looked at and show the kit. And the kit looks super official. And so this is a way of putting kind of official-dom. So there was a bit of theater to the whole thing as well.
Deboki: But to make these kits a reality, Marty had to convince others that it was important, which meant recruiting some allies. She had to convince the police鈥攖he same police that had previously been told they should play judge and jury with survivors鈥攖hat a rape kit was a good idea to begin with.
So she turned to Louis Vitullo. Pagan told us that at first, Vitullo threw Marty out of his office. But eventually, he decided to help create the prototype, though Marty was the one who organized trainings and also worked to get funding for the kit.
Sam: And as far as who she got funding from, this is one of the weirder details of the story: one of the funders of the Vitullo Kit was the Playboy Foundation, which even helped design some of the outer parts of the kit.
Pagan Kennedy: I was a kid in the seventies, but it was kind of shocking to go back and see how different things were. I hadn't really remembered. So you wouldn't say the word rape really in polite company or something. So if you went to the country club and tried to meet all the people who ran philanthropic organizations and get them involved in this, they wanted nothing to do with this. It was so controversial. And so it was just really that they ran out of places to go. And actually, the Playboy Foundation was one of the chief funders of civil rights work and many women's health organizations. Ruth Bader Ginsburg's project with the ACLU was funded by it. So you see a lot of kind of pretty feminist people getting funded by the Playboy Foundation because they have nowhere else to go.
Deboki: We don鈥檛 want to romanticize or gloss over Playboy鈥檚 very fraught relationship with women鈥檚 rights and feminism. But I think this is one of those details that highlights how complicated the context is around how we talk about and deal with rape and sexual assault.
Pagan Kennedy: And another thing I think the kit did was just broadcast the idea that yes, there could be evidence of a sexual assault. Because before the kit, the real idea that was prevalent was every assault was just a he said, she said, and most of the women who accused were just liars, and you could never prove it. So why would you even bother to collect evidence? So building out this really elaborate system is pushing back in this really kind of great way that's not about holding up a sign or having a protest, but just creating a new sense of norms around the idea that, yeah, if you want to solve this case, do it like a murder or robbery.听
Sam: But while Marty Goddard was the driving force behind making the rape kit and the systems around it a possibility, she ultimately didn鈥檛 get the credit of having her name on it.听
Pagan Kennedy: From what I understand, the project just wasn't going to go forward unless various politicians and people in the police department felt that they got credit and had ownership of it. And that there was even kind of a fight between the state's attorney's office and the police department about who got the credit for this.听
I don't think she would've ever thought of naming it for herself because that just would've killed this whole project. And she wasn't really focused on that anyway, she wanted just to make things work. She was just very focused on let's change things. Whatever we have to do to smooth the feathers and the egos, that's fine. I don't care. That was very much the attitude.
Sam: But despite her success, Marty would end up sort of vanishing from any kind of record, leaving a huge gap in what Pagan could learn about her.
Pagan Kennedy: So at first it was really just I couldn't establish if she was alive or dead and I couldn't find an obituary. I couldn't find what happened. So that drew me in, because rarely is somebody that invisible.
Sam: Eventually, Pagan was able to find obscure oral histories and other archival material that described Marty鈥檚 involvement in championing the rape kit, as well as other tools to help sexual assault victims鈥攊ncluding dolls that would help children describe abuse they had experienced.
Pagan Kennedy: Tragically, as she became more powerful, I think sometime in the late 1970s when the kit was already underway, she was violently assaulted herself. And that was something that hit really hard. And then also, I think the pressure, she was doing more and she was really a player in Chicago, and she had more and more power, and she was trying to do a lot.
And she just really started to burn out. And then the Justice Department hired her to go all around the country and spread best practices of the kit and teach different localities how to start the system. And she almost kind of disappears during that period.
Deboki: But still, the rape kit has managed to persevere. In some senses, the versions of the rape kit that are used today closely resemble the Vitullo Kit that is housed in the Smithsonian.听
In the US, the contents of a rape kit can vary from state to state, but it generally includes instructions and forms for documenting the procedure and evidence. There鈥檚 also usually a large sheet of paper for a survivor to stand on so that as they undress, the paper can catch potential evidence like hair or fibers. Then there are swabs and other tools to help collect additional evidence, like saliva, blood, or semen3.
Sam: The exam is usually performed by a doctor or nurse, but some hospitals have trained personnel, either called Sexual Assault Forensic Examiners or Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners. The exam can last anywhere from 4-6 hours, though survivors can decline any of the steps along the way.
Deboki: But while the contents of the kit might not seem like it鈥檚 changed much since the seventies, the world around it has changed quite a bit. For example, in the seventies, the amount of testing that crime labs could do with a rape kit was pretty minimal.听
Pagan Kennedy: They could look at blood types. There were a few other biomarkers they might be able to look at, but they're really not narrowing it down a huge amount. You can't really rule out that many people with say, blood type. So it really depended a lot on showing physical damage to the victim's body.听
But then in the late eighties and nineties when DNA identification comes along into crime labs, suddenly now you've got this already existing trove of biological data in all these kits, and it's just so much more valuable because now you can compare the DNA in the kit to a sample blood sample from a suspect, and you can say with so much more certainty if that's the person whose sample is in the kit.
Sam: In episode 49, which is titled 鈥淗e was never there, but his DNA was,鈥� we talked about how this DNA identification process works in detail, so listen to that episode if you want to learn more about how our understanding of DNA transformed the way investigators were able to look at forensic evidence, and some of the ethical issues that have come with that ability, particularly as we analyze smaller and smaller amounts of DNA.
Deboki: There are a few techniques that have evolved since the eighties that have allowed crime labs and investigators to study DNA, including enzymes to cut at specific sequences and polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, to amplify the amount of DNA in a sample. The end result is a tool that allows you to compare the DNA evidence collected from biological samples, like blood or semen, to DNA collected from potential suspects.
This technology has made a huge difference in being able to convict rapists. In 1987, a serial rapist named Tommy Lee Andrews was the first person convicted in the United States based on DNA evidence4. But DNA fingerprinting has also been important in exonerating people who were wrongly convicted, as well as preventing wrongful convictions to begin with.
Sam: According to the National Registry of Exonerations, there have been more than 600 exonerations in the US that used DNA evidence5, which is both amazing and terrible. It鈥檚 great to be able to exonerate people who have been wrongly convicted, but it would be even better to not wrongly convict them to begin with.听
And while rape kits should be this resource that both helps survivors and prevents innocent people from being convicted, the reality is that many kits don鈥檛 actually end up being tested. They might languish in queues at crime labs, or they might not even get sent there. It鈥檚 hard to know exactly how many kits actually go untested because many jurisdictions don鈥檛 track or count rape kits, but current estimates suggest there are at least 50,000 of them around the US6, making up what鈥檚 come to be known as the rape kit backlog.
Pagan Kennedy: It started almost as soon as there is DNA fingerprinting in the early nineties. As soon as that test is available, you see the backlog starting. And back then there was very little outcry or awareness about this. It's only in about 2010 that it really becomes a scandal.
I will say that thanks to amazing efforts by activists and groups like the End The Backlog, that backlog is now much, much, much smaller. And so I think it's important to say that because I think that there's a feeling of defeat often, especially in the world of sexual assault survivorship, that people feel very betrayed often by the system or it's very broken, which it is, but we can improve it.听
Deboki: Activists and organizations have been pushing for reforms to reduce the backlog, which includes policies like maintaining a state-wide inventory, creating a tracking system so that survivors can know the state of their kits, and setting plans to test both backlogged and new kits7.
But different states have been more successful than others at implementing these reforms. According to End The Backlog, some states like Florida, Alaska, and Connecticut have zero untested kits. Meanwhile, California has 13,929. And in some states, like Maine, the total number of untested kits is unknown8.
Sam: And this parallels another broader issue in the United States, which is that there isn鈥檛 consistency between rape kits.
Pagan Kennedy: What's really kind of distressing is there is no one standard kit today. And in fact, there are hundreds of kits all across the United States. It's like a Tower of Babel. And because the nurses and so forth have to be trained to use it. If every single one is different and they have different instructions, that's not helpful.
Pagan Kennedy: So much of what matters about the kit isn't in the kit, it's the training of the nurses. It's creating a database, it's training of people in the crime lab and the police officers and creating a kind of common language because it sits in the middle of medicine and criminal justice and science. And so it sort of belongs to, in this no person's land, this gray area where nobody really takes responsibility for it.
Sam: Pagan told us that the .
Deboki: We started out the episode talking about how sometimes new technologies aren鈥檛 just about some big invention. And what Marty Goddard showed through her work is that it鈥檚 really more about understanding the needs of the people using those technologies, and using the resources around you to meet them. And so as far as the rape kit goes, there are still a lot of other needs that could help survivors if they were met.听
Pagan Kennedy: For the most part, to get the exam and to be able to file evidence, you have to go to an ER. But there aren't that many ERs that handle this. And the process, what we ask of survivors is a lot, I mean, generally you would have to have a car to get to the ER and you might have to drive quite a ways, and then you would have to wait in the ER for up to 10 hours. The exam itself is very invasive and can take up to five hours. So not everybody has a car. Not everybody has childcare for 24 hours in the hospital. Not everybody has a job where they can just disappear for 24 hours, and not everybody is in the mental shape to go through that. So as a result, not that many people file kits.听
Deboki: And like many things, this became a huge issue during COVID. With so many ERs overwhelmed with patients, it became even more difficult for people to seek out help. Pagan told us that rape reporting went down by about 40% during this time.
Pagan Kennedy: I did talk to this really interesting forensic nurse who created a system in California whereby somebody could call the police and they would drop off the kit as well as antibiotics or whatever else, whatever other medical stuff the person would need. And then they would do a telemedicine appointment with the forensic nurse from their home. They would collect the DNA themselves and they would take the medicines and do everything according to the nurse and then leave everything on their porch. But it was so controversial. I mean, people were losing their minds about this and that there's just a lot of fear that if you change the system, it's not going to stand up in court.
Deboki: Pagan told us that self-collection kits aren鈥檛 meant to be a replacement for the official rape kit. They鈥檙e meant more for people who aren鈥檛 ready to come forward, or who might not have access to places where they can have an official rape kit collected. But many states have outlawed the sale of these self-collected versions.听
Sam: And even if these self-collection kits remain outlawed, they still continue the legacy of Marty Goddard, and the work she did to understand what kind of tools could help survivors in telling their story. They also reflect the fact that Marty鈥檚 work isn鈥檛 complete, and that there鈥檚 so much left to do.
Pagan Kennedy: I'm just going to say I don't have an opinion about how the system should work, but I do want to illuminate for people the fact how the failure of the current system is pushing people to think of different ideas.听
I think it's also a very heavy burden to put on survivors to ask this much of them and give them so little. So for that reason, I think it's really important for us to have a conversation about what we want from this system, to have a survivor-led conversation with people from different communities.
Sam: It's time for Tiny Show and Tell. Okay, so researchers have figured out why you shouldn't scratch an itchy rash even though it feels really good.
Deboki: I feel so called out and I don't even know what's about to happen.
Sam: So allergic contact dermatitis, it's pretty general term, it's just an allergic reaction to allergens or skin irritants. So this includes things like poison ivy and also different metals. For me, I can't wear nickel earrings and stuff because my ears will get all red and rashy and goopy. It's disgusting. People find that they develop this itchy, swollen rash. So researchers wanted to understand how itching the rash might actually affect it.
So they used mice and they put itch-inducing allergens on their ears. And so what they found was that when they would scratch, their ears would become more swollen and filled with inflammatory immune cells called neutrophils. Mice that couldn't scratch because, okay, this is cute, they wore these tiny Elizabethan collars, like the ones that if a dog or cat gets spayed they have to wear, some of the mice were wearing this.
So they were having an allergic reaction, but they couldn't scratch it. And the inflammation and swelling was much milder. And the researchers also tested this in mice that lacked itch-sensing neurons 鈥� which I didn't know there were knockout mice with that 鈥� same thing, less inflammation and swelling because they weren't itching.
Ultimately, the researchers were able to figure out that scratching causes pain-sensing neurons to release a compound called Substance P, which is actually a neurotransmitter that activates mast cells, which are coordinators of inflammation that drive itchiness and also recruit neutrophils. So essentially you scratch, you're just inducing more and more inflammation.
Deboki: Oh, that's diabolical.
Sam: I know. But mast cells are also important for protecting against bacteria and other pathogens. And so there was kind of this curiosity too like, okay, so scratching, if it's not good for us, why does it feel so good? And so the idea here is that there could be some benefit to scratching because it seems like scratching can reduce the amount of Staphylococcus aureus, the most common bacteria involved in skin infections, on the skin.
However, huge asterisk, so although scratching can to some degree maybe help prevent bacterial skin infections, which could be why there's this positive feedback for scratching where we're like, "Oh, it feels so good, I'm going to keep scratching this thing, even though it's getting more inflamed," one of the researchers of this study said the damage that scratching does to the skin probably really outweighs this benefit of potentially cutting down on staph if you're chronically itching.
So the take home is best to just not itch if you can't, but it's so hard. I'm thinking about mosquito bites. How can you not itch a mosquito bite? Don't do it. Just don't do it.
Deboki: Yeah. Think of the neutrophils.
Sam: Think of the neutrophils.
Deboki: Well, I am here to tell you about the bacteria you're going to meet in space.
Sam: Ooh!
Deboki: Yeah. So apparently there's been this project going on on the ISS where astronauts have just been swabbing samples. Like between October 2020 and April 2021, they've been using swabs to look at different surfaces.
Sam: Like outside the ISS? Inside the ISS?
Deboki: The results I was looking at were mostly centered on surfaces inside, but I know there have been experiments looking at stuff that happens outside, but I don't know if that's included here. This is part of an overall effort just to see, I don't know, what happens. I think the overall effort to see what happens when you put people in space basically, I think, basically to see what happens to the microbial and chemical environments of the space that they're living in over this time.
There were around 800 samples collected, which is a lot of samples, collected over several months, and they were looking at different modules of the United States Orbital Segment. One of the things that really was interesting to me is seeing that these different modules, they're used for different functions around the ISS, and it was interesting that they could actually see that reflected in the microbes themselves.
So for example, the module where food is usually prepared and stored had more food associated microbes. In the module where they have the waste and hygiene compartment, they had more feces and urine microbes.
Sam: I was going to say, a lot of E. coli hanging in there.
Deboki: Exactly. I should mention they used DNA sequencing to figure out the microbes that were in the area. They also used mass spectrometry to study the chemical environment. But most of the stuff that I've been reading about is really more about the microbes. And then one of the things that they did is they looked at basically how the microbe content I guess of that area, what fraction of the entire phylogenetic tree it takes up.
And so they found in general that it took up 6.31% of the entire phylogenetic tree. For comparison, apparently microbes found in Finnish homes reflect 12.23% of the phylogenetic tree. In rainforests, it's 28.37%. So it is quite a bit less. What they found is that the ISS was more similar to isolation dorms on the UCSD campus during COVID where things were super sterilized.
I assume that it's specifically UCSD because someone was collecting the numbers and was like, "We want to know. We want to know what the microbial content here is like." But that was just really fascinating to me that we can collect these numbers, we can compare these numbers, and we have some sense. And also microbes just make up so much of life. The fact that microbes can make up鈥�
Even in a place where we're like, oh, there are fewer microbes, it's 6% of the entire phylogenetic tree is represented up there on the ISS in microbe form. And it's crazy.
Sam: They know how to survive, man.
Deboki: They sure do. Thanks for tuning in to this week鈥檚 episode of Tiny Matters, a podcast brought to you by the American Chemical 中国365bet中文官网 and produced by Multitude. This week鈥檚 script was written by me and edited by Sam, who is also our executive producer, and by Michael David. It was fact-checked by Michelle Boucher. Our audio editor was Jeremy Barr. The Tiny Matters theme and episode sound design is by Michael Simonelli and the Charts & Leisure team.
Sam: Thanks so much to Pagan Kennedy for joining us. Go rate and review us wherever you listen, we super duper appreciate it. We鈥檒l see ya next time.
References:
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