Podcast on Crimes Against Women
The Conference on Crimes Against Women (CCAW) is thrilled the announce the Podcast on Crimes Against Women (PCAW). Continuing with our fourth season, the PCAW releases new episodes every Monday. The PCAW serves as an extension of the information and topics presented at the annual Conference, providing in-depth dialogue, fresh perspectives, and relevant updates by experts in the fields of victim advocacy, criminal justice, medicine, and more. This podcast’s format hopes to create a space for topical conversations aimed to engage and educate community members on the issue of violence against women, how it impacts our daily lives, and how we can work together to create lasting cultural and systemic change.
Podcast on Crimes Against Women
The Evolution of the Rape Kit: Learning from the Legacy of Marty Goddard
In this episode, Pagan Kennedy, author of "The Secret History of the Rape Kit," reveals the untold story behind the rape kit, a forensic tool that revolutionized sexual assault investigations but whose creator, Marty Goddard, was erased from history. Through meticulous research, Kennedy uncovered how Goddard developed this life-changing evidence collection system in 1970s Chicago while facing systemic barriers and police attitudes that dismissed victims.
When Kennedy began researching the origins of the rape kit, she expected a straightforward story. What she discovered instead was a buried history of female innovation deliberately erased from public record. In 1970s Chicago, Marty Goddard encountered a system where police manuals explicitly stated "most women who report rapes are lying" and evidence collection was an afterthought. Determined to create change, Goddard developed a standardized system for collecting sexual assault evidence that would give credibility to survivors' accounts through science.
Kennedy's research exposes concerning modern issues as well. Despite DNA testing revolutionizing forensics, rape kits remain largely unchanged since the 1970s. With over 1,000 different versions nationwide, inconsistent protocols, invasive questioning, and accessibility barriers continue to plague the system. Perhaps most troubling is the persistent devaluation of sexual assault evidence, evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of untested kits discovered in warehouses nationwide.
The most revealing aspect of this history is Goddard's strategic decision to name the kit after police chief Louis Vitullo, knowing that in the male-dominated world of law enforcement, a woman's invention would never be adopted. This sacrifice ensured implementation but cost Goddard her rightful place in history until Kennedy's journalism brought her contributions to light. Now housed in the Smithsonian, the original rape kit represents both a breakthrough and a reminder of how women's contributions are often obscured.
The subject matter of this podcast will address difficult topics multiple forms of violence, and identity-based discrimination and harassment. We acknowledge that this content may be difficult and have listed specific content warnings in each episode description to help create a positive, safe experience for all listeners.
Speaker 2:In this country, 31 million crimes 31 million crimes are reported every year. That is one every second. Out of that, every 24 minutes there is a murder. Every five minutes there is a rape. Every two to five minutes there is a sexual assault. Every nine seconds in this country, a woman is assaulted by someone who told her that he loved her, by someone who told her it was her fault, by someone who tries to tell the rest of us it's none of our business and I am proud to stand here today with each of you to call that perpetrator a liar.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the podcast on crimes against women. I'm Maria McMullin. The conversation surrounding the origins of the rape kit is a culminating topic following Women's History Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and that we are often reminded of how, historically, rape in and of itself was not taken seriously by authorities, minimized by a community, couched in victim blaming, or considered too convoluted to prosecute. Furthermore, marital rape, specifically, was only legally recognized as an illegal act as late as 1993. When the devastating issue of rape and all of its implications is discussed, it helps to bring the importance of the rape kit into focus. Ideally, one may think that we would be talking to forensic nurses, sexual assault investigators or crisis center advocates about rape kits, and rightfully so. Or crisis center advocates about rape kits, and rightfully so. However, our guest today, a renowned author, researcher and professor, brings a unique journalistic perspective to this concept. There is an old adage that states we can't know where we are going if we don't know where we've been. As someone who has championed the cause to take a deeper dive into not only what is but why it is, and spotlights how something as monumental as sexual assault evidence collection not only changed the landscape of investigations, but also shifted a paradigm and transformed a culture.
Speaker 1:My guest is Pegyn Kennedy, the author of 12 books, most recently the Secret History of the Rape Kid. Her journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and dozens of other publications. She has been a columnist for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing writer for the New York Times Sunday Review. Her awards include a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, an NEA Fellowship, a Smithsonian Fellowship and two Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowships. She joins the show today to discuss her work, the Secret History of the Rape Kit. Peggy, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being here and also for your incredible journalism surrounding the development and evolution of the Rape Kit, a sexual assault evidence collection system that revolutionized sexual assault investigations and brought justice to countless victims of rape and sexual assault. Before we dive into the book, could you give us an idea of what led you to conducting deep investigational journalism, because you seem to have a penchant for learning about the origins of so many things, not just the rape kit. So what led you to this?
Speaker 3:work. So actually that takes me back to like 2012, when I was hired to be the who made that guy, as I called it, for the New York Times Magazine. So they had this column where they would have an enormous picture of an ordinary object and then my job was to track down the person who originated the idea, and I had to do this every week. So I got very fast at tracking people down, learned a lot about the patent system crash course in how things get invented. It was an amazing opportunity because week after week, I either investigated a story sometimes the inventor was no longer around but often I found these pretty obscure people who had come up with ideas that are incredibly familiar to us now, and so their object, whatever they invented, was really famous, but they were sort of living in obscurity and sometimes, you know, it took a long time to even figure out who that person was. So I learned, you know, that really changed.
Speaker 3:Then I went on to write a book called Inventology. Because that experience of doing that for two years I came away kind of seeing a lot of patterns of how new ideas come into the world and kind of the secret sauce of invention, which actually there's a couple of different secret sauces. There's no one. There's a couple of patterns I noticed that were really interesting, and one of them, I would say one of the chief patterns that I noticed is I mean, we might just call it, necessity is the mother of invention, but people with skin in the game are enormously inventive, like people who are at the front end of a problem, and so then I got really interested in what? Because so few women have had the chance to be inventors?
Speaker 2:because, well, I could go into all the reasons why.
Speaker 3:You know there were a lot of reasons and that's a whole other story of why women didn't have the power or the resources to be able to design and invent. But I became really interested in the question of like, when women do have the power to see things you know, through the framework of the problems that you know come to you that live with in a female body, what kinds of things do you design and invent? What kind of world do you imagine, what kind of problems do you want to solve and how do you think about them? And so I was really looking at, kind of looking at like, what were the things that are invented or designed really from a woman's point of view? And I was kind of looking at the objects of the world and seeing very few things.
Speaker 3:So you know, so many things are deeply embedded with, I would say, not just a male point of view, but almost a sexual predator's point of view.
Speaker 3:I mean, just look at social media, you know where you could easily put brakes on things that would prevent, you know, stalking or exploitation of vulnerable people, but there's no. That would get in the way of profit, so that doesn't happen. So, anyway, at some point in 2018, my attention landed on the rape kit, and that was the moment when there were a lot of headlines I'm going to sort of post Me Too, or the Me Too movement was happening and there were a lot of headlines about the rape kit because there had been a huge scandal that the kits had been backlogged, that there were nearly half a million kits, that there were nearly half a million kits that this is, kits containing potentially DNA evidence of a sexual assault crime had been either just left in warehouses, thrown away, trashed like literally you could see pictures of aisles of kits covered in mold and like bird shit. You know, you know, and so it was very clear how little regard that this evidence was given inside of many police departments and so there was an enormous outcry about that.
Speaker 3:But the question that really interested me as I thought about it was well, how did the rape kid even come to exist? Because in this world of things, where you know, generally male controlled design and invention, how did something that was created to supplement a survivor's story and potentially even prove her story and potentially put a powerful man in you know, get a powerful man in trouble? How did that happen? And so that's what I started. I pulled that thread and then crazy things happened, because it just turned out to be a much wilder story than I had ever imagined.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, your story is also an odyssey from what you described just now, and it's all sounds incredibly fascinating, just solving that puzzle week after week. It's kind of like rewiring your brain to think in a much different way. And what's likewise fascinating is that you did all of this before AI.
Speaker 3:Oh, I mean I don't think AI would have helped me. I mean I'm writing another book and not using AI. I mean most of the-.
Speaker 1:No, I was thinking about AI to recognize images and kind of help determine what they are and maybe where they came from.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't actually find that very useful because a lot of the research.
Speaker 3:I mean AI tends to pick up the most believed story about something. You know the kind of cover story that would be printed a lot and more recent. There's very little. You know pre-2010 or something, because you know it's scraping all this modern stuff. But you know that's the very thing it's like when you dig into a story and really go through archives, newspaper archives and archives you know of materials that aren't even on the internet. You just find the story is not as it has been told. Very over and over again I found that you know.
Speaker 2:I mean you know the.
Speaker 3:The story like the. When I was writing who made that column? I could have said who made the tennis ball hopper or the you know, I don't know. There's a lot of you know or the initial or the sugar cube or whatever, because it required calling up a lot of people, dealing with a lot of murky information and eventually doing a lot of human stuff to figure out what was really true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I appreciate that context. Just to have people understand how powerful it is when you really do dig into a topic and immerse yourself in it and the results can be fascinating. And you have done just that, and you could have stuck with researching and writing about the origins of things, especially those that may be more benign or safe, but instead you gravitated towards the heavier topic of rape. So let's talk about what led you to research and write about the origins of the rape kit, and did you receive any pushback doing so?
Speaker 3:Well, in the beginning I was actually at that time by this time I was working for the another section of the New York Times, the Sunday Review, and it was a wonderful, wonderful gig where they let me have a lot of freedom and tell a lot of weird stories. But as I began pulling this thread, it didn't seem like an article because there was so much you know, as I began interviewing people and finding some of the people who were there at the time and the story turned out, and this is an example of like why.
Speaker 2:AI why.
Speaker 3:It's why real journalism by humans is so important. Because at the time, like when I looked it up on Wikipedia, everything much of what was on Wikipedia would turn out to be completely wrong, wow, or or just a very much an oversimplification either wrong or just oversimplified. And you know, as I began actually digging into it, it was like so much more emerged and yeah there. So in the beginning I just my editor at the Times, who's wonderful was on maternity leave and so I was sort of I knew I owed her some story pitches, but I sort of took this time to kind of hide and just I just let myself go and begin researching and writing notes and something happened Suddenly. I had like 80 pages and I had all these interviews and I still wasn't done, you know. And so when she came back from maternity leave, you know, I said I've just dropped down this rabbit hole and I have all this material. It's not going to work for you because it's way too long and complicated. And she said, oh well, actually I've been made the editor.
Speaker 3:They were going to do a new version of the Sunday review, that where they would allow really long stories, and so I just lucked out that didn't last for very long. So she, I just said, well, let me send you everything I have. So, not, I did not get pushed back at all, it was she. She was brilliant. She kind of boiled it all down into 10,000 words and we went from there. And you know, having it's really amazing to work with an organization like the New York Times because you have fact checkers and editors and an amazing art department. They made all these amazing images. So originally I published it in 2020 as a very long article and then just so much more kept coming out. In fact, because I had the article, more people contacted me who knew about this story.
Speaker 3:It just kept going you know. So it just kind of evolved into a book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's a long and interesting story. So just for a bit of context for our listeners who may be new to the term rape kit, can you explain the distinction between a sexual assault exam and a rape kit and how, why and how the rape kit is so crucial to that exam?
Speaker 3:So well that actually brings us into the story, because you know at the beginning so and the story begins and it's very much about a woman named Martha Goddard or Marty Goddard, and in the early 1970s if somebody was assaulted, there was really an attitude.
Speaker 3:They did have a procedure. They would often send you I mean often people would be hurting, it might be a violent attack so they'd be sent to the hospital and the doctors and nurses there would try their best to collect evidence, but they hadn't been trained, there was no kind of formal way of doing this, and so then they'd send a bag of stuff like clothes or they'd try to click slides or whatever. So the way it looked in 1970 was that, you know, the victim would go into the hospital often, but it was a tremendously harrowing even more so than today process for the victim, because the police were just terrible I mean, there's no other way to say it At the time. They might bring the victim in and yell out we've got a rape for you. And then the person would be taken into an exam room and the nurses and doctors were oriented towards just taking care of that person if they had been stabbed or hurt or they needed antibiotics or whatever they needed, and then they would.
Speaker 3:It was like an afterthought to collect the evidence. They would just bag up whatever they found and put it in and send it to the crime lab. And then the crime lab gets this bag. Nobody's trained the medical workers about how to collect evidence, so they just get this bag and they're like, okay, this is useless, and they throw it away.
Speaker 3:But I mean, even more problematic was really the attitude inside police departments of that time. Literally there were. The handbook said most women who report rapes are lying, or many of them, and so it's your job to determine if she's lying. She probably is, and if she is lying you don't need to go any further. So in essence, it made the police officer the judge and jury before evidence was even collected.
Speaker 3:So that's obviously not an evidence-based evidence system If you decide right away who you think is guilty, and if you think that they are, you know pure or a virgin or they. You know they're a quote-unquote slut, you know. And so when Marty Goddard came along, she worked for a nonprofit organization. Marty Goddard came along, she was a worked for a nonprofit organization. She was had kind of stumbled across this problem because she had volunteered at a hotline for kids who lived on the street. Kind of this is the height of the hippie era.
Speaker 3:So there were a lot of kids, you know, living on the streets running away from home, the streets running away from home, and she discovered talking to these kids like they weren't running away to join the circus, you know, or have fun. They were many times running away from family members who were abusing them and she realized there was this widespread problem and so that kind of led her to try to work, to ask why there's all these predators around, why aren't we catching them? Why aren't we even aware of them? Why isn't there evidence? Surely we can prove this. You know, the attitude was it's always a, he said, she said it's not provable.
Speaker 3:So she, with the help of many other great, amazing anti-rape activists, began to push against the police departments and she was appointed to be on a rape task force in Chicago and that gave her to investigate this and that gave her the power to go into the crime lab to talk to the nurses, to talk to the police officers, to begin to try to understand, like, where is the failure point? Where what's going wrong? Why are we not even getting any evidence? Far from actually the you know like again, when I began doing this, like Wikipedia would have said, or everybody would have said, that Louis Fetullo, who was a police chief in Chicago, was the inventor of the first rape kit. But in fact there actually were rape kits around at that time.
Speaker 3:It was kind of like, locally, different cities were trying to, because they were all seeing this problem. They were trying to sort of organize, you know, bridge the gap between the hospitals and the crime labs, and it would guide what the nurses did and it would be like a common language between the hospitals and the crime labs and the police officers. Everybody's going to do the same thing. It's going to be systematized and even define what evidence is. So those kind of existed, but in a very small way, but they were very. They were often really badly designed, I mean horribly designed, like there was one I found out about where it it said um, the instructions to the police officer were um, if you think that the victim is a freelance prostitute, then you don't need to collect the evidence.
Speaker 3:You know it was just like full of the kind of hateful language. And so it was. You know there was nothing magical about the idea of a kit Like it could be very bad. But Marty Goddard, actually she did work with Louis Vitulo in the police department.
Speaker 2:They worked together but it was very much.
Speaker 3:She was very much the instigator and guider of this whole project and she wanted to use, she wanted to design a kit, not just to kind of create, get better evidence and create an idea that everybody would be on the same page and we're going to define what actually the evidence is and what works. But she realized that when the cases went to trial, you know the victims weren't believed. Cases went to trial, you know the victims weren't believed. So if you had this scientific kit and a person in a white lab coat standing up there saying, okay, this is what we tested, we do it this exact way, then we look at this and this and this and we get the slides, you know that's much more worked. That was it was sort of a theater prop as well for the trial, so that was very important as well.
Speaker 1:So I mean because prior to DNA evidence there was very little to go on right. There was fingerprinting and blood typing for other types of crimes, but there wasn't any DNA evidence until sometime in the late 20th century.
Speaker 3:Yes, correct, so they developed they actually when they were developing these first kits. You could get blood, you could get HLA type, you could get a few things, but you're not really going to narrow it down a huge amount with somebody's blood type, obviously. So they would depend heavily on photographs and this is why the exam would be important to also document any violence that had been done to the victim's body, things like that. And then, like you said, you know, dna fingerprinting was invented in the 80s and it really came into use in the 90s. At that point you already have all these thousands of kits that have been collected.
Speaker 3:They've taken swabs off of the victim's body without knowing you know that one day these swabs are going to be so much more meaningful because by the nineties you can test them and give a type to the DNA and then compare that to the suspect's blood type and you can really rule out people and rule in people. You can say this has to be the person whose you know blood is in this kit, say, or this isn't the person. And being able to rule out people was also very, very important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's been an evolution. I think this has been a long process of trying to establish some standardized procedures, actually having those executed and then eventually tested, which was a roadblock there for a while that you mentioned earlier in this conversation. Let's talk a little bit about what this kit is called, because I've heard it called several things the rape kit, the sexual assault, forensic evidence collection kit. Did it start out as being called a rape kit or something else, or do you feel like that term really is appropriate for what this is?
Speaker 3:Well, the interesting thing is, it actually started out being called the Vitulo kit after Louis.
Speaker 3:Vitulo who was given credit as the inventor. And you know that's a big part of the story I told, because what I discovered looking through the documents and trade was that actually Marty Goddard had trademarked the kit under his name and I interviewed and reached out to a lot of people to talk about why that had happened. And of course we can't say for sure but it seems pretty clear that in the 1970s if you were dealing with the Chicago police department and Chicago politics, which were very corrupt and you know it was very difficult to make change then and as now.
Speaker 3:And so she, I think you know people have told me, and it seems like a reasonable assumption, that she realized that if she named this kit after well known guys in the you know leaders in the crime lab of that time and he had, you know, he had helped with the prototype and he'd helped with some of it, um and and been you know, he'd been on board with it then that would really give it the imprimatur of a male inventor, right and um of the police department and give you know everything would go. She wanted it to work, she wanted, wanted it to happen and she was the kind of person who was willing to do what it took to, you know, make this work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's actually genius, right Cause, to your point, if, if she had named it after herself or actually use the word rape, we may not be having this conversation today about her or the kit that she actually invented. So a huge part of successful victim advocacy is to first believe the victim, and you mentioned several times now that it was always up to law enforcement back in the 70s to decide if they believed the victim's story or not and then rule in, rule out whether or not this was going to be investigated. And yet many people, including law enforcement and investigators, they want something tangible before they can accept a person's claim. So how did something that actually collected evidence, like the rape kit, impact police departments and labs around the world once the rape kit was initially finalized and released?
Speaker 3:Well, that's kind of a long story because you know there have been all these you know with.
Speaker 3:DNA coming in to DNA fingerprinting coming into use. You know, it really evolved in this kind of weird backwards fashion where they already had the kits. You know, one of the big ideas that Marnie Goddard had was that being able to file evidence was the right of every survivor. So even if she, you know, you could go first to the hospital yourself and ideally every hospital would be able to give you would have a nurse there, and by the 1980s there was trained, for there were trained forensic nurses. So in theory anybody would be able to go to the hospital and get this forensic exam by a professional who was trained also in trauma care. So they would be, they would not be disrespectful to you, they would work with you and you could file this, both biological evidence. You could file this, both biological evidence, and then the nurse would also take the story, you know, record the story and you would go through this process that could take up to five hours. It was incredibly thorough. Yes, and so you know we've always fallen short of this idea that we can provide this to everybody everywhere, but that was the idea. And then those kits would be sent on to the police department and then you could.
Speaker 3:You know also, laws vary state by state, but in a lot of states you could decide not to report the rape, just to file the evidence, and then you could decide whether you wanted to actually go forward from there. The police, you know. Unfortunately, you know, often the police would really discourage people or or still not treat them well. But you did have all this evidence that was banked. But in the nineties, when, you know, I looked back over the news, I think we became aware of this problem of kits not being tested, you know, pretty recently, but that problem started as soon as there was testing, because in the nineties it was very expensive to do even one DNA test on a kit and so you had these backlogs already starting to pile up everywhere in the country and now it was already becoming a problem. Yeah, which just?
Speaker 1:points to the fact that these were so necessary. Right, because there was just rampant sexual abuse or sexual assault and rape of women across the country and there's still a huge epidemic. But this was a critical turning point in investigating or potentially investigating those types of crimes and apprehending perpetrators. Now I'm curious about the replication of the kit because with something as groundbreaking as a sexual evidence collection kit, was there an increased interest from pharmaceutical companies to replicate the kit?
Speaker 3:Well, actually, I mean, nobody's making a lot of money off of rape kits. You know what's weird is that and this is something I really dig into the book the original kit. So there's also no one rape kit.
Speaker 1:There's thousands of them. Oh, different, there's different types.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, and that's part of the problem. Oh yeah, and that's part of the problem. There's probably more than a thousand kits in the United States, all with different rules like of what you're supposed to collect and how the exam proceeds. Even in one city there could be three different kits. Oh my OK.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not good, it's not ideal. It does not sound very standardized, as I thought. Perhaps it was no no.
Speaker 3:So what happened was in the early in the 70s, when Marty Goddard and Vitula were working on this. You know. She really conceived of a kit that would be very simple and she was part of the great expense. She also had to raise all the money to make this happen. She was part of the great expense, she also had to raise all the money to make this happen.
Speaker 3:And it was expensive, not because of the kits themselves so much as the fact that you had to train the nurses and you had to train the crime lab workers and the police officers. You had to raise awareness and you had to get the staff, get it into the hospitals and just like all the stuff that's not even in the kit was a lot of work and a lot of expense. And so it was a very simple like. If you look at the original one, there's about a checklist of about 10 things you're supposed to collect and then a victim statement and that's about it. It's very simple and it's really designed so that somebody with a bit of training can do it. It's very clear cut.
Speaker 3:And then you know, and committees started, state committees started getting involved and you know what happens with committees. More, the kit got a lot of places. It has hundreds of envelopes because in some bizarre, weird circumstance you might potentially need to collect X or Y kind of swab from this part of the body why kind of swab from this part of the body? And dense instructions and it's become very much not user-friendly. But also, you know, the crime labs themselves often, unfortunately, have a lot of power to say what they want in the kits and they may ask for things that are not legal or reasonable to have for them, like they may want to know what medications the victim is on medications they want to know things that can.
Speaker 3:They should just be testing the evidence without knowing anything about the victim, right To have good evidence. They often will want to see the victim's statement. They'll want, you know there's been very little ability to stop the, to kind of get control of that kind of information that should not be known about. The you know could be sealed in the kit for trial. The nurse is collecting it, but she's a trauma informed person who's you know working with the victim. But other people should not be seeing that, nor should they be. They may ask for the entire history of the victim's sexual life. They may ask for all the medication she's on.
Speaker 1:This is part of the rape kit collection process.
Speaker 3:So it depends. This is why it's really important to have the right kind of design and have. You know one thing I really wanted to write the book people just don't know about. You know it's. It's bizarre because finding out even what the kit looks like in different States and what it is, it's so hard.
Speaker 3:There's there even people who are really, really who are working with it, you know they don't have the sense of like what it looks like elsewhere, you know there's just no, there's so little attention given to this issue, and I think that's also why, aside from kind of getting more complicated and messy, the kit is hasn't really changed since the 1970s, it's still on paper at a time when everything else has gone digital.
Speaker 3:And, you know, I don't know what the ideal solution is, but it certainly seems like it would be better to have it work more digitally, especially because so much evidence now of assault is actually digital. And this is something I've started to think about, kind of post after the book, after writing the book, you know. Uh, I think that we just so it's so baked into us to think about the evidences of assault as being DNA but DNA. And that being DNA but DNA is amazing what it can do in terms of telling us who was there and who wasn't there, but it can't tell us about their intentions. But, like it or not, every moment of our lives is now tracked digitally and so many of our interactions with people are in text or they're recorded somehow. So when you get digital evidence, you can start to see intention, not only who was there, but what their intention was, or if there was, a threat was made, if violence occurred no-transcript.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it also could be a game changer in making sure that the information collected in rape kits no longer sits and gets moldy on a shelf, because it'll have a digital footprint and it cannot go away. So as long as the information is tested and then stored digitally, it shouldn't disappear.
Speaker 3:Oh well, they do store the DNA. So when the DNA is tested it is converted into a digital code Great. And then that digital code and this has been going since the 90s that digital code then goes to a central database at the FBI called CODIS, and then the advantage of that is that you could have, if there were the same perpetrator was going state to state. You can see that pattern. Once you put together all the information you know in CODIS, you could have one kit and then it shows a hit to like three other kits in different states.
Speaker 2:And that's very powerful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so many scientists now are worried about the destruction of data, about climate change. We haven't really had a discussion about the threat to the potential destruction of sexual assault data, but that is something we should talk about. You know that. You know so much of this. What I've been writing about I feel like nobody's talking about and I'm kind of looking, you know, suddenly come across something and think, well, that could be a big problem, like why aren't, aren't we, we should, but of course, there's so much going on right now, it's it's really hard.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a lot of complexities and confusion, and I'm glad you brought up some of the issues around what's happening with the administration currently in 2025, because that brings us to the topic of women's rights and, within the feminist or pro-woman space, sexual assault exams and rape kits are likely to be considered a no-brainer, a great way to support female victims, but also as a way to stand up for females by daring to bring evidence into question. So how does feminism or the women's rights movement help to justify things like rape kits, often in spaces that are still male dominated, like hospitals, police departments and government offices?
Speaker 3:You know. So I think there's some level of just fighting back against norms, the kit itself. You know, I'm really fascinated by the way the designed world shapes our norms. So, you know, we all see a traffic light and we stop, you know, and having this sexual assault exam sends the message that there is such a thing as evidence, sexual assault can be proved, and you know that the victims have a right to um, accuse and seek justice, and I think that's becoming harder right now. Um, but um, yeah, I mean the, the way that we're fighting back, you know.
Speaker 3:I think, everybody's throwing everything at the wall right now to see what works. I'm talking to a lot of forensic nurses who are just heroes, who are trying to maintain the system amidst huge funding cuts and all kinds of headwinds and all kinds of headwinds. But at the same time, you know, I would be hopeful that we do have these new technologies. I would love to see and again I'm not prescribing anything because I'm not the expert here I would love to see a panel of survivors and forensic nurses and lawyers and so all kinds of experts come together to talk about what the system should look like. Now. Maybe we could use telemedicine more to do these exams so that people don't have to go to hospitals.
Speaker 3:You know another, there is a lot of people who don't feel comfortable going to an ER or who are just too traumatized. But I was writing this book during the pandemic and that the the problem of basing something inside of a hospital became really obvious because literally the rape reporting had gone down by 40% in some areas. Because people couldn't get into an ER, you couldn't go there or it wasn't safe, and so what are you supposed to do? And I was sort of shocked by the lack of accommodations made because the idea was somehow, if you tried a different system where the victim didn't go to the hospital or didn't go to one of these places, um, that somehow they would cheat or lie or, you know, fake it and I don't even know how you fake like, I'm not even sure what they're afraid of when they talk about.
Speaker 3:you know that the chain of evidence or the chain of custody needs to be established because you know to prevent, to make sure the evidence is hasn't been falsified, because I mean, what are they imagining? Like somebody would steal somebody's sperm and put it on their bodies, like I'm not sure what is the fear of fakery?
Speaker 3:And even if that's the case which is crazy, you know even if that crazy scenario where somebody manages to steal some sperm, put it on their bodies, they can perfectly well go to a hospital and sit in the ER. So I you know there's a lot of it that just doesn't seem logical to me, but you know it's. It's very hard to change a system and I think a lot of people inside of the system feel like it's so deeply under attack that they don't want to raise questions like that, I think you raise some very interesting ideas for discussion or debate and I'm glad you went so deep with this work and it sounds like you continue to study it and follow what's happening around.
Speaker 1:You know the rape kit collection and nursing and so on to really give it some special attention. Now your story about Marty Goddard and the origins of the rape kit received national attention. Do you believe that attention has moved the needle in the sexual assault advocacy space or, if not, what is still missing?
Speaker 3:I hope. I'm not sure if it's moved the needle, but what I hope to do was, first of all, I think that you know one thing I discovered in talking to people while I was working on the book, and then after events and everything, and then even interviews, like where the first question is often what is a rape kit? And then I go through explaining what it is.
Speaker 3:Well, the fact that it's a million things right now, but also, you know exactly how the exam works and what it is and what I realized is like, even though I think almost everybody's familiar with the idea, unless you've engaged with it in your own life, um, you have no idea what exactly it is or how it works or what yeah why would you problems? Are, why would you? Why would you and it's some sort of like that familiar yet invisible thing and I think just by trying to have you know by the end of reading my book, you like absolutely know what it is, how it works, how it's supposed to work, what's going wrong.
Speaker 3:You know, and I think, just I think, when something's kind of invisible, it can be taken away more easily.
Speaker 3:So my intention was just to make it visible in a new way so that people can see what it is. And also, I really wanted to start a conversation about how do we make this better and how do we get this out unstuck from the 1970s, because there's so much potential to do things better today. How do we do that? You know how do we do that and I've, you know, encountered I've just met so many interesting people while reporting this book and then afterwards, and it's not like my ideas have sharpened, because I feel like every person I talk to kind of I learn about a new problem or I learn about a new solution. People are trying, but how much you know how difficult it is. And then you know, with the Trump administration coming in, there's like a whole wealth of new problems. I had a PowerPoint lecture where I kind of listed some of the main problems and then, as I was updating it, you know, it's like I can't even put in the rest of them, because I just kind of make people too depressed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Like, like we both said, it's a very complex situation. It doesn't need to be, I think. Going back to the origin story of the rape kit, you explained it so well how simple it was intended to be and hopefully you know to try to make it easy to implement and reduce the impact to victims who have to endure that process. And I love that you mentioned bringing visibility to this issue because, amazingly, the original rape kit is housed at the Smithsonian. What?
Speaker 3:did you think about when they decided to have it on display for visitors to see and learn about? Well, I was. I'm glad to say that I was a little bit a part of that story, because when I was reporting the story for the New York Times, I realized that I hadn't actually seen the original kit. I mean, there were no pictures of it. There was, you know, just no.
Speaker 1:I can't believe it even existed that something like that existed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so I actually was in touch with obviously a lot of people who were there at the beginning, obviously a lot of people who were there at the beginning, and one of and so I would always ask them like, or even Marty Goddard's nephew took care of her, when you know I I mean he had all her things. I was like is there an original rape kid in there?
Speaker 2:He couldn't find one you know so.
Speaker 3:I was looking and looking and then finally I talked to somebody who had worked with Marty Goddard back in the day, mary Dreiser, and I said, by chance, would you have a rape kit? And she was like, oh, I you know. There was this long, long trauma where she thought it might be. She had a storage facility. She went there, wasn't there, and then one day she like looked in the back of her closet and she found it. Wow. And then we were like super excited because we could have the New York Times photographer come and take pictures of it. It had all the original stuff in it. They laid it all out, they did the pictures. So those were like, as far as I know, the first real pictures of the original kit. And it's funny because it was. It had this groovy, I mean it was very official looking.
Speaker 3:But it also did have a groovy 1970s woman sort of. Yeah, I, you know, on the cut on the it looked very 1970s, yeah. But um then, mary, you know I had, you know I think I wrote in my article, you know I had a dream that it would be displayed in the Smithsonian as parts of the Smithsonian, contacted Mary actually put the kit up for auction with Sotheby's.
Speaker 3:I believe and then the two of, yeah, two branches of the Smithsonian bid on it and they got it sort of in a shared deal and that's how it got to the Smithsonian. And so then I befriended the curators at the Smithsonian and, as I was working on the book, they had resources about the history of sexual assault forensics that I didn't have. They were very helpful to me.
Speaker 1:That's remarkable. I'm so glad that dreams do come true sometimes, right? So Marty Goddard passed away 10 years ago. What do you think she would say now, in 2025, as it relates to rape kits, sexual assault, investigations and prosecutions?
Speaker 3:I think the young version of Marty, who was a. She was a big kind of player in Chicago, she really understood politics. She was a big kind of player in Chicago, she really understood politics. She had a lot of power by 1981, and then she kind of flamed out, doing her best to really look into, you know, all those hidden problems now and trying to organize people around making this work again. It's kind of a janky system. You know that hasn't been rethought and I part of the book was I did reach out to the people I considered sort of the the Marty Goddards of today, people who were really thinking about how would we?
Speaker 3:And there aren't many of them, unfortunately. But I found some interesting people who had ideas about, you know, how we could rethink the kit, make it more effective, make it less burdensome on the survivors, burdensome on the survivors, um. So I talked to those people and, um, you know I don't have again there's. I think the answer has to really come from. I would like to see it really come from a survivor-led initiative yeah um, you know, unfortunately there's too little weight given to the survivor experience.
Speaker 3:There's so much asked of survivors to go to an ER, wait potentially eight hours, go through a very invasive exam that can last five hours to go through what might be very difficult interactions with the police. You know that is a lot and a lot of people don't have a car to get to the hospital. They don't have child care to be out of pocket for 24 hours doing this. You know I mean this is not accessible to a lot of people. So for me that accessibility problem is really the big one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's an incredible observation based on a lot of work and dedication from you. We thank you for the work that you've done and that you're doing, and for talking with me today.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for those great questions.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe and follow us on social media at National CCAW.