'Secret History of the Rape Kit' reveals past, future

Photo by Jaclyn Nash, courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History

      We remember feminism of the 1970s without also recalling exactly what women were being militant about: their voices being muffled, their power minimized, their issues ignored.
     Pagan Kennedy's new book, "The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story," is a disturbing journey back to the bad old days of Chicago a half century ago. And maybe, the way we're going, a glimpse into our future, too.
     The book begins with the sexual abuse of the author, trauma both specific and universal. "The warnings of sexual assault carried inside them an even more demoralizing and insidious message: This world is not for you."
     Then Kennedy settles into the story of Chicagoan Martha "Marty" Goddard, whose life changes after volunteering at a phone hotline for homeless teenagers.
     "I was just beside myself when I found the extent of the problem," Goddard said. "The runaways were pregnant, homeless, suicidal, strung out."
     She realized she had "stumbled upon a dark and terrible underworld."
     Police would arrest young women, for solicitation or vagrancy. The abuse that had sent them fleeing into the streets wasn't considered. "No one talked about the crimes that had driven those girls out of their homes."
     It was "a culture in which cops played pranks on victims, making them the butt of sick jokes. At least one officer persuaded a woman to strip naked, so that he could photograph her wounds as evidence. He then passed the photos around to his buddies, as if they were porn."
     Mayor Richard J. Daley deployed a taunt when the subject of corruption arose — "Where's your proof?" — that served double for rape victims. It was her word against his, and everybody knew who was trustworthy, who unreliable.
     The solution was to collect evidence immediately after these crimes, which led to the rape kit, a box filled with swabs, combs and other equipment designed to collect evidence after a woman — or man; 9% of rape victims are men — was assaulted.
     Goddard championed the kit for both its practical and ideological value: "It's true power came from a new set of ideas," Kennedy writes. Ideas starting with: What happens to women matters.
     The kit was named, not for Goddard, but for a Chicago police sergeant, Louis Vitullo, and unpacking that fact brings us back — and maybe forward — to a world where women carry less authority than men. Having a man's name made the kit more acceptable to law enforcement that, frankly, couldn't be bothered investigating sexual assault.

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