During the first Donald Trump presidency – when Christine Blasey Ford testified before Congress that the president’s Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh,had sexually assaulted her, and he was appointed anyway – the American writer Pagan Kennedy found herself thinking about all the man-made objects that seemed specifically designed to let men get away with rape: date-rape drugs, stalkerware software and car doors with driver-controlled locks. Had anything ever been invented to discourage sexual assault, she wondered?
And so began her years-long investigation into the origins of the rape kit. “A work of audacious genius”, it was a box that contained a few cheap, household objects – combs and clippers, swabs and slides – for gathering forensic evidence, but that represented a fundamental shift in how sexual assault was treated by police, and by society at large. Rape kits meant assailants could be identified, survivors could present some hard evidence before court and rape could be investigated and treated as a serious crime.
The first rape kits were named Vitullo kits, after the Chicago police sergeant Louis Vitullo, who was widely credited with inventing them in the early 1970s. This origin story struck Kennedy as “counter-intuitive”. At the time, the Chicago police force was notorious for its corruption and violence. Kennedy, a New York Times journalist and the author of the non-fiction book Inventology, which explores how new technologies come into existence, has found that inventors usually have some skin in the game – a pressing reason to solve a particular problem.
The more Kennedy dug around, the clearer it became that the real brains behind the rape kit was a woman named Martha “Marty” Goddard. Goddard, if she was mentioned in the historical record at all, was usually named as a collaborator. The Chicago activist not only came up with the idea for the rape kit but also spearheaded the fundraising, training and campaigning needed for its adoption, first in her home town and then elsewhere.
Goddard’s former co-workers told Kennedy that she was pressured by Vitullo into letting him claim credit for her work. No one, however, seemed to know why Goddard dropped out of public view in the 1980s – just as her efforts were finally paying off and the arrival of DNA testing had turned rape kits into a formidable tool for cracking cold cases – and cut all ties with her former friends and allies. Kennedy’s propulsive new book, The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story, explores Goddard’s history-making invention and investigates her mysterious disappearance.
In the 1970s, most of the other volunteers working for Metro-Help, a helpline for homeless teenagers, were hippies; Marty Goddard stood out in her smart business attire. She was in her early thirties, divorced and working for a local philanthropic organisation. Most people saw homeless teens as “runaways” – bad kids who had chosen to tune in and drop out into the counter-culture – but Goddard learned how many were fleeing childhood sexual abuse. She grew determined to expose the extent of the problem and find a way to hold predators to account.
She saw an opportunity to do so a few years later. In 1974, a group of suburban housewives complained to members of the Illinois General Assembly about the incompetence of the police at dealing with epidemic levels of sexual violence. One woman, who had fended off an attacker with a fireplace poker and then carefully saved the bent poker as evidence, recounted how a police officer had simply returned it to her, unbent, thinking she wanted him to fix it. With the incoming police chief under pressure to finally do something, Goddard persuaded him to appoint her and a colleague to lead a new citizens advice panel on policing and rape.
The first time she shared her ideas for a rape kit with Vitullo, a famous (or at least “Chicago famous”) investigator, he reportedly screamed at her. But – and Kennedy’s reporting doesn’t quite reveal why – he relented. By 1976, Goddard had founded a non-profit to train hospital and lab staff in how to use the new technology. She succeeded in raising $10,000 in early funding from the Playboy Foundation (more than $50,000 in today’s money). Hugh Hefner was an early champion of abortion and birth control, because “his ideal Playmate was liberated and eager to explore her own sexuality”, Kennedy writes. She does not mention that Hefner was later subject to multiple allegations of rape, or that many former Playmates have told journalists that sexual assault was rife in the Playboy mansion.
By the end of 1979, nearly 3,000 kits had been turned over to crime labs. As her success soared, Goddard’s mental health declined. Sometime in the late 1970s, Goddard was raped while on holiday in Hawaii, an assault that had a lasting physical as well as emotional impact. She became an alcoholic and a workaholic completely consumed by her campaigning. In 1988 she gave a final interview before seemingly dropping off the map.
If inventors usually have a pressing personal reason for creating what they do, so do writers, and some of the most powerful and poignant passages in this book are Kennedy’s reflections on her own experience of sexual assault and its long aftermath. Kennedy relates to Blasey Ford, because the teenager who raped her also grew up to occupy a powerful government position: “Like her I had been collateral damage. The future presidents, generals, CIA operatives, lobbyists and justices had to learn how to dominate, how to be ruthless,” she writes. She also feels a very close affinity with Goddard. At points she comes to see her subject as a “maternal figure”. “She was the woman who had believed little girls. I had wanted to fiddle with the gears of time, fly back to the 1970s, shrink down into a girl again and tell her my troubles. I felt she would have been able to hear me and avenge me,” Kennedy writes. At other times, Kennedy says she became consumed with the fantasy of avenging Goddard: she would put her name in history, she would find out the name of her rapist and ensure he is held accountable for what he did.
Kennedy was ultimately not able to discover the name of Goddard’s rapist, but the book does something more than reclaim her proper role in history: it gives her a voice. Goddard herself was extremely shy, she gave few interviews, never spoke publicly of her assault or the violence of her childhood and, towards the end of her life, she was too unwell to speak lucidly of her work. By writing with such courage about her own experiences of sexual assault, Kennedy helps the reader better understand Goddard and place her invention in its proper context. Kennedy describes attending feminist meetings while at university in the early 1980s and understanding, for the first time, that what happened to her as a child was a serious crime rather than her fault. The arrival of rape kits didn’t only herald a change in how the police and criminal justice system treated rape, but also changed how survivors could see themselves.
This was a thought I seized on, because what a grim time it is to be reading such a book. In the UK, organisations such as the Centre for Women’s Justice and the End Violence Against Women Coalition have warned that rape has been “effectively decriminalised” as a court backlog and declining police funding mean prosecutions and convictions have fallen to record lows. Kennedy’s book was published in the US a few days before the inauguration of a president who has been subject to dozens of sexual misconduct allegations, and who is surrounding himself with advisers who have also been accused of sexual abuse and misconduct.
But The Secret History of the Rape Kit serves as a reminder that some progress is hard to undo. Thanks to the efforts of women like Martha Goddard, survivors know that rape is a crime, that they have been wronged and that they deserve better than broken criminal justice systems.
The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story
Pagan Kennedy
Vintage, 320pp, £15.99
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[See also: Labour has lost the language of solidarity]
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This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation