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.
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