In the seventies, as the anti-rape movement gained force, the number of rapes reported to police started to climb, with allegations of “acquaintance rape” accounting for much of the rise. More survivors began speaking publicly about their assaults, challenging legally encoded stereotypes about rape. States enacted rape-shield laws, which sharply limited the ability of defense attorneys to badger complainants with irrelevant questions about their sexual history.
The advent of the rape kit, meanwhile, helped to codify a minimum level of response to the pleas of a rape victim and, in theory, to “display to honest men the injury done to her.” Goddard’s innovation led to innumerable arrests, guilty pleas, and convictions. DNA evidence in rape kits has exonerated the innocent—including many Black men who were falsely accused of assaulting white women—and cracked decades-old cold cases. Joseph DeAngelo, known as the Golden State Killer, who committed dozens of rapes and murders beginning in the mid-seventies, was finally apprehended in 2018 using a combination of rape-kit evidence, a family DNA profile, and swabs from his car door and a used tissue.
But, as Kennedy’s book makes painfully clear, the rape kit has also become a paradoxical symbol of systemic indifference toward rape and its victims. Even today, research by criminologists suggests that police will be dubious about a rape allegation if the woman was drinking, was at a party, or, as in cases of “acquaintance rape,” knew her assailant. This reflexive skepticism naturally extends to the victims’ rape kits—which partly explains why, every few years, a scandalous news report emerges about one municipality or another that either hoarded or destroyed its untested kits.
In 2009, more than eleven thousand kits were discovered in a warehouse in Detroit. A police chief in Fayetteville, North Carolina, admitted, in 2015, that his department had thrown away three hundred and thirty-three kits, about half of which were tied to unresolved cases, to make space in its evidence room. A 2018 CNN investigation found that agencies in fourteen states had destroyed some four hundred kits before the statute of limitations on them ran out. Hundreds of thousands of kits sit untested nationwide, and ten states still have no tracking system for them. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation currently takes more than five hundred days, on average, to process a rape kit.