Bodies of Evidence: A History of ‘Rape Kit’ Protocols in U.S. Emergency Nursing and Global Humanitarian Medicine

Jaimie Morse
Sociology
UC Santa Cruz

Routine administration of medical forensic exams for sexual assault (commonly known as “rape kits”) in emergency medicine is one of the most significant institutional reforms advanced by the U.S. anti-rape movement since the 1970s. Nurses were key allies who translated social movement demands into new medical routines. In the 1990s international aid organizations drew on clinical nursing guidelines to adapt “rape kit” protocols for use with refugees. New clinical guidelines transformed the rape kit into an assemblage of instruments, medical routines, and new ways of thinking about sexual assault. Drawing on archival research, data from over 50 in-depth interviews with nurses, doctors, lawyers, activists, and other experts, and fieldwork at international meetings in global centers of diplomatic and humanitarian policy-making (including Geneva, London, Paris, and The Hague), Bodies of Evidence follows “rape kit” protocols as a traveling technology of care and a technology of governance and law.  In charting this history, Bodies of Evidence prompts crucial questions about the intersection between medicine, law, care, and justice—a profoundly consequential, yet contested zone of meaning and practice. 

Image credit: Valerie Garcia, UC Santa Cruz alum (copyright 2024).