by Pagan Kennedy, Vintage
Reviewed:
by Tess Little, in the London Review of Books, Vol., No., 15 May 2026, p.25-26
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n21/tess-little/nutshell-crime-scenes
“The Rape Kit is a cardboard box containing ordinary items anyone might own: envelopes, combs, swabs, nail clippers. But the packaging together of these things in Chicago in the 1970s enabled the standardisation of evidence collected following a sexual assault, greatly increasing the likelihood of prosecution.
At the time, US state laws tended to define rape as something that occurs when the accused ‘has carnal knowledge of a female’ who is ‘not his wife’ and this takes place ‘forcibly and against her will’. Under this definition, men could not be raped and wives could not be raped by their husbands. Sexual violence was conceptualised as something that happened outside the home, perpetrated by violence strangers. If the accuser had known the alleged rapist, if there were no signs of struggle, who was to say a crime had been committed? The question for police and prosecutors was whether the victim had consented, and because rape usually occurred without other witnesses, only the victim could prove this.
Unlike other kinds of victim, the raped person was treated as a suspect. It was the victim who had to submit to an invasive medical examination, the victim who was interrogated. When a woman went to a Chicago hospital after a sexual assault, she would be asked to remove her clothes so they could be used as evidence. Police would cross-examine her and ask whether she had seduced her assailant. Had she enjoyed it? A 1973 training manual advised cadets that “many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge against an unfaithful lover.” Afterwards, the victim would be sent home in a police car for all her neighbours to see, wearing paper slippers and a surgical gown….”
SOURCE: Article in the London Review of Books, 15 May 2026, pp. 25-26. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n21/tess-little/nutshell-crime-scenes