Learning from the History of Rape Kit Protocols
By Jaimie Morse, author of Bodies of Evidence: A History of Rape Kit Protocols in US Emergency Nursing and Global Humanitarian Medicine
Bodies of Evidence grew out of my experiences as a volunteer at a rape crisis center. I was part of a county-level response team that involved police, prosecutors, nurse examiners, and rape crisis center staff. In the jurisdiction where I volunteered, medical forensic exams for sexual assault (commonly known as “rape kits”) were conducted in a dedicated facility by nurse examiners. I was on-call to provide support and accompaniment for survivors of sexual violence during the exam. I did not know at the time that I would end up writing a book on the subject.
When I began my PhD, I wanted to learn more about the history of sexual assault response team interventions like the one I had been a part of. I began by tracing the history of activism in nursing for new standards of care that combined post-rape therapeutics, such as emergency contraception and prophylactic treatment of sexually transmitted infections, with forensic evidence collection beginning in the 1970s. I soon discovered that models of care developed by American nurses had influenced international standards in humanitarian medicine. Experts convened by the World Health Organization and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had used nurse-activists’ clinical nursing protocols as models when they drafted the first international guidelines on post-rape medical care in humanitarian emergencies. Once published in the early 2000s, these new international guidelines paved the way for humanitarian aid organizations to increasingly offer post-rape care for refugees and internally displaced persons. UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) Reproductive Health Kits were—and are—instrumental in making post-rape therapeutics available in humanitarian settings.
In the book, I draw on comparative and historical methods to trace the origins of new clinical standards of care in U.S. emergency nursing, how these standards were adapted for use in humanitarian medicine, and the challenges surrounding their implementation through a case study of the work of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF or Doctors Without Borders) in providing post-rape care. To do so, I bring together two areas of scholarship that are rarely put in conversation—sociolegal studies and science and technology studies (STS)—to explore questions of epistemology, representation, and social justice in anti-rape activism in medicine.
I wrote the book to distill key lessons and insights from this history that I believe raise important questions for anti-rape activism today. So I would like to invite you, the reader, into a conversation with me that I hope will begin with the book, but continue well beyond.