In 2021, the Smithsonian acquired something called the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit for Sexual Assault Examination. It was a 10-by-6-inch cardboard container filled mostly with items you could buy at any pharmacy, but for millions of American women, the “rape kit,” as this 1970s invention is now known, was a revolution in a box.

Oh, and one important detail: The Chicago police sergeant Louis Vitullo didn’t invent the kit that initially bore his name. That credit goes to Martha “Marty” Goddard, a determined, soft-spoken woman who came up with the idea of a consistent set of standardized tools to collect evidence after an assault — but then disappeared before it became the national standard it is today.

How Goddard dreamed up her creation is the central question of “The Secret History of the Rape Kit,” by Pagan Kennedy, a journalist with a “feverish obsession” with the subject. “How,” she asks, “does a tool that empowers women ever get built in a man’s world?”

Out of necessity, in this case. As a volunteer at a Chicago crisis center, Goddard began to see “a dark and terrible underworld” of young rape survivors. She set about understanding their experiences, wheedling her way into local police departments and interviewing hospital and crime-lab personnel to learn what it would take to solve cases.

Kennedy argues convincingly that not much had changed in the 400 years between when an English judge dismissed rape as “an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved,” and 1970s Chicago, where a police training manual taught that “it is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge” against “a boyfriend with a roving eye.” When officers did do forensic exams, she writes, they were “Kabuki theater” usually designed to expose a mendacious woman, or to conveniently convict a nearby Black male. Physical evidence was lost; victims were left humiliated; justice was rare.

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