Nicol’s Reviews > The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story > Status Update

”with each case she witness how police detectives gaslighted, humiliated, and bullied victims. ‘It’s a very ugly world, she said. ‘The police accuse the victims of not being able to provide evidence,’ even when they had plenty of it.”

“‘If you’ve seen the police hurting African American people who’ve done nothing wrong, why you go to the police and tell that you’ve been raped?’”

“Sometime around 2020, a group of researchers decided to find out how many nonwhite professionals were working as forensic scientists. They discovered that no one had bothered to collect statistics on racial and gender bias in the field.”

”Less than 1/4 of all survivors chose to report their assaults.Some had been told by police detectives that it was pointless to file an evidence kit because SA was a crime that couldn’t be proved.Sexual assault was the least reported violent crime in the US, and the dismal statistics suggested that as many as 80% of survivors felt that this system had not been built for them. They had no desire to engage with it.”

“For decades, it was generally believed that serial predators were rare. Now, however, it’s becoming clear that serial rapists only seem to be rare because police departments so often fail to catch them, bungling cases and ignoring survivors. ‘Our findings emphasize that serial sex offending is quite common’”

””Chillingly, two-thirds of serial rapists had never been arrested for sexual assault before the backlogged evidence was tested, even though some of them had been active for years. That ‘is an indicator as to just how much undetected sexual offending there is,’ Lovell told a reporter in 2020. It was also an indication of just how little police departments had to prevent it.”

”During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost all of the patentable ideas generated by African American and female originators could be appropriated by a small group of wealthy white men, so the U.S. patent system became one of the prime tools of extractive capitalism.”

”It seemed logical, then, that the most effective inventor of a sexual-assault forensics system would be a woman. And it also seemed cruelly inevitable that a man would be the one to receive the credit.”

”In other words, sexual-assault forensics began as a system for men to decide whether a woman deserved to be considered a victim at all. It had little to do with identifying a perpetrator or establishing the truth.”

”We girls were put on notice that stairwells, laundry rooms, parking garages, running trails in parks, and the entire world after midnight were made by and for men. We were allowed to share these places, so long as we didn’t get too comfortable in them. The warnings of sexual assault carried inside them an even more demoralizing and insidious message: this world is not for you.”