We remember feminism of the 1970s without also recalling exactly what women were being militant about: their voices being muffled, their power minimized, their issues ignored.
Pagan Kennedy’s new book, “The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story,” is a disturbing journey back to the bad old days of Chicago a half century ago. And maybe, the way we’re going, a glimpse into our future, too.
The book begins with the sexual abuse of the author, trauma both specific and universal. “The warnings of sexual assault carried inside them an even more demoralizing and insidious message: This world is not for you.”
Then Kennedy settles into the story of Chicagoan Martha “Marty” Goddard, whose life changes after volunteering at a phone hotline for homeless teenagers.
“I was just beside myself when I found the extent of the problem,” Goddard said. “The runaways were pregnant, homeless, suicidal, strung out.”
She realized she had “stumbled upon a dark and terrible underworld.”
Police would arrest young women, for solicitation or vagrancy. The abuse that had sent them fleeing into the streets wasn’t considered. “No one talked about the crimes that had driven those girls out of their homes.”
It was “a culture in which cops played pranks on victims, making them the butt of sick jokes. At least one officer persuaded a woman to strip naked, so that he could photograph her wounds as evidence. He then passed the photos around to his buddies, as if they were porn.”
Mayor Richard J. Daley deployed a taunt when the subject of corruption arose — “Where’s your proof?” — that served double for rape victims. It was her word against his, and everybody knew who was trustworthy, who unreliable.
The solution was to collect evidence immediately after these crimes, which led to the rape kit, a box filled with swabs, combs and other equipment designed to collect evidence after a woman — or man; 9% of rape victims are men — was assaulted.
Goddard championed the kit for both its practical and ideological value: “It’s true power came from a new set of ideas,” Kennedy writes. Ideas starting with: What happens to women matters.
The kit was named, not for Goddard, but for a Chicago police sergeant, Louis Vitullo, and unpacking that fact brings us back — and maybe forward — to a world where women carry less authority than men. Having a man’s name made the kit more acceptable to law enforcement that, frankly, couldn’t be bothered investigating sexual assault.
If you’re wondering why this book would snag my attention, it’s because in 2012, then-Attorney General Lisa Madigan called to discuss the state’s Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners program, or SANE, training nurses to use these kits.
The program was a bomb. Of 200 hospitals in the state of Illinois, two participated. Neither were close to Chicago.
And you want me to write about this? I asked, amazed. Politicians as a rule don’t tout their failures.
What she wanted, Madigan said, were more participants.
I wish I could say my story changed anything. But it didn’t. In 2018, the Tribune revisited the subject and found scant improvement.
“There are more than 196,000 registered nurses in Illinois,” Alison Bowen wrote. “Only 32 nurses in the state are certified by the International Association of Forensic Nurses to work with adult sexual assault patients.”
This is the part of the story where I tell you how the SANE program is doing now. Hard to say. Haunted by the memory of how forthcoming the attorney general was in 2012, I spent 10 days calling and emailing every member of the Illinois AG press office.
Nobody would talk about the SANE program or even provide statistics. Exasperated, I phoned AG Kwame Raoul directly and begged his executive assistant to do something. An hour later, his press office sent two paragraphs of self-congratulation and one applicable statistic: There are now 678 “qualified medical providers.”
Is 678 a significant figure? I guess it’s better than 32. But considering there are 140,000 nurses working in Illinois, still a drop in the bucket. The Chicago Department of Health pointed me to the Illinois Department of Public Health, which suggested I try the attorney general. Bringing us full circle. It seems that Illinois has cleared its backlog of untested kits without addressing the bottleneck thwarting skilled use of those kits.
You can’t fix a problem you can’t even talk about. Fifty years ago, women bold enough to report being raped were smirked at, accused, then ignored. Now they go to a hospital and maybe find someone willing to learn how to use a rape kit by administering it to them.
If that’s progress, it isn’t much. And now our nation is going backward, full steam.