Visions of Public Safety, Justice, and Healing: The Making of the Rape Kit Backlog in the United States
| Published date | 01 April 2020 |
| Author | Andrea Quinlan |
| Date | 01 April 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919829848 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2020, Vol. 29(2) 225–245
Visions of Public Safety,
ª The Author(s) 2019
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Justice, and Healing:
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663919829848
The Making of the Rape
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Kit Backlog in the
United States
Andrea Quinlan
University of Waterloo, Canada
Abstract
Large backlogs of untested sexual assault kits have recently come to light in cities across
the United States, fueling public controversies over criminal justice responses to sexual
assault and sexual assault forensic services. This article examines these controversies to
reveal how kit backlogs have come to matter as a political problem. Using a range of
textual data, this article traces the history of the sexual assault kit backlog in New York
City and contemporary national campaigns around kit backlogs to examine how sexual
assault kit backlogs are being defined as threats to public safety, justice, and healing for
victims of crime. Drawing on theoretical insights from actor-network theory, institu-
tional ethnography, and feminist technoscience studies, this article examines the impli-
cations of the current framing of kit backlogs for sexual assault survivors and their allies,
and current dialogues about criminal justice responses to sexual assault.
Keywords
Actor-network theory, feminist technoscience studies, institutional ethnography, rape
kit backlogs, sexual assault forensics
Introduction
News reports of hundreds of thousands of untested forensic sexual assault kits sitting in
police storage facilities and forensic labs across the United States have sparked wide-
spread public debate about criminal justice responses to sexual assault in America.
Corresponding author:
Andrea Quinlan, Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L3G1,
Canada.
Email: andrea.quinlan@uwaterloo.ca
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Social & Legal Studies 29(2)
A growing number of legislators, advocates, and activists have been calling police
organizations and public forensic laboratories to task for failing to routinely test forensic
sexual assault kits, which contain records of victims’ injuries and samples of bodily
fluids that in some cases can be used to identify perpetrators of sexual assault. American
victim rights organizations that promote criminal justice reform and improved services
for sexual assault victims, such as the Joyful Heart Foundation; Natasha’s Justice Proj-
ect; and Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network, have been spearheading national cam-
paigns to demand more funding for sexual assault kit testing. This article interrogates
these campaigns to explore what they reveal about contemporary understandings of
forensic science, technology, and sexual violence prevention.
In these campaigns, victim rights organizations have cast backlogs of untested kits,
which have arisen from decades of police failing to submit kits for testing and public
laboratories’ limited resources, as threats to public safety. Forensic sexual assault kits
have been cast as essential tools for investigating and prosecuting sexual assault and
enhancing victims’ healing and access to justice. Natasha’s Justice Project asserts, ‘each
of these kits represents a victim seeking justice and a potential serial criminal who may
be wandering the streets, looking for new victims’ (Natasha’s Justice Project, 2017),
while the Joyful Heart Foundation (2015) uses the slogan ‘hundreds of thousands of rape
kits sit untested: each one represents a lost opportunity for healing and justice’. Amer-
ican legislators and law enforcement officials have chimed in with similar contentions
about the powers of forensic kit evidence to convict sexual offenders. Congresswoman
Carolyn Maloney, an avid supporter of backlog reduction efforts, asserts that ‘by pro-
cessing this evidence, we can prevent rapists from attacking more innocent victims and
ensure that the survivors and their families receive justice’ (Maloney, 2009: para. 2),
while Cuyahoga County Office of the Prosecutor (2015: para. 9) stresses that the con-
tents of the kit are ‘a ticket to prison for a trainload of violent rapists’. In the ongoing
campaigns to end kit backlogs, the kit – a cardboard box filled with bodily fluids, hairs,
and pictures of injuries taken during a sexual assault medical examination – has become
a symbol of justice that is imbued with the power to convict sexual offenders.
These mainstream campaigns and discussions around sexual assault kit backlogs raise
several important questions: How did kit backlogs come to be seen as threats to public
safety in the United States? How did the kit come to be understood as an essential
technology for justice, healing, and safety? What work has gone into configuring the
kit in this way and into making the backlog matter as a political and social problem?
And, what are the consequences of this configuring, and for whom? Answering these
questions offers insight into much more than sexual assault kit backlogs. Public dialogue
around kit backlogs sheds light on popular conceptions of forensic science and technol-
ogy and common ideas about its role in sexual assault prevention and justice. As such,
the making of the backlog is worth interrogating. Drawing on theoretical and methodo-
logical insights from feminist technoscience studies, actor-network theory (ANT), and
institutional ethnography (IE), this article takes a historical look at sexual assault kit
backlogs and examines how they have come to matter as a social and political problem in
the United States. In particular, this article interrogates how the singular meaning of kit
backlogs as threats to public safety, justice, and healing has been made through ongoing
Quinlan
227
debates and campaigns around sexual assault forensics and considers what the conse-
quences of this may be and for whom.
Sexual Assault Kits and Kit Backlogs
Forensic sexual assault kits are standardized forensic evidence collection tools that
forensic nurses and physicians use to collect bodily fluids and document physical injuries
on a victim of sexual assault. While they can vary in specific design, forensic sexual
assault kits in most jurisdictions contain swabs for collecting traces of foreign bodily
fluids, vials for urine and blood samples, envelopes for hair and foreign debris, paper
bags for clothing, standardized forms for documenting injuries, and instructions for
conducting the forensic exam (Du Mont and White, 2007). A forensic sexual assault kit
exam usually involves multiple steps in which a forensic nurse swabs different areas of a
victim’s body for fluid samples, combs a victim’s hair for loose debris, photographs and
documents a victim’s injuries, and bags the victim’s clothing for analysis. If the sexual
assault involved penetration of any kind, the exam can also include an internal examina-
tion, in which a forensic nurse uses a variety of technologies to magnify and photograph
injuries inside the victim’s vagina, anus, or mouth (White and Du Mont, 2009). Forensic
exams with sexual assault kits can last up to 6 hours. If a sexual assault kit is sent to the
laboratory, forensic scientists can analyze the kit’s samples of bodily fluids, clothing,
and hair for DNA profiles to identify perpetrators of sexual assault and confirm recent
sexual activity. The samples of the victim’s blood and urine can also be analyzed to
determine a victim’s level of intoxication during the assault (Du Mont and White, 2007).
Sexual assault kit backlogs have been defined in many ways. However, in mainstream
campaigns on sexual assault kit backlogs, the phrase commonly refers to kits that have
remained untested for approximately 30–90 days in police storage facilities and/or
forensic laboratories (Nelson, 2011). The ongoing debates about this term are examined
later in this article.
Much of the existing literature on sexual assault kits has focused on medical practi-
tioners who use the kit, and the settings and effects of sexual assault kit evidence in legal
cases of sexual assault. More specifically, this literature has spanned topics that include
the development and effectiveness of professional groups associated with sexual assault
kits (Campbell et al., 2005; Du Mont and Parnis, 2003; Sievers et al., 2003; Stermac and
Stirpe, 2002), institutional settings and practices around forensic sexual assault kit exams
(Hatmaker et al., 2002; Rees, 2010; Sampsel et al., 2009), and the effects of sexual
assault kits on arrest and conviction rates (Campbell et al., 2009; Feldberg, 1997; John-
son et al., 2012; McGregor et al., 2002). Literature on sexual assault kit backlogs
specifically has focused on institutional practices that contribute to kit backlogs (Camp-
bell et al., 2015; Patterson and Campbell, 2012; Telsavaara and Arrigo, 2006), the value
of testing backlogged kits (Fallik and Wells, 2015; Wells, 2016), and the consequences
of kit backlogs on victims and the criminal justice system (Hansen, 2010; O’Connor,
2003; Peterson et al., 2012; Spohn, 2016). In this broad literature, less attention has been
given to the mainstream discussions about kit backlogs and their potential implications.
Addressing this gap, this article interrogates how understandings of sexual assault kits
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and kit backlogs have been constructed in backlog campaigns and how the backlog has
come to matter in the United States.
The ‘Ontological Politics’ of the Rape Kit Backlog
For decades, backlogs of untested sexual assault kits were largely invisible....
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