Whose rape kit? Stabilizing the Vitullo® Kit through positivist criminology and protocol feminism
| Author | Renee Shelby |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618819805 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
819805TCR0010.1177/1362480618819805Theoretical CriminologyShelby
research-article2018
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2020, Vol. 24(4) 669 –688
Whose rape kit? Stabilizing
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480618819805
DOI: 10.1177/1362480618819805
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
positivist criminology and
protocol feminism
Renee Shelby
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Abstract
Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship has increasingly focused on the rape
kit, with scholars critiquing the gendered biases that are enacted through the medico-
legal exam and how the kit itself serves as a technoscientific witness of rape. However,
little scholarship has focused on the discourses surrounding the early US Vitullo® Kit.
This article traces the stabilization of the kit from 1973 to 1987, attending to how
community advocates embraced technoscientific protocols to intervene in medico-
legal evidence collection. I bring insights from criminology in conversation with STS,
to examine archival records associated with the Vitullo® Kit. I argue the kit emerged
as a strategic feminist and positivist criminological intervention, in which discourses
about the perceived reliability and objectivity of protocol technoscience were believed
to counter gendered stereotypes embedded in the justice system. This project, sheds
new light on the neglected contributions of community advocates in developing this kit.
Keywords
Forensic, gender and crime, protocol feminism, rape kit, sexual violence
From 1973 to 1975, the Chicago-based victim advocate Marty Goddard and Dr Cynthia
Porter Erie, an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, conducted infor-
mal, cold-call interviews with law enforcement, state’s attorney’s offices, and crime
Corresponding author:
Renee Shelby, Georgia Institute of Technology, Old Civil Engineering Building, 221 Bobby Dodd Way NW,
Atlanta, Georgia 30332, USA.
Email: rshelby6@gatech.edu
670
Theoretical Criminology 24(4)
laboratories across the country, asking what inhibited rape prosecution in their areas.
Repeatedly, the women were told that quality evidence was a central yet solvable bar-
rier. Although forensic evidence circulates through many actors in the criminal justice
apparatus, including hospital staff, police, crime lab technicians, and prosecutors, with
each offering a junction to reinterpret evidence, Goddard and Erie decided to intervene
at the source, where criminal justice and medico-legal actors initially collected evi-
dence in the emergency room. Their efforts led to the development of the early US rape
kit—the Vitullo® Kit.
The term rape kit typically describes the forensic assembling of biological evi-
dence for scientific analysis. During this process, a trained medical professional
collects specimens such as blood, saliva, or sweat from a victim’s or perpetrator’s
body or belongings and secures these specimens for biomedical testing. For a seem-
ingly mundane object comprised of swabs, slides, and envelopes, the kit has effected
a thorny impact on the criminal justice system. Since its introduction, proponents
have elevated the forensic technology as the definitive standard for investigating
sexual assault (Farrell, 1987). However, despite the perceived reliability of the kit,
forensic evidence continues to have minimal impact on the disposition of charged
cases (Du Mont and White, 2007; Sommers and Baskin, 2011). Scholars have ana-
lyzed the rape kit from a number of insightful angles. These include, among others,
the symbolic power of the rape kit (Corrigan, 2013a; Parnis and Du Mont, 2006); the
kit’s role as a technoscientific witness of rape within the criminal justice system
(Quinlan, 2017); barriers to the effective use of medico-legal findings in adjudicat-
ing cases (Du Mont and White, 2007); the kit’s role in facilitating the “second
assault” of rape victims (Corrigan, 2013a); and the raced, gendered, and classed
biases performed through the kit (Mulla, 2014). Yet there remains a significant gap
on the origins of the Vitullo® Kit.
In this article, I trace the stabilization of the Vitullo® Kit as a technoscientific inter-
vention in the criminal justice system and analyze the technoscientific discourses that
surrounded its development. For scholars, practitioners, and advocates alike, examining
the origins of the kit can refocus attention on the persistent themes and social factors that
permeate its use in the criminal justice system. While the rape kit is often conflated with
DNA testing, the Vitullo® Kit predates this technique, and its intended purpose was
process reform—to increase the likelihood of prosecution by enhancing the ability of
medico-legal actors, police, and prosecutors to produce reliable evidence. Although con-
temporary research shows there is significant discretion in evidentiary collection prac-
tices (Parnis and Mont, 2002), during the 1970s, victims’ rights activists regarded rigid
methods of preserving and processing evidence as a means of offering material substan-
tiation for sexual violence claims—substituting the reliability of the scientific process for
the perceived unreliability of victims’ voices. Through my analysis, I bring theoretical
insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) into conversation with feminist
criminology to argue the Vitullo® Kit emerged as a strategic feminist and positivist
criminological intervention, in which discourses about the perceived reliability and
objectivity of the kit were believed to counter gendered stereotypes embedded in the
criminal justice system.
Shelby
671
Literature review
In this section, I provide a brief background on positivist criminology and the gendered
beliefs about sexual violence embedded in 1970s rape law. I then offer an overview of
Science and Technology Studies approaches to forensic evidence knowledge making and
the rape kit.
Positivism, feminist criminology, and 1970s rape law
In the US context, the relationship between law and science is derived from the political
commitment to resolve conflict through law and the belief that science and technological
progress produce objective truth (Jasanoff, 1997; Lynch et al., 2010). It is these entwined
and constitutive cultures of law and science that led to the development of positivist
criminology—referring to the belief that science can disclose an objective reality and
that social order is something knowable and reducible to the laws of nature. The episte-
mology of positivist criminology relies on counting and classification to reveal the
“truths” of the social and natural world, without critical reflection or meaningful inter-
pretation (Morrison, 2014). As many feminist criminologists have argued, commitment
to positivist inquiry lead to essentialized and androcentric assumptions about crime vic-
tims and offenders that often overlooked the constitutive role of power (Cain, 1990; Daly
and Chesney-Lind, 1988; Naffine, 2018). In contrast to positivist criminology, feminist
criminology emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a practice concerned with how knowl-
edge about crime is created and who is creating it (Mason and Stubbs, 2010). Of particu-
lar interest to feminist criminologists is confronting the stereotyped and singular accounts
of women in popular criminology that are based on assumptions of gendered behavior
(Gelsthorpe, 2002), especially in the context of rape law (Corrigan, 2013b; Du Mont and
Parnis, 1999).
In light of gendered beliefs about crime in rape law, a primary goal of the 1970s femi-
nist victim advocacy movement was to challenge the treatment of rape victims in the
criminal justice system and craft support systems as a buttress against women’s lack of
social power and status (Young, 2006). Feminists have long established that while vic-
tims have struggled to have any rape case taken seriously, victims whose assaults did not
align with the expected classic rape narrative struggled even more (e.g. Brownmiller,
1975). As Linda Williams (1984) articulated, the classic rape narrative—in which an
unknown man brutally assaults (a woman) in an isolated yet public place, after which the
woman is required to prove the attack happened, and that she actively resisted it—is
culturally considered the most legible form of sexual violence. The classic rape script
deploys tropes of the innocent/pure victim and frames offenders as perverted psycho-
paths with abnormal, broken, and unchangeable masculinity characterized by insatiable
sexual desires (Shelby and Hatch, 2014). This script is embedded in the criminal justice
system and in our cultural imaginary as the most widely enacted form of assault, and
constitutes a significant and problematic rape myth (Ryan, 1988).
Early feminist criminology sought to expose the prevalence of rape stereotypes in
explanations of crime, law, and policy (Smart, 1995). While the history of feminist activ-
ists’ work on rape policy is covered elsewhere (Bevacqua, 2000), the gendered problem
672
Theoretical Criminology 24(4)
of evidence and rape myths embedded in 1970s law is especially relevant for this analy-
sis. In 1977, the Battelle Law and Justice Study Center published Forcible rape: An
analysis of legal issues (LeGrand et al., 1977: 20), in which the authors cite three ele-
ments must be proven in a criminal trial of rape: (1) that a sexual assault, through pene-
tration or other...
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