Rape kits are used to collect evidence of sexual assault for testing
Jaclyn Nash/National Museum of American History
The Secret History of the Rape Kit
Pagan Kennedy (Vintage Books)
While writing Inventology, a book on inventions that create social change and the people behind them, Pagan Kennedy became fascinated by what she describes as “a piece of technology designed to hold men accountable for brutalizing women”: the rape kit.
But who invented it? Newspaper reports credited Chicago police sergeant Louis R. Vitullo at the city’s crime lab, but a few accounts mentioned a woman he collaborated with. Kennedy investigated, and…
