Bodies of Evidence: A History of Rape Kit Protocols in US Emergency Nursing and Global Humanitarian Medicine

Bodies of Evidence disrupts popular understandings of the rape kit by examining it as a complex assemblage of practices and protocols that stands at the uneasy nexus of law and medicine. Jaimie Morse traces how this assemblage was championed as a rights project in medicine, moving from the margins to the center of health care responses to sexual violence through new clinical standards of care, first in the United States and then in global humanitarian medicine. Drawing on archival research, interviews with experts and activists, and fieldwork at international meetings, the book chronicles a novel process of legal mobilization in medicine and interrogates the existential meanings and stakes of rape kits, their associated practices, and their underlying assumptions and expectations for survivors of sexual violence. “Compellingly places the so-called rape kit at the center of scholarship on law and medicine. Jaimie Morse’s use of data is original and fascinating, sweeping and detailed.” — ANNA KIRKLAND, author of Health Care Civil Rights: How Discrimination Law Fails Patients “Morse is unflinching in examining difficult questions about the rape kit’s mobilization in clinical and legal spaces. Essential reading.” — RENE ALMELING, author of GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health “An ambitious, groundbreaking, and ultimately successful achievement in research and analysis.” — JONATHAN SIMON, UC Berkeley School of Law “Morse thoroughly and carefully illuminates how very different parts and aspects of society had to be brought together for the rape kit to come into being as the widely used artifact it is today.” — CORINNA KRUSE, author of The Social Life of Forensic Evidence Jaimie Morse is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.