The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story
Marty Goddard dreamed up a new crime-solving tool—a kit that could help rape survivors fight for justice. This thrilling investigation tells the story of the troubled, heroic woman who kicked off a feminist revolution in forensics, and then vanished into obscurity.
"Astonishing . . . Marty Goddard takes her rightful place as a visionary thanks to Kennedy’s relentless investigation.”—Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises
"The Secret History of the Rape Kit is stunning: part thriller, part feminist reclamation, part personal journey, fully a page-turner. How did we not know about Marty Goddard?"—Peggy Orenstein author of Girls & Sex and Boys & Sex
In 1972, Martha "Marty" Goddard volunteered at a crisis hotline, counseling girls who had been molested by their fathers, their teachers, their uncles. Soon, Marty was on a mission to answer a question: Why were so many sexual predators getting away with these crimes? By the end of the decade, she had launched a campaign pushing hospitals and police departments to collect evidence of sexual assault and treat survivors with dignity. She designed a new kind of forensics tool—the rape kit—and new practices around evidence collection that spread across the country. Yet even as Marty fought for women's rights, she allowed a man to take credit for her work.
When journalist Pagan Kennedy went looking for this forgotten pioneer, she discovered that even Marty Goddard's closest friends had lost track of her. As Pagan followed a trail of clues to solve the mystery of Marty, she also delved into the problematic history of forensics in America. The Secret History of the Rape Kit chronicles one journalist's mission to understand a crucial innovation in forensics and the woman who championed it. As Pagan Kennedy hunts for answers, she reflects on her own experiences with sexual assault and her own desire for justice.
"Astonishing . . . Marty Goddard takes her rightful place as a visionary thanks to Kennedy’s relentless investigation.”—Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises
"The Secret History of the Rape Kit is stunning: part thriller, part feminist reclamation, part personal journey, fully a page-turner. How did we not know about Marty Goddard?"—Peggy Orenstein author of Girls & Sex and Boys & Sex
In 1972, Martha "Marty" Goddard volunteered at a crisis hotline, counseling girls who had been molested by their fathers, their teachers, their uncles. Soon, Marty was on a mission to answer a question: Why were so many sexual predators getting away with these crimes? By the end of the decade, she had launched a campaign pushing hospitals and police departments to collect evidence of sexual assault and treat survivors with dignity. She designed a new kind of forensics tool—the rape kit—and new practices around evidence collection that spread across the country. Yet even as Marty fought for women's rights, she allowed a man to take credit for her work.
When journalist Pagan Kennedy went looking for this forgotten pioneer, she discovered that even Marty Goddard's closest friends had lost track of her. As Pagan followed a trail of clues to solve the mystery of Marty, she also delved into the problematic history of forensics in America. The Secret History of the Rape Kit chronicles one journalist's mission to understand a crucial innovation in forensics and the woman who championed it. As Pagan Kennedy hunts for answers, she reflects on her own experiences with sexual assault and her own desire for justice.
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Community Reviews
It all started “with a woman in a skirt suit and silk blouse who zoomed around the city in taxicabs. She refused to be branded as a radical, and she also refused to go away…She wrangled with police chiefs and hospital administrators; she trained nurses; she raised money; and she oversaw the development of what was arguably the first large-scale and comprehensive rape-kit system in the world.”
The story of how she did that–and what happened afterward— turned out to be much stranger than journalist Pagan Kennedy could have anticipated, “twisting its way through secret files and spy rings, through the Playboy Foundation, and into the tiny rooms of dollhouses.” The story also led her, finally, “to the mysterious disappearance of Martha Goddard herself.”
“My attention landed on an object I'd been aware of since my college years: the box that holds DNA evidence collected after a sexual assault, known colloquially as the rape kit…its existence struck me as both a miracle and a mystery…Here was an object invented specifically to help a survivor prove that her attack had happened and to help identify the perpetrator.”
“The more I thought about the rape kit, the more it seemed to be a wondrous device that entered our world from an alternate feminist universe…It was part of a system designed…to be wielded equally against a multimillionaire, a media mogul, a Catholic bishop, or a cop. On the face of it, the kit was such a simple device: a cardboard box packed with envelopes for storing biological evidence collected during an examination of an accuser's body.”
Marty Goddard was “a woman who dared to burn down her whole life in order to tell her truth.” She “would be ridiculed, stalked, threatened; she'd be called a vengeful bitch and a crazy media whore. But she wouldn't be silenced…she had just invented some new kind of freedom that could be anyone's for the taking.”
This book was a very interesting read. I know just in general sexual assault is more common than people say. But the history on how and why the rape kit was developed was intriguing to learn about as well as just shocking how things were done back in the 1960s-1980s. Even still there are issues with the store of these evidence kits and the practices of using them.
I really liked how the Pagan was getting into the nitty gritty of finding Marty Goddard and all her research. I might have to look more into this.
I really liked how the Pagan was getting into the nitty gritty of finding Marty Goddard and all her research. I might have to look more into this.
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