UNTESTED

The frustrated promise of the rape kit.

- JESSICA WINTER

In 1975, a rape victims' advocate named Linda Reinshagen shared a story with a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. A man on the South Side had pulled a woman into an alley where he raped and badly beat her. A witness called the cops; the victim could be heard screaming from the alley when patrolmen arrived at the scene. "The police caught the rapist running down the street with his pants down," Reinshagen said. "Then they made the victim stand in the rain without her clothes while they argued over which hospital to take her to." Once the victim did reach a hospital, she was not examined or treated for sexual assault. When an attending physician filled out a police report, next to the blank space for "rape" he entered a series of question marks. Almost a year later, the case was still pending in court.

The specifics of the incident adhered to what law enforcement used to call "bonafide rape": the victim was violently attacked by a stranger, with a bystander present, and the assailant was caught in the act. Yet cops and doctors still bungled the follow-up and compounded the survivor's distress. The prospects of a sympathetic, competent reception from law-enforcement officers and medical professionals were worse for victims who knew their rapist, who had been drinking, who didn't report the rape right away, or who lacked witnesses or obvious injuries. At a 1974 hearing of the Illinois House of Representatives' Rape Study Committee, a Chicago-area nurse testified both to her hospital's lack of protocols for rape exams and to her own experience as a survivor. When she told police that she had been raped, they declined to take her to a hospital, she said, "because I was not bruised, cut, or bleeding."