Nutshell Crime Scenes: The Rape Kit
Tess Little, 20 November 2025
The rape kit is a cardboard box containing ordinary items anyone might own: envelopes, combs, swabs, nail clippers. But the packaging together of these things in Chicago in the 1970s enabled the standardisation of evidence collection following a sexual assault, greatly increasing the likelihood of prosecution. At the time, US state laws tended to define rape as something that occurs when...

