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University of California Press
Open Access

Bodies of Evidence

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

by Jaimie Morse (Author)
Price: $34.95 / £30.00
Publication Date: Jun 2026
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
ISBN: 9780520428911
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 10 b/w figures and 2 tables

About the Book

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

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.
 

About the Author

Jaimie Morse is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

    Introduction: What Is a “Rape Kit”?

Part I. Legal Mobilization in US Emergency Medicine

    1. Nurse Activism for “Rape Kit” Protocols

    2. The Knowledge Problem of “Rape Kits” and Injury Detection Techniques

Part II. Legal Mobilization in Humanitarian Medicine

    3. Sexual Violence as a Problem of Global Health Governance

    4. Médecins Sans Frontières Medico-Legal Certificates for Sexual Violence

Conclusion: The Probative Paradox and What Can Be Done

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Reviews

Bodies of Evidence compellingly places the so-called rape kit at the center of scholarship on law and medicine and extends the conversation transnationally and temporally. 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 thoroughly and carefully illuminates how very different parts and aspects of society had to be brought together and balanced against each other 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

“Tracing the rape kit from its origins in 1970s emergency rooms to its present-day use in conflict zones around the globe, Morse is unflinching in examining difficult questions about its mobilization in clinical and legal spaces. Essential reading for anyone interested in the intersections of gender, medicine, law, and technology.”—Rene Almeling, author of GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health

“Bringing together the logics of inquiry in the compatible but too rarely combined interdisciplinary fields of science and technology studies and law and society, Bodies of Evidence traces the historical and international journey of a distinctive socio-legal artifact of the late twentieth century. An ambitious, groundbreaking, and ultimately successful achievement in research and analysis.”—Jonathan Simon, Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law, UC Berkeley School of Law