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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
Pages: 236
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.