The Technoscientific Witness of Rape

Reviewed by: The Technoscientific Witness of Rape: Contentious Histories of Law, Feminism, and Forensic Scienceby Andrea Quinlan Joanna Bourke (bio) The Technoscientific Witness of Rape: Contentious Histories of Law, Feminism, and Forensic Science. By Andrea Quinlan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Pp. 272. Paperback $25.95. In the United States, thirty-three Americans over the age of twelve are raped and sexually assaulted every hour. That makes 288,820 legally acknowledged victims. These horrific statistics mask the true figures since most victims never report the attack in the first place. Worse: the conviction rate has been declining. One important response to this crisis has been to harness scientific and medical technologies in order to ensure that assailants are identified, prosecuted, and convicted. From the 1970s, "rape kits" (also known as "sexual assault investigation kits") have been introduced in an increasing number of countries in an attempt to provide medical personnel who examine victims of sexual assault to collect forensic evidence that can be later used in court. These "kits" not only provide standardized procedures for forensic personnel on how to carry out their task, they have also dramatically improved the reliability of the evidence gathered. The kits are generally assumed to improve the credibility of women reporting sexual assault. In the words of one advocate, the kit made "sure that when we got to court things weren't thrown out" (p. 53). The enhanced credibility of forensic evidence in law courts would lead to an increase in rape conviction rates. It all sounds incredibly laudable. In The Technoscientific Witness of Rape, Canadian sociologist Andrea Quinlan disagrees. She launches one of the most trenchant critiques of the way these technologies are used in practice. She argues that the rape kit is an example of a "boundary object," that is, a technology that "reflects and maintains the histories and politics of the worlds of which it is a part" (p.12). In other words, rape kits straddle law and medicine and are therefore deeply implicated in the patriarchal and racist histories of those institutions. The kit makes assumptions about the identity of "real perpetrators" [End Page 342]—they are almost always strangers, rather than husbands or lovers. The technology also positions physicians and forensic examiners as "expert users," while rape victims are pressed into conforming to a particularly unhelpful "forensic script" in which their bodies become little more than a "walking crime scene." The kitbecomes the active witness—a technoscientific witness to crime. Indeed, the victim is increasinglydistrusted: she is the one who destroyed evidence (by showering, for example). Quinlan's analysis is deeply embedded in a sophisticated version of the "social construction of science." She notes that the design of rape kits is culturally "located" in such a way that the lived experience of victims is excluded. The kits encourage an individualized understanding of sexual violence, rather than a social one. Responsibility devolves to victims, who can never actually live up to the "hype" of scientific authority. This is also a book deeply informed by feminist analyses of science. Quinlan carefully unpacks the ways in which "objectivity" is gendered. Forensic scientists are posited as being able to transcend their own biases and physicality, unlike victims whose subjectivity resides entirely in their physicality. Anti-rape activists who initially promoted the rape kits became increasingly divided. In order to be taken seriously, many rape crisis centers were forced to downplay their feminist politics and adopt a more "professional" comportment—often to the detriment of the vulnerable women they were intending to help. The performative aspects of their work gave them credibility amongst the political and medical elites but watered down their advocacy roles. Quinlan's book is a fascinating analysis of the role of technology and science. It is a remarkable analysis of the social life of objects and the political lives of its users. She shows why the history of technology is important. Crucially, though, she ends by discussing how "it could have been different." Joanna Bourke Joanna Bourke is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London and author of Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present. Copyright © 2019 Society for the History of Technology

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