Rape kit

A rape kit or rape test kit is a package of items used by medical, police or other personnel for gathering and preserving physical evidence following an instance or allegation of sexual assault. The evidence collected from the victim can aid the criminal rape investigation and the prosecution of a suspected assailant.^[1][2][3][4] DNA evidence can have tremendous utility for sexual assault investigations and prosecution by identifying offenders, revealing serial offenders through DNA matches across cases, and exonerating those who have been wrongly accused.^[5]

The kit was developed in Chicago in the mid-1970s, in order to provide a more uniform protocol for evidence collection after sexual assaults. While Louis R. Vitullo is frequently credited as the developer of the first kit, it was originally researched and proposed to Vitullo by Martha 'Marty' Goddard, who was a victim advocate and founder of Chicago's Citizens for Victims Assistance organization, and herself a sexual assault survivor.^[6][7][8][9] For years, the standardized tool was referred to as a Vitullo kit.^[1][10] Today it is colloquially referred to as a rape test kit or a rape kit, which is used interchangeably to refer to the specific evidence that is obtained through the use of the rape kit.^[11] Other terms and abbreviations used are sexual assault kit (SAK), a sexual assault forensic evidence kit (SAFE), sexual assault evidence collection kit (SAECK), sexual offense evidence collection kit (SOEC) and physical evidence recovery kit (PERK).^[12]