As the national dialogue around sexual assault develops, there have been new suggestions about how to best support survivors. MeToo Kits, a Brooklyn based company, recently launched its idea for at-home rape kits, which are not yet for sale.

The intention of the kits is to provide sexual assault victims the time and privacy to process their experience without the pressure of immediately needing to seek medical and legal help. The reality is a potentially useless product which profits entirely off of the real or anticipated violation of people’s bodies.

“The kits don’t work for their intended purpose,” said Randi Bregman, executive director of Vera House, a Central New York nonprofit organization that prevents, responds to and partners to end domestic and sexual violence and other forms of abuse. “Nothing else really matters, and so they shouldn’t be marketed because they’re misleading.”

Since the announcement of their intended release, do-it-yourself rape kits have been criticized on the grounds that they are highly unlikely to be admissible in court. There is a specific procedure that must be followed when collecting evidence to be used for a rape kit.

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“I know in our own community we didn’t used to have a SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) program at every hospital and so we would hear from the crime lab that the kits which were collected by medical professionals that weren’t doing them regularly, who didn’t have special training as a SANE, that their kits often weren’t good enough to use in the crime lab,” Bregman said.

The fact that even medical professions struggle to collect evidence properly without intensive training shows that the odds of an at-home kit being admissible in court are extremely low.

The other insidious reality of DIY rape kits is that they are a business. While the companies which designed these kits might have good intentions, the reality is a product that misleads those who have been sexually assaulted.

These companies are asking survivors to pay them for the chance to regain some agency over a traumatic event, but these kits do no such thing. Instead, they potentially compound the trauma of pursuing a court case by setting the survivors up to be told that their evidence doesn’t count.

These companies seek to profit off of the past and future trauma of sexual assault survivors.

“Honestly, I’m not sure whether people should be able to sell those kits, period,” Bregman said. I don’t know what their purpose would be so I’m not sure that you could advertise them. Why would you choose to do an at-home rape kit if it’s very unlikely to be admissible if you need it?”

One specific target of marketing for at-home rape kits have been colleges. DIY rape kit companies have tried to sell kits directly to universities. Universities as a whole are notorious for mishandling sexual assault on campuses, and bringing these kits on campuses across the nation would only compound this issue by further muddying the university and police investigation process.

Another concern surrounding at-home rape kits is the question of who would be most likely to buy them. The supposed benefits of an at home rape kit are clear: they eliminate the need for a medical examination at a hospital. Certain disenfranchised groups, like transgender people, sex workers and low-income individuals, might be particularly enticed by the opportunity to side-step the hospital process in order to avoid potentially unsafe or traumatic events. The problem is that communities like these, for whom an at-home rape kit would be the most valuable, also have the hardest time navigating the criminal justice system. To sell them a product which might put them at an even greater disadvantage in court is dangerous.

While several government officials, such as Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, have spoken out about the harms of at-home rape kits and how there needs to be greater action to if not entirely outlaw these kits, ensure that they are advertised honestly.

If the companies which produce at-home rape kits were to advertise them honestly, sharing with the potential consumer that they are not guaranteed to produce admissible evidence, the odds of anyone using them would decrease precipitously. The government needs to ensure that sexual assault survivors are being prioritized over the profits of a company, even a well-meaning one.

Sydney Gold is a freshman policy studies and public relations major. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at segold@syr.edu. She can be followed on Twitter @Sydney_Eden.

Published on October 6, 2019 at 10:19 pm