The woman who invented the rape kit; so why did a man get credit for it? • FRANCE 24 English

The woman who invented the rape kit; so why did a man get credit for it? • FRANCE 24 English

[Music] Hello, I’m Annette Young and welcome to the 51% show about women reshaping our world. Coming up, US President Donald Trump finally signs a bill to release files on sexual abuse of hundreds of women and girls by sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but victims continue to call for greater transparency. Also, we meet Pagan Kennedy, the journalist who uncovered that a woman originally invented the rape kit, even though a man had long been credited with the idea. And here comes the sun, the NGO in Zanzibar which is teaching local women to become solar power technicians. [Music] But first and this week as we mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls, a victory of sorts for the survivors of the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. After months of mounting pressure, US President Donald Trump has now signed a bill allowing for the release of files on the sexual assault and rape of hundreds of women and girls. But the victims are amplifying their calls for transparency and accountability. As Olivia Salazar Windspear reports, ongoing calls for justice that are now too loud to ignore. Victims of Jeffrey Epstein have kept up pressure to reveal the full truth about his crimes, calling on Congress to release the files about him and calling on Donald Trump himself. It is not about you, President Trump. You are our president. Please start acting like it. Show some class. Show some real leadership. Show that you actually care about the people other than yourself. I voted for you, but your behavior on this issue has been an national embarrassment. And without once Congress passed legislation requiring the Justice Department to release the Epstein files, Trump did a U-turn and signed the bill, pointing out on social media that he has nothing to hide, but that his political enemies did. Nothing to do with Epstein, the Democrats do. Perhaps the truth about the Democrats and their associations with Jeffrey Epstein will soon be revealed because I have just signed the bill to release the Epstein files. Epstein’s finances, travel arrangements, and the circumstances of his death are detailed in the tens of thousands of documents compiled for federal investigations into his sexual crimes before he died in 2019. Trump was known to have maintained a friendship with Epstein in the past. Critics believe that the president’s reluctance to release these files was due to his association with the convicted sex offender. In recent months, the publication of the late Virginia Dupre’s memoir detailing her experience at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and Gileain Maxwell has amplified other victims voices. Virginia Dupre is one of the women that saved my life. If she hadn’t come forward in that 2018 piece in the Miami Herald, I don’t know that I would have ever addressed my own rape and actually gotten help. And it was her continued fearless voice to stand up to to powerful men that really taught me so much about what being an advocate can mean. I was 14 years old. 14 years old. Indeed, the ongoing campaigning of women in a postme landscape has contributed to a renewed interest in the case and has even put Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes on the political agenda. [Music] Now, it’s a story with all the hallmarks of a great detective mystery. The search for the woman who created the rape kit for survivors of sexual assault. someone who is only now getting the global recognition she so rightfully deserves. Her name was Martha or Marty Godard. She died in 2015, but her invention revolutionized the way rape cases are investigated. And now her remarkable story has been told in a new book by journalist Pagan Kennedy, the secret history of the rape kit. Uh and Pagan joins me now. Thank you so much for your time, Pagan. This is not an unusual question to be asked on this show, but how did it come about that the kit originally bore a man’s name, that of a Chicago police sergeant? Originally the the kit that was created in Chicago that became the model for the national kit in America, rape kit in America and then the world uh was called the Vulo kit and it was named after uh a police uh policeman who worked in the crime lab in Chicago uh Lewis Vulo and he certainly did contribute to the design and and creation of the kit But as I dug into it, I found that a woman who had really not received any recognition named Marty Goddard was in many ways the person who came up with the idea, who found a way to fund it, who um built out the whole system, got it into hospitals all around uh Chicago and um and eventually the country. Um but in um one of the most interesting pieces of this story was I found the trademark that she herself had filed calling this kit the the Vulo kit. This was part of um her strategy to name it after a man in order to um give it give the this really controversial new forensic technology um credibility. One of the hallmarks of Marty Goddard’s genius was she knew how to get things done um and make them happen and she would go to great lengths to um actually build this system, this brand new evidence system. So, how did the kit change the way society views rape claims? So, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to do this project was I was so interested in the politics of evidence. Who gets to decide what evidence is? Uh, what evidence counts? And when Marty Goddard and the people who worked with her designed this kit, it was very much from the survivor’s point of view. It was to help her tell her story, collect her evidence um in a way that hopefully wouldn’t be traumatizing and also um present that evidence on the stand in a court and make these cases stand up in a court at a time when um survivors really weren’t believed. Um and so it it was something that systematized the collection of evidence in for Chicago. than um m much of the United States. And we still have this system in place largely unchanged. Um which is somewhat of a problem because it really should have been it needs to be updated after uh 50 years on. Tell me more about Marty Godard and what drove her to invent the kit. Well, in 1972, um, she was a, uh, working at a philanthropic agency and she went in to volunteer at a he helpline for kids who lived were living on the streets, uh, who were called runaways back then. This is the height of the hippie movement. So, everybody would think that these kids who ran ran away were running off to kind of join the circus and have fun and join communes and things like that. But what she found as she talked to these um kids on the other end of the line was that many of them were fleeing from abuse in their homes. So many of them. And that led her to the question of how did how are we not finding all these perpetrators? I mean, if there’s this many kids living on the streets, and that in turn led her uh to start to build a network and join a network of other anti- rape activists who began to fight for um changing the methods of policing um and creating a lot more transparency in the way that evidence was collected. Sadly, Marty Godard spent the last few decades of her life in obscurity and certainly made no efforts to have her name acknowledged as the inventor of the kit, which I understand is why you got interested in the story in the first place. Yeah. I mean, I spent so long even trying to find out where she was, um, what had happened to her because she had utterly disappeared. And eventually I did track down um she had been sadly she had died soon after I or soon before I started this project. But she had live been living in uh the desert in obscurity um and had a lot of health problems. But she had really uh flamed out in the late 1980s after being one of the most important people in building what became an international system for the collection of um sexual assault evidence. So you know it took a big toll on her that work. Pagan, I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much again for your time. Thank you to Sansibar now. And although the Tanzanian archipelago has been boosting its tourism industry in recent years, it still largely remains an agricultural society. It’s also one where half of its homes have no electricity. But one NGO is teaching village women to become solar power technicians. As Brian Quinn reports that out of the darkness and into the light in Zanzibar, one NGO is helping rural villages install solar power systems, training women as their engineers. The tools seemed difficult to use at first, but after a short time, I managed to handle them. The semi-autonomous archipelago off the coast of Tanzania counts some 2 million inhabitants, half of whom are not connected to the electric grid. For most, their only sources of illumination after sunset are oil lamps whose limited light comes with acurid smoke and increased fire risk. Kerosene has many dangers. Houses can burn down. Children might drink it. We have seen many such cases. Some kids come in with burns from kerosene fires. It’s a big hazard. The East African coastal climate though has abundant sunshine and rural Zanzibar has many women with deep connections to their local communities. After 6 months of training at the Solar Mama program, they’re sent back to their villages with 50 household solar kits and the expertise to install and maintain them. The community is used to seeing women nursing kids uh you know cleaning you know cooking not going on the roof put a panel and then the whole house is electrified. So for us actually it’s it’s not only empowering but also it’s building the sustainable communities. In addition to providing employment for women in conservative societies where gender roles are often restrictive. The program has also made it easier for children in rural areas to follow their studies after dark. So far in Zanzibar, the solar mamas have lit up nearly 2,000 homes. And that’s it for this edition. So until our next show, bye for now. [Music]

Annette Young talks to Pagan Kennedy, the journalist who uncovered that a woman originally invented the rape kit, even though a man had long been credited with the idea. Also, as we mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and Girls, a victory of sorts for the survivors of the late convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. After months of mounting pressure, US President Donald Trump has now signed a bill allowing for the release of files on the sexual assault and rape of hundreds of women and girls. Plus, the NGO in Zanzibar which is teaching local women to become solar power technicians.
#rape #epstein #trump

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