Part of the Gender Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

Aliza Shvarts first became fascinated with rape kits a decade ago as a graduate student at New York University. In her research, Shvarts focused heavily on speech act theory — a field that looks at the way words can be used to create realities, altering the world around us through speech. She was also watching a lot of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and her professional studies began bleeding into the way she consumed the show.

One of the show’s most common tropes centered on the rape kit. Without one, survivors would find themselves vilified and disbelieved. But once their kits had been collected and processed, they had power and credibility, ultimately winning their cases.

“The thing that makes you matter all of a sudden is the empirical object that corroborates your testimony,” says Shvarts. The idea of a concrete object that could render the truth unimpeachable was deeply appealing, particularly when it came to a disputed and seemingly unknowable subject such as sexual assault.

Rape kits — known alternately as sexual assault forensic exam (SAFE) kits, sexual offense evidence collection kits, physical evidence recovery kits, sexual assault kits, and sexual assault evidence collection kits — loom large in the public imagination.

On procedural shows such as Law & Order: SVU, they’re often presented as the difference between a rapist’s conviction or acquittal.

In the real world, rape kits also highlight how our criminal justice system routinely fails survivors. Advocates frequently use the rape kit testing backlog — it’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of kits go unprocessed and untested after they’ve been collected — as an entry point for exploring the low priority that sexual assault cases are given by law enforcement, as well as the stress and trauma of reporting a sexual assault. Kits are often the only physical evidence a survivor can present in court, but they’re frequently lost in the system; because many states don’t require them to be logged or tracked, it’s both easy for kits to be misplaced and impossible to know precisely how many untested kits there are.

And yet for all our conviction that rape kits are the key to justice for sexual assault survivors, most of us do not know what these kits contain, or even what purpose they serve in the criminal justice process. Despite her obsession with the role rape kits played on Law & Order, “I didn’t really know what they looked like,” says Shvarts.

Determined to demystify them, Shvarts purchased a few from websites selling SAFE kits. But once she had one in her hands, she was surprised to find not some high-tech forensic device but a simple cardboard box full of paper envelopes and instruments for collecting debris, skin cells, hair samples, clothing, and other items used by forensic examiners to document evidence of an assault and potentially identify a perpetrator through DNA evidence.

The SAFE kit began to seem less like unassailable proof and more like one more way of taking control away from survivors. 

“Certainly [the kit] does a lot of important work in terms of collecting physical evidence,” says Shvarts. But at the same time, she says, there’s a crucial piece of evidence that cannot be documented through a rape kit examination. “A rape kit can never discover the presence or absence of consent. That’s something only the survivor can really testify to.”

That a rape kit could somehow reveal a nonconsensual experience is rooted in some persistent myths about rape. “Consensual sex can leave injuries,” says Maggie von Dolteren, a victim’s advocate at West Virginia’s Rape and Domestic Violence Information Center. “And the injuries that are associated with sexual assault are just not as violent as some people expect them to be.”

As helpful as rape kits can be in reconstructing the details of an assault, the key factor that distinguishes sexual assault from consensual sex can’t be documented by swabs, slides, or photographs of bruises.

Shvarts began exploring this tension in her artwork, incorporating the kits into her performance pieces, and, as her work evolved, eventually treating the kits as a form of sculpture. In 2018, Shvarts exhibited all the kits that were publicly available for purchase in a piece called Box Choreographies, inviting viewers to examine the range of ways a SAFE kit could be constructed — to understand the kits not as a fixed authority, but as inconsistent, works in progress, still being refined.

Soon, Shvarts began reaching out to various state agencies to request samples of their kits. If the six kits included in Box Choreographies already showcased a diverse range of shapes, sizes, and procedures, what would dozens of them, displayed side by side, show the world about how we talk about rape?

Last January, Shvarts debuted a new work at SculptureCenter, a museum in Long Island City, Queens. The artwork, Anthem, invited viewers to make their way down a long, concrete hallway, its arched ceiling lending the scene a somewhat Gothic effect. On the walls of the hallway were small boxes and envelopes, recreations of the dozens of rape kits that Shvarts had collected from forensic examiners, sexual assault nurse examiners, and other sexual assault response experts from across the country, displayed in alphabetical order by state.

Shvarts didn’t manage to secure kits from all 50 states. In the original version of Anthem, 28 states were represented. (Since Anthem’s debut at SculptureCenter, Shvarts has received kits from Delaware and North Dakota, which are being added to the collection for its next showing this February at Art in General in Brooklyn.)

Even at a passing glance, Anthem makes clear that not all rape kits are created equal. The boxes come in a wide variety of sizes; in some cases, they’re not boxes at all, but oversized paper envelopes. Glancing inside the kits reveals more differences. In some states, examiners only have seven steps to go through; in others, there are more than 20 separate tasks on the checklist. 

The language states use to direct examiners also varies widely. Some limit themselves to medical or legal language, others are more colloquial in their terminology. In Florida, examiners collect underwear, while in Washington, they request a survivor’s underpants; in Louisiana, panties. The Virginia kit lists various sexual acts on the evidence collection envelopes, distinguishing between swabs that collect evidence of forced cunnilingus and those that indicate forced anal penetration (or, as the kit refers to it, buggery). 

Anthem’s viewers see not just the stark differences between kits and the broad range of experiences survivors may have at the emergency department. These kits reflect the piecemeal way the country understands and addresses sexual assault — and how far we are from a national consensus on how to respond to rape.

“A lot of visitors were looking at kits from states that they had been to or had lived in, trying to see whether their sense of that state’s awareness of the gravity and importance of addressing sexual assault was reflected in the [kit’s design],” says Gee Wesley, a former curatorial fellow at SculptureCenter who worked with Shvarts on the project’s debut. In many instances, Wesley says, visitors left Anthem more “attuned to the unevenness of access” to quality care for survivors.

Shvarts hopes audiences will also develop a deeper understanding of the fundamental limitations of these kits — that they’re simply one more imperfect way to help a survivor make their case. 

Anthem isn’t the only way Shvarts is reassessing rape kits. This spring, a follow-up project titled Anatomy will debut at the 8th Floor in Manhattan. Where Anthem offers a broad and comprehensive view of SAFE kit variation, Anatomy hones in on one specific aspect of the kits: the diagrams provided to examiners to document the locations of injuries. Though they ostensibly represent a universal body, more often than not they read as white, cis, and female. “If you are a black trans woman, and a nurse is trying to diagram your injuries, one of these diagrams would not allow for an accurate representation of your assault,” Shvarts says.

“A rape kit is meant to embody the voice of a survivor; it’s meant to speak on your behalf,” Shvarts says. Through her work, Shvarts highlights what a complicated, and perhaps impossible, mission that truly is. She hopes more of us will begin to question why we put more faith in a small cardboard box full of envelopes, swabs, and DNA than we do in the testimony of a person.

Anthem can be viewed at Art in General (145 Plymouth St, Brooklyn, NY) February 21–May 9. Anatomy can be viewed at The 8th Floor (17 W 17th St, New York, NY) April 16–July.

Lux Alptraum’s writing has been featured in publications including the New York Times, New York magazine, Wired, Cosmopolitan, and Hustler. Her first book, Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex — And the Truths They Reveal, explores our cultural obsession with feminine deceit.

More from this issue of The Highlight

• Life in between: Nonbinary adults, in portrait
• The Assimilationist, or: On the unexpected cost of passing as a trans woman
• How baby clothes became a pink and blue battleground
• The pungent legacy of Axe Body Spray