The Violence of Care

Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention

Sameena Mulla

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781479867219
• eBook ISBN: 9781479858200
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner, 2017 Margaret Mead Award presented by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology

Honorable Mention, 2015 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize presented by the Society for Medical Anthropology

Analyzes the ways in which nurses work to collect and preserve evidence while addressing the needs of sexual assault victims as patients

Every year in the US, thousands of women and hundreds of men participate in sexual assault forensic examinations. Drawing on four years of participatory research in a Baltimore emergency room, Sameena Mulla reveals the realities of sexual assault response in the forensic age. Taking an approach developed at the intersection of medical and legal anthropology, she analyzes the ways in which nurses work to collect and preserve evidence while addressing the needs of sexual assault victims as patients.

Mulla argues that blending the work of care and forensic investigation into a single intervention shapes how victims of violence understand their own suffering, recovery, and access to justice—in short, what it means to be a "victim". As nurses race the clock to preserve biological evidence, institutional practices, technologies, and even state requirements for documentation undermine the way in which they are able to offer psychological and physical care. Yet most of the evidence they collect never reaches the courtroom and does little to increase the number of guilty verdicts. Mulla illustrates the violence of care with painstaking detail, illuminating why victims continue to experience what many call "secondary rape" during forensic intervention, even as forensic nursing is increasingly professionalized. Revictimization can occur even at the hands of conscientious nurses, simply because they are governed by institutional requirements that shape their practices.

The Violence of Care challenges the uncritical adoption of forensic practice in sexual assault intervention and post-rape care, showing how forensic intervention profoundly impacts the experiences of violence, justice, healing and recovery for victims of rape and sexual assault.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sexual Violence in the City
• 1. “The Hand of God”: DNA and Victim Subjectivity in Sexual Assault Intervention
• 2. Making Time: Temporalities of Law, Healing, and Sexual Violence
• 3. On Truth and Disgust: Managing Emotion in the Forensic Intervention
• 4. Re/production: Articulating Paths to Healing and Justice
• 5. Facing Victims: Vision and Visage in the Forensic Exam
• 6. Documentary Agency: Institutional Dispositions toward Gender and Rape Myths
• 7. There Is No Place Like Home: Home, Harm, and Healing
• 8. Patient and Victim Compliance: Drugs, AIDS, and Local Geographies of Care
• Conclusion: “We’re Not There for the Victim”: The Violence of Forensic Care
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author