The following is from T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong's so far fantastically well-written and well-researched book named "A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America", on Martha Goddard; talk about somebody who's gone through hell and high water to make something good out of old hat:

By August of 2008, the specialized examination of rape victims—often referred to as “rape kits,” for the box in which the evidence is placed—had been around for thirty years. They originated by virtue of a victim’s advocate, a police microanalyst, and funding from a most unlikely source.

In the mid-1970s, Martha “Marty” Goddard formed a nonprofit in Chicago called the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance. At the time, rape, steeped in stigma, received little attention; what attention it did get often did more damage than good. Goddard, a self-described type A personality—she lived close to the office, worked weekends and holidays, spent hundreds of dollars on a gym membership but never escaped work long enough to go in the door—set out to change that.

Part of her challenge was confronting how people wrote about rape. One of her board members picked up a greeting card in a store, brought it in to Goddard, and, “freaking out,” said, “Read this.” “Help stop rape,” the card’s cover said. The note inside was “Say yes.” Goddard wrote the card company with her own message: “You guys, I’m sure, think it’s funny. But it’s not funny.” The company, chagrined, pulled the card from shelves. Goddard saw a newspaper story in Chicago about a woman who had reported being raped. The story may not have named her, but with its careless cascading of detail—combining precise physical description with her job (waitress) and the place she worked (the exact restaurant)—it hardly needed to. Identifying her would be easy enough. Goddard went to the newspaper and met with an editor and some of his staff. At first they were defensive. Then they apologized. “And I gotta tell you, they never did it again,” Goddard says. For Goddard, such were her days: “One incident by one incident by one incident. It took forever.”

Goddard also focused on the enforcement of sexual assault laws. She met with police, prosecutors, and emergency-room doctors and nurses, and discovered a problem in how rape was investigated. The collection of physical evidence was haphazard. If hairs, fibers, blood, semen, fingernail scrapings, clothing, and other evidence were gathered at all, they were often preserved or labeled improperly, jeopardizing their value. Police told Goddard of emergency-room workers rubber-banding two slides together, face to face, contaminating both samples. Sometimes slides wouldn’t say where the samples came from. The ER workers were trained to see a rape victim as a patient—not as a patient and a crime scene. Often, hospitals didn’t have replacement clothes available. Victims, their clothes seized as evidence, might be taken home in a marked police car—and emerge wearing hospital slippers and patient gown, tied in the back. Their neighbors were sure to wonder.

At the Chicago Police Department, Goddard found allies for her cause, most notably Sergeant Louis Vitullo, a microanalyst who was head of the crime lab. Vitullo worked downtown, but lived an hour north of the city. Chicago made him nervous (he didn’t let his daughter go there alone until her twenties), which stood to reason, what with the blood and knives coming through his lab. In the sixties he’d worked on the investigation of Richard Speck, the infamous murderer of eight student nurses. Working with Goddard—“The crime lab eventually became my second home, I’m not kidding you,” she says—Vitullo devised a blue-and-white cardboard box that standardized the collection of evidence in sexual assault cases. The kit itemized swabs and slides to be gathered and provided labeled folders to be filled and sealed.

So with Vitullo’s help, Goddard had a design. What she lacked was the money for parts and assembly. Foundations gave generously to medical research hospitals and symphonies. If they chose to fund women’s and girls’ programs, they might give to the YWCA or Girl Scouts. But they wanted nothing to do with the subject of rape. “Most of the foundation and corporate people were male,” Goddard says. “And they held the big money, so they held the purse strings. And it wasn’t loosening up.” Ultimately, Goddard turned to a friend, Margaret Standish. Standish ran the Playboy Foundation, the activist arm of Hugh Hefner’s publishing empire. The Playboy Foundation provided $10,000—and the use of Playboy’s offices as an assembly line, where volunteers, mostly senior citizens, were provided with foldout tables and free coffee and sandwiches while building the first of these revolutionary kits. “I took a lot of flak from the women’s movement—but too bad,” Goddard says. “If it was Penthouse or Hustler, no. But Playboy? Please, give me a break.”

In September of 1978, twenty-six hospitals in the Chicago area began using the kits. The following year, 2,777 kits went to the Chicago crime lab for analysis. In the summer of 1979, prosecutors used one while trying a man accused of raping a Chicago Transit Authority bus driver. The jury voted to convict, after which the judge let Goddard’s committee ask jurors if the kit helped them reach a verdict. Nine said it did.

That same year Goddard met a Northwestern University graduate, Susan Irion, who worked in public relations while volunteering with a fledgling group called Rape Victim Advocates. Irion was on call for twelve-hour shifts, during which she could be paged by any of seven emergency rooms to help guide sexual assault victims through medical exams and police interviews. Goddard hired Irion to be assistant director for the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance. For two and a half years Irion trained hospital workers and police in use of the rape kits and in the complexities of trauma. Don’t be hostage to your expectations, she would teach. Sometimes trauma doesn’t look the way you think it should.

For expertise Irion turned to Jon Conte, a social work professor in Chicago who would later move on to the University of Washington and evaluate Marie. Irion also incorporated the lessons in Rape: Crisis and Recovery, a book published in 1979 by a psychiatric nurse and a sociologist who had provided crisis-intervention services for 146 rape victims admitted to Boston City Hospital. The authors discovered a range of emotional reactions among rape victims. Some were angry or anxious, some composed, some in shock. “I remember doing some strange things after he left such as biting my arm…to prove I could feel…that I was real,” one woman reported. Physical reactions included disrupted sleep patterns and lingering pain. “I am so sore under my ribs,” said another victim. “The pain just stays there; it doesn’t go away. I guess he really hurt me, although the X-ray didn’t show anything.” Some victims suffered nightmares, their dreams similar to the rape itself, the victim unable to get away. Some underwent a form of self-imposed isolation, rarely venturing out, missing school or quitting work.

By 1980, 215 hospitals in Illinois were using Goddard and Vitullo’s rape kits. From there they became standard issue across the country. The advent of DNA testing in the late 1980s made the kits especially powerful, by pushing forensic science beyond the limitations of blood typing and microscopy.