A radical new scheme sees students handing out at-home DNA testing kits, to open up a conversation around rape. But will it work? We join them on campus to find out.
By: Catriona Innes
Content warning: this article contains descriptions of sexual assault and rape
On a busy crossroads, atop of one of Bristol’s steepest streets, students fray their baggy jeans on the ground, pulling their woollen hats lower against the biting wind. Amidst all the grey, an orange paddling pool sits on the ground, flagged by a group of cheery leaflet-wielders, clad in neon orange hoodies. The paddling pool is filled with white, plastic packages with the word enough stamped on the side. They could be ice-creams or mini chocolate bars. Something to lure in students, so the volunteers can talk to them about their society, or careers day. But that’s not what’s happening here.
I hope no one ever has to tear open one of these packages, that out of the 7000 handed out to date, none are used. The knot in my stomach, as I watch them being pressed into student’s hands, tells me that this is not realistic thinking. That’s my own hopeless dreaming, searching for another, less dark world.
Each package contains one at-home DNA testing kit. In the wake of a rape or sexual assault, you can swab yourself and send this off, later receiving the results: tangible evidence that someone else’s DNA has been found on your body. Ella, who is 21 years old, tells me that, in her all girls flat, they have them lined up on the mantlepiece. “That way, if someone brings a guy back and he saw them, it might act as a deterrent, it might show him he has to ask for consent,” she says, pulling her vintage Missoni scarf tight around her. “Every single woman I know has experienced some sort of sexual assault, or rape. Having these kits in the house makes me feel safer.”
This is one of the three ways co-founder of non-profit enough Katie White hopes the kits will be used. “This is what survivors want”, she tells me, over lunch, after I spend the morning with her and her team handing out the kits outside Senate House, during ‘rush hour’ for students as they dart to-and-from lectures. The kits can also be ordered online, for free if you’re based in Bristol, or for £20 if you’re not, and the team have 30 safe spaces around the city, mostly student pubs, where, if you go up to the bar staff and ask for a “hot orange,” the staff will hand one over, no questions asked. Bristol university are not associated, and do not endorse the scheme.
The kits themselves are simple, easy-to-use swabs which detect DNA on the body, and are to be used after someone has experienced sexual assault or rape. The swab is then sent off to a lab, and the results are sent back to the victim as well as being stored, on site, for 20 years. There is also an option, on the enough website, whether used with or without a kit, for survivors to write down – anonymously – what happened to them. There is a further option to write something that will then be shared publicly, on the website and social media. “This is a simple and discreet way of confirming something bad has happened to you, which is an essential step in recovery from trauma,” White explains.
However, the ideal outcome would be that the kits never get used and – as Ella and her housemates hope – serve instead as a deterrent and visible reminder that rape and sexual assault comes with consequences, for the perpetrator and the perpetrator alone. “Their presence on campus is well known, [perpetrators] will be aware that [if they act] their DNA will be on file somewhere. That’s very scary thought for most students,” says White.
Later in the evening, we stand at another crossroads. This time in Clifton, as a stream of students bowl their way down the hill, heading to the pub, often clad in half-hearted fancy dress or fleeces proudly displaying what society they’re a part of. “Excuse me, have you heard of enough?” the volunteers chorus. The majority have, and those who haven’t tend to stop to hear about it, lured in by the promise of a free orange wristband.
“My missus has had some horrendous experiences, so this is brilliant, just brilliant what you’re doing,” says one lad, as his friend sways beside him, beer in hand. While another group of men, clad in shirts and ties (the classic sports group on a night out uniform) show off the bands already firmly on their wrists. A group of girls, each in a different colour wig, tell us it’s their friend’s 19th birthday. When I ask them how they feel, now they each have a kit in their tote bags, one tells me: “I feel liberated, like I’m able to speak my truth now.”
Adam, a passionate politics student clad in an orange wig and Doc Martens tells me he’s been volunteering once or twice a week for the past few months. “People are fed up of inaction of those in power,” he says. “Most students when they experience sexual assault don’t report it, I experienced sexual violence and I didn’t report it. It just wasn’t an option I wanted to take. This is a good alternative to that. It’s something, in theory, I wish I’d had.”
Every single student I meet, and speak to, during my day spent with enough is enthusiastic about the scheme. The enough team seem to hold a certain cache on campus, it’s cool to be seen with an orange band, it’s cool to be a part of something that loudly and brightly says rape and sexual assault will not be tolerated.
However, the attitude from the students towards the kits, and those who work within the field, is vastly different. I struggled to find anyone who worked in VAWG sector who did not have concerns regarding the kits. Lawyers fear the evidence from the kits would not be admissible in court and give victims “false hope.” A position statement, from the Faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine, issued in September last year concluded that while they “applaud any organisation that is interested in reducing sexual violence and addressing its aftermath” they could not advocate the use of self-swabbing kits due to the swabs not providing reliable evidence that could be used in criminal proceedings, and, that if survivors self-swab instead of interacting with services such as the police or the NHS they miss out on vital help, both psychologically and forensically (if the survivors then chose to take the case further.)
These are, of course, valid concerns. But, ever since starting to work on this story, the alarm going off in my head has been the need for the kits at all. The enough team’s ‘solution’ has definitely attracted its critics but what they’re doing is a reaction, a reaction to a current situation that has escalated this point. Much of the focus of the press surrounding the kits so far has been on whether the kits will hold up in court, but shouldn’t we be more concerned with the fact that most rape cases will not reach the courts at all? How did we reach the point that these kits have to be handed out in the first place? Where students take them, and have them lined up in their living rooms, because it makes them feel safer?
The latest statistics show that, in one year, 1.1 million adults were victims of sexual assault (in the year ending March 2022) according to the crime survey for England and Wales. That same survey found that a higher proportion of adults aged 16 to 24 were victims of sexual assault, than those aged 25 and over. And, a higher proportion of full-time students were victims of sexual assault than any other occupation. Five in six women who are raped, do not report what happened to them to the police. As for convictions? Fewer than 3 in 100 of the rapes recorded by police between 1st October 2023 and 30th September 2024 resulted in someone being charged that same year, let alone convicted. The number of rape victims pulling out of prosecutions before trial has more than doubled in five years. The court backlog for adult rape cases stands at a record high, with 3,656 people awaiting trial in June 2024, more than five times the number in 2019. I could go on, keep pulling out the statistics, painting this morbid picture. It makes me want to scream, to run out into the streets and thrust this reality into people’s hands, urge them to please, please, listen, as something needs to change. But, isn’t that, essentially, what White and her team have been doing the past few months? When the team first set up enough and began handing out the kits in October last year, no one had heard of them and the team had a lot of explaining to do. They targeted various events and societies, arranging fun runs and went out day and night to spread the word. Today? I’d say the majority of people I encounter when I’m out with the team are aware of them, and the work that they do. “Everyone on campus knows who they are,” explains David, who alongside his friends Lily and Skye chatted to me around the paddling pool. “It’s much more effective than the posters around campus saying ‘don’t get a creep’ or whatever. They’re consistently here, giving out these kits, and that’s really powerful. It’s such a visual way of highlighting the problem.”
“The government has pledged to reduce violence against women and girls by half, and they said that to do that, we have to have radical ideas to make that happen,” White says, adding that enough spent a year developing the idea, speaking to survivors, the police, psychologists and lawyers. “This is a radical idea and we are being met with resistance perhaps because we are challenging the belief that this problem can only be solved via criminal justice. Our approach uses social deterrence.”
“Rape culture can be treated as an afterthought at [some] universities, and we know that sexual assault is, sadly, a very common university experience,” says Eliza Hatch, founder of cheerupluv, a community platform that educates on misogyny and sexism. “There’s a clear need for more reporting, aftercare and support services which are widely accessible and which validate survivors experiences, so I definitely support this arm of enough‘s campaign. However, I do share the concerns about the self-swabbing kits. They might, in some cases, empower the individual, but it could put the onus on them to go through the process alone, and potentially unsupported. I worry that the more that goes unreported to official channels, the less clear picture of the true scale of violence against women the authorities will have, meaning the less resources we will have to tackle the problem.”
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