Normalizing State Rape: (In)Voluntary Consent and the Body Cavity Search

This paper exposes the body cavity search as a quotidian technology of state sexual violence. The practice has escaped isolated, sustained scrutiny even within critical scholarship. Rather than relying on state definitions for our analysis, we collected publicly available victim testimonies, contextualized alongside abolition feminist critiques that describe the practice for what it most clearly is: state rape. Testimonial evidence suggests body cavity searches function to degrade, humiliate, and dominate rather than maintain safety and security, as reasoned by institutions transnationally. In what follows, we problematize “voluntary” consent and seriously grapple with the many personal, social, and structural detriments of this procedure.