Attrition rate studies have outlined the role the 'real rape' stereotype plays in prosecutor decisions concerning the progression of rape cases through the criminal justice system. According to the 'real rape' stereotype, the victim should attend the medical examination with significant physical injury, and therefore police, prosecutors and jurors take injury evidence into consideration when deciding the veracity of the complainant's allegation. However, forensic medical studies have shown injuries to be rare, and even when present, consent cannot be dismissed. To this end, in nearly all cases Forensic Medical Examiners (FMEs) produce 'neutral reports'; reports that neither confirm nor deny the complainant's allegation. In this article I explore FMEs' justifications for neutral reports, and find that their production reinforces FMEs' expertise. FMEs construct boundaries, distancing themselves from contentious issues. While such boundaries ensure authority, they limit evidential significance, which in turn provides a space for the prosecution to dismiss evidence that does not conform to the popular understanding of rape. Such a 'vicious cycle' of prosecutorial decision-making removes the opportunity for FMEs to explain the limits of injury evidence to the police, prosecutors and the jury and reinforces the belief that injuries are a necessary outcome of rape assaults.

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Despite decades of feminist-inspired law reforms, rape remains highly prevalent. While many continue to fight for broad cultural and institutional changes, some argue that more immediate interventions are required. Self-defense techniques represent a key strategy of resistance to rape, and empirical evidence suggests that women's active resistance may hold a number of positive benefits. In this essay, we compare the aims and objectives of a novel anti-rape technology, known as the Rape-aXe, with traditional self-defense techniques, focusing upon the potential for both to resist individual acts of sexual aggression and, more broadly, end gendered sexual violence.

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In this article, I contribute to the literature around interagency collaboration, especially between law enforcement and health care, by reconciling the previous work of Sarah Charman (2014) with the interprofessional teamwork literature. Drawing upon a semi‐structured interview‐based study with 20 custody nurses working in English police custody suites (analysed using Framework Analysis), I explore the ways they are able to achieve interagency collaboration with a particular police officer, the Desk Sergeant. I argue that nurses accomplish interagency interoperability by interacting regularly with the Desk Sergeant, anticipating their needs and limiting their own goals to those that are commensurate with the Desk Sergeant's, notably providing information and avoiding deaths in custody. Such practices are similar to the strategies of ‘Cultural Interoperability’ noted by Charman (2014); however, this study also identifies that such strategies are only available once a successful working relationship has formed between Desk Sergeant and nurse, and as a result, similarly to the findings of interprofessional teamwork studies, the success or failure of attempts to collaborate across agencies is underpinned by interpersonal relations. The paper concludes by commenting on the importance of analysing both the interpersonal and organisation levels when studying collaboration.