By Sanne van den Tol
Meet Undercover Nail Polish.
Designed to tell you when your drink has been spiked with date rape drugs through changing colour simply by dipping your finger in your drink. The nail polish should be able to detect the three most common date rape drugs – Rohypnol, GHB and Xanax – which all cause relaxation, drowsiness, drunkenness, loss of consciousness and loss of memory.
The parent project, Undercover Colors, is the brainchild of Materials Science & Engineering majors Ankesh Madan, Stephen Gray, Tasso van Windhiem, and Tyler Confrey-Maloney from Duke University and North Carolina State University. The students’ company, Undercover Colors, is according to their website, “The First Fashion Company Empowering Women to Prevent Sexual Assault”, by “invent[ing] technologies that empower women to protect themselves from this heinous and quietly pervasive crime”. It is an inspiring goal, but also a controversial one.
According to Katie Russell from Rape Crisis England and Wales, her organization will not endorse the Undercover Colors project as it “implies that it’s the woman’s fault and assumes responsibility on her behalf, and detracts from the real issues that arise from sexual violence.” She is not alone on this point of view, Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti alongside Rebecca Nagle, co-director from FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, both agreed the product leaves room for victim blaming, as one of the most common questions victims asks is whether the victim ‘could have done anything to prevent it’. To critics indeed the nail polish would suggest so. Yet others argue that means of prevention – such as self-defense classes and pepper spray – is exactly what is necessary for sexual assault. The Undercover Colors team takes the stance that prevention is important, stating that the product is intended not only to prevent drug-facilitated sexual assault, but also to raise awareness and to “shift the fear from the victims to the perpetrators, creating a risk that they might actually start to get caught.”
A common retort to this point is that ‘we should not have to prevent this [drug-facilitated sexual assault] in the first place’, but as Tulane University student Mary Clare Molina remarks in recent interviews about Undercover Colors’ mission, drug-facilitated sexual assault is “just an unfortunate reality you almost adopt when you go to college when you’re a girl.” Not only in colleges, as the Undercover Colors team noted, but anywhere perpetrators find their way. About 18% of all women in the USA will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, and an ITV poll suggested that nearly one in 10 women in the UK have had their drinks spiked. In fact, the project was initiated because every member of the Undercover Colors team “had been close to someone who has been through the terrible experience, and […] began to focus on finding a way to help prevent the crime.”
Yet even if the nail polish itself proves to be unsuccessful, many are hopeful that this team of university students have sparked a new discussion about drug facilitated assault, and hopefully also caught the attention of other creative minds to help fight this issue.
Currently, the nail polish is still in a prototype phase and no release date for their product has yet been announced.
Sanne van den Tol, class of 2016, is a Science Major from Halsteren, the Netherlands
