Why Women Don't Report

Like most of America, I have been following the #Kavanaugh hearings. I have never watched a Supreme Court hearing, and was curious how this type of hearing would differ from a criminal trial, especially when the topic at hand is an alleged sexual assault. (For more on that process, read this blog post, which is oddly my number 1 most read post of all time).

One thing I've heard a lot of on social media and in conversations with real humans in real life this week is "Why now? Why did she wait so long to come forward?" Our own president tweeted that if this had really been as bad as she alleges, charges would have been filed immediately (36 years ago). I get it. These are valid questions. No one taking the responsibility of the highest court in the land should be approved without a lot of questions, and allegations of this nature should not be taken lightly. 

Before my first training on working with sexual assault survivors 14 years ago, I had some of the same questions and suspicions when I heard about sexual assaults. That first training helped me identify some of the narratives about sexual assault that I didn't even realize I had bought into because they are so ingrained in our culture. Then, over the last 14 years I've taken more trainings, worked with hundreds of survivors in therapy and as a forensic exam accompaniment volunteer, worked with colleagues in law enforcement and advocacy, witnessed and testified in criminal and civil cases, and have a much better understanding of why women (or men) don't come forward about their assaults. Let's take the politics out of this for a moment and just talk about the general dynamics of why someone would or wouldn't report their assault to law enforcement or their parents or their therapist or anyone else. 

• They are in shock. You know that feeling you get after a car accident or a natural disaster, where you kind of question if what just happened was real? Ninety-four percent of women who are raped experience PTSD in the two weeks following their assault. (https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence). The symptoms of PTSD are: 
• re-experiencing the trauma through flashbacks, nightmares, unwanted thoughts of the event, and physical reactivity to the event 
• trauma related thoughts or reminders 
• negative thoughts or feelings (inability to recall details, negative thoughts about oneself, exaggerated blaming of self, difficulty feeling positive) 
• trauma arousal (difficulty sleeping, irritability, risky or destructive behavior, aggression, hypervigilence, difficulty concentrating) (https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/ptsd-overview/dsm5_criteria_ptsd.asp)

These symptoms impair functioning, and many survivors are still trying to work, go to school, or have productive lives. They may be using all of their emotional energy to just survive and continue at the status quo, yet they are having flashbacks, difficulty remembering details of the event, negative thoughts about themselves, negative thoughts about the potential outcome, and the potential for destructive behaviors. So the very thing that a survivor would come forward about is creating barriers to them coming forward. 

• They fear it was their fault. Culturally, we do a lot of victim-blaming. If a stranger punched me in the face at a bar, no one would ask me what I was wearing, whether I was drinking, and no one would say maybe I was "asking for it". If a car ran a red light and smashed into my car, no one would ask if I was sexually active, or if I had been flirting with that car, or if I had ever allowed that car to smash into me in the past. We also know women can also kiss men, dance with men, and talk to men without owing them sex, yet survivors often blame themselves for engaging with their assailants at a previous point. 
• They don't want to get in trouble. This is particularly true with underaged teens/adults and alcohol use. Survivors think that if they were drinking and they report that to law enforcement, they will get in trouble for the drinking or possession of alcohol. Younger teens may fear getting in trouble with their parents for not being where they were supposed to be. 
• They don't remember everything.  Sometimes people dissociate during a traumatic event, which is the body's way of protecting and distancing itself from the trauma. This is sometimes described as an out of body experience or zoning out, and it can actually lower the body's stress hormone, cortisol. Sometimes people hyper focus on one specific yet insignificant thing, like the curtains in the room or the pattern in the carpet as a form of dissociation. Then it makes sense that they don't remember all the details of the assault, since their brain was actively working to block it out. Additionally, some people may remember specific details about the assault, but their brain involuntarily dissociates when they talk about it, in order to protect itself from re-experiencing the trauma. When you add the potential for roofies and other drugs or alcohol, it's no wonder survivors don't remember every detail. I barely remember yesterday and I didn't have any trauma. 
• They didn't run away. We hear sometimes about the fight or flight response, but that term is a little outdated. It is now commonly referred to as the fight, flight, or freeze response, since we often freeze when we are in danger. This is another biological process that keeps us safe, and has saved many a life. And yet, we don't talk as much about freezing as a valid response to stress, and survivors tend to think that if they didn't run away, it wasn't really an assault. 
• They fear law enforcement won't take them seriously. Sometimes this fear is for good reason. I've worked with clients where law enforcement officers have been their assailants, or good ole boy cops haven't wanted to follow through in pressing charges because the alleged perpetrator "is a good guy" and "a family man" and officers are hesitant to get involved. We are lucky to have a lot of good law enforcement with good training here, but why would a survivor know or trust that? They may have heard the true and horrific stories of friends and acquaintances who had negative experiences with law enforcement. 
• It wasn't violent. Sometimes the aggression isn't physical, but emotional. It's coercion, or the survivor is drunk and can't consent, or there are threats involved. If a survivor doesn't have bruises to prove they were "attacked" they may feel they can't be taken seriously, or that it wasn't a crime. 
• They fear they will bring shame or embarrassment to their families. Can you imagine if everyone aired all your dirty laundry all over your town? Including the circumstances that dirtied your laundry, and the fact that you had been doing so and so with so and so just last week. And don't forget the opinions that you are probably just retaliating because of that one thing that happened that one time, and that you want to drag his/her name through the mud, because those opinions will definitely get shared too. This is amplified if the survivor is a male, or homosexual, or the target of a hate crime. 
• They fear they'll have to testify. The truth is most sexual assaults cases never make it to trial. But TV crime dramas know that non-reporting and non-trial cases don't make for good tv, so if our experience is based on what we've seen on tv, we don't usually have that perspective. Survivors often don't want to face their perpetrator again, and certainly don't want to have to do so in front of others and under oath. (https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system).

• They fear it won't go to trial. If survivors have heard of the statistics above, they may wonder what's the point in reporting if it doesn't change anything? 
• They love the alleged perpetrator. Perpetrators are boyfriends. Girlfriends. Husbands. Wives. Fathers. Uncles. Grandfathers. Grandmothers. If there is a cycle of abuse or assault, the perpetrator may also provide the survivor with gifts, praise, nurturance, care, and fun experiences. Coming forward would mean the person they care about may be removed from their life, and making the assaults go away may not seem worth that loss. 
• They didn't know it was abuse/assault. Children who have been abused are often groomed to think the sexual assault is normal. Women who are assaulted by their husbands may not know that legally a husband can be convicted of raping his wife.  (Spousal rape is now illegal in all 50 states, but at least two states did not pass that until 1993. 1993! South Carolina law (SECTION 16-3-615) still requires the use or threat of using a weapon in order to be charged with sexual battery of a spouse.). The "boys will be boys" mentality means that we expect sexualized behavior from boys and often miss that it may be missing consent. 
• They don't want their families/friend groups/careers ruined. Coming forward will tear people apart. Family members take sides. Friends stop talking to each other. Career opportunities are lost. Sometimes it's just not worth risking everything someone has to share publicly or even privately about an assault, especially when sharing is already a gamble and may not lead to an arrest. If the abuser was a person in power like a boss or clergy or parent figure, they may not want to remove that person from the other people in the office, church, or family. 
• They are ashamed. Following sexual assault, many survivors feel worthless. I've heard survivors say that they must've deserved to be raped, and they don't deserve justice. Thirty three percent of sexual assault survivors contemplate suicide. If there's nothing worth living for, why would they come forward? (https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence) 
• They are reclaiming their power. Sexual assault is a crime of power. Survivors have had power taken away and dignity taken away, and the choice to come forward or not is one way they may be reclaiming their own power, dignity and voice. 
• They fear the reactions of their loved ones. I've heard many survivors say they knew they couldn't come forward because their father or other loved one would have killed the perpetrator, and they couldn't stand to lose that family member/support person to a potential lifetime prison sentence. 
• They fear retaliation. The thought of publicly testifying against or even privately stating that someone in a position of power has hurt another person can be terrifying. The more high profile the case, the bigger a problem this is. If I tell you Johnny assaulted me, I risk it getting back to him and him trying to hurt me or threaten me to be quiet. If I say it on the stand and it makes the local paper, I may have Johnny's family to worry about retaliating too. If I say it to our whole community and as a result our priest has to leave, I risk all the parishioners of our church getting mad. If I say it on national tv, I risk having every Bill Cosby fan for the last 40 years angry with me and many of them looking to prove it.
• They fear they won't be believed.  This week has proven this fear is still a valid one in this country. Juries (and facebook posters) expect DNA evidence in sexual assault cases even though the majority don't have DNA evidence, and even with physical evidence, it could still be a case of he said/she said. People point out holes in survivor's stories. We question the legitimacy of the complaint, the actions of the survivor, the timing of the allegation, and the motivation of the survivor. I've seen some facebook posts fearing for their boys in the aftermath of the #metoo movement, insinuating that someone could accuse their boys of anything, and they would have their names tarnished by the accusation. Interestingly enough, with all this data showing that women are fearful they won't be believed, we are still fearful they will be. 

We may never know what happened between Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford, and thankfully it's not my job to make that determination. What I do know is that one in three women and one in six men will be victims of contact sexual violence in their lifetime (https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics), meaning out of my roughly 1300 facebook friends, approximately 288 will have an assault story in their life. Maybe they already have. Because of the dynamics above, many of them will hold or are currently holding that secret in silence, feeling that the risk is too great to share. They are our friends. Our daughters. Our sisters. Our co-workers. Our people. And they are reading every post that I write, and that you write, and getting a better understanding of our take on sexual assault and our support for survivors. I hope that during this time we think about more than Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford and the supreme court and the republicans vs the democrats. I hope we are also thinking of our friends and family who are reading our words and knowing whether we would blame them for their own assault if we knew about it. When in doubt, I pray we lean in toward kindness and love for each other, and speak up for those who may be reading in silence.