Why
women don’t report sexual assault
Delays should never be used to
discredit accusers like Christine Blasey Ford.
When Christine Blasey Ford came
forward to report that President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, sexually assaulted
her in 1982, you could cue the response: Why didn’t she speak
out then? Why didn’t she go to the police?
There’s a long, long list of reasons
why a woman wouldn’t speak out even now, and no doubt it was even more
difficult in the pre-Anita Hill world of 1982.
I can’t speak for everyone who has
faced sexual assault, but I can speak for myself.
1. At first, I didn’t know that what happened to me was a crime. My first assault occurred in college, 18 years ago. He lived in my dorm. I knew what rape was and didn’t think I’d experienced that. But I didn’t know that sexual violations without consent that aren’t sexual intercourse are also a crime.
2. I couldn’t talk about it. Even
now, I can’t describe what happened to my therapist in any detail. What
happened involved body parts that are too private to discuss with those closest
to me — let alone the police, a judge, or a newspaper. Talking about a past
trauma can be re-traumatizing. Some of us cope by staying silent.
3. I blamed myself. I physically
resisted for a while and then I froze and it happened. At the time, I told
myself that if I really didn’t want it, I would’ve kept fighting. I didn’t know
that freezing is a normal human response in a traumatic situation.
4. Afterward, I wanted him to be my
boyfriend. My therapist said this was my way of trying to improve the
situation. If he was my boyfriend, then what happened could be reinterpreted as
meaningful. It’s a perverse response, but it’s apparently not uncommon.
5. I know someone who reported a
rape to the police and had a traumatic experience of testifying in court and
getting cross-examined by her rapist’s lawyer in front of her rapist. And then
the rapist was found innocent. I don’t want that to happen to me.
6. Now, 18 years later, the man who
assaulted me is an instructor of neurology at a prominent children’s hospital.
He did a terrible thing to me, once, nearly two decades ago. Should I attempt
to ruin his career because of it?
The answer to that is: I don’t know.
If I thought he was still assaulting women and my speaking out would contribute
to making him stop, I would in a heartbeat.
What he did to me 18 years ago still
hurts so much that I would only revisit that assault and expose him publicly if
there was a very clear purpose to doing so.
I expect if I did attempt to expose
him, I’d be attacked. People would say that it wasn’t an assault because I
wanted him to be my boyfriend afterward. They would say I wanted it because I
froze and stopped fighting. There are good odds I wouldn’t be believed.
I’ll tell you this: Like Christine
Blasey Ford, if the man who assaulted me was nominated for the U.S. Supreme
Court, I’d speak up. I don’t think a man who violates a woman that way is
qualified to rule on cases of violence against women, or any other aspect of
their well-being. I don’t think he could be impartial.
When a victim of sexual crimes comes
forward, even if it’s decades after the crime took place, we shouldn’t use her
past silence against her as “evidence” to discredit her. That urge to discredit
is exactly why it takes so long for some to come forward in the first place.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson
is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She
lives in San Diego. Distributed by OtherWords.org.