Why reporting sexual assault is so damn hard

When Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Brett Kavanaugh emerged alongside his confirmation to the Supreme Court, questions regarding reporting sexual assault landed in our societal spotlight. Outrage poured across my phone as #whyIdidntreport trended on social media. I was triggered for seven days. Crying in the mornings, nightmares every night. The guy I was dating at the time, a centrist at best, kept pushing back on my beliefs, defending Kavanagh, and trying to poke holes in why I believed Dr. Ford, who happened to be my old professor.

I questioned my reactions and my obvious inability to keep emotion out of it. Am I overreacting because of my experiences? Is this guy being an asshole, or am I unable to see straight? I was so sick of being silenced. I was so sick of feeling ashamed. I was so sick of seeing these men in power! 

From a place of fury and despair, uncharacteristically, I took to my Instagram and posted:

Dear Trump et al.-

To question why women don’t come forward immediately following sexual assault is to have zero understanding of human psychology. As Dr. Ford is receiving death threats, you sit and question ­––why didn’t she report it earlier. Isn’t the answer self-evident?  You promote a rape culture that puts every obstacle in our path to reporting, and then act incredulous that we don’t easily and quickly overcome them. When we DO come forward, you shame us for what happened while simultaneously acting like you don’t believe us. You respond without empathy for events that will forever impact our lives. Why didn’t I report it earlier? Because there was no one there to hear me. I’m done adhering to this gas lighting. It’s not us that need to change. It’s you.

I let it sit on the internet for a day, maybe two. I waited for the guy I was dating to like it, as he did all my other posts, but he never did. At first, I felt pride and a release of the outrage I was feeling. But quickly, I became a raw nerve, feeling overexposed and a rush of that oh-so-familiar shame. Unable to handle the sheer vulnerability, I took the post down.

I had been through this cycle many times before—feeling empowered when speaking up, then spiraling down into shame. I felt this when I disclosed my trauma to those close to me, and I certainly felt it when I reported what had happened to me.

A deep sense of conditioning woven into the fabric of my being—one that insisted on my silence—wouldn’t release its grip. I’ve come to wonder about this from both a psychological and sociological perspective. What messages are imprinted upon us that keep us quiet? How is shame taught to us? How do we ingest it?

Sexual trauma survivors are commonly asked questions regarding reporting sexual assault, such as:

• Why didn’t you report it?
• If you did report it, why didn’t you do so sooner?
• Why didn’t you tell someone when it happened?
• Why are you coming out six months, one year, or twenty years later?

Talking about and reporting sexual trauma is to push back against tremendous conditioning on both a personal and societal level. Questioning trauma survivors in this way wholly disregards these facts. It neglects to acknowledge how many barriers there are in the process of becoming ready to talk about and report one of the most challenging things a person can go through.

Talking about sexual assault is hard; reporting sexual assault is a whole different level. To report a sexual assault, one must first get through all the personal layers of healing. (Check out my last post on this topic HERE.) Then, it requires the fortitude to take your most intimate and difficult experience into a court of law, opening yourself up for questioning, scrutiny, and cross-examination. It is often re-traumatizing.

I’d like to talk further about why reporting sexual assault is so damn hard from a societal perspective.

Why Reporting Sexual Assault is so Damn Hard

1) Our Society Flips Victim and Perpetrator

Our society views accusations of sexual assault as a bigger problem for the perpetrator’s life than the impact of trauma on a victim’s life. Because  of  this societal programming, she is often treated like the perpetrator, and he, the victim. And commonly, she feels this way too.  

I’ve had moments of feeling vengeful, no doubt, but certainly, I’ve struggled much more with feelings of pity, sorrow, and sadness for my perpetrator. I can’t tell you how many holidays, birthdays, and fathers’ days I’ve spent crying. Not about my loss, but about what I had done to his life. These are the messages we give girls and women. These are the messages we give boys and men.

Accusations should be handled with utmost care and looked at, not just automatically believed on their face. But to hold that perpetrators are passive victims while denying the actual victim’s humanity and lifelong repercussions of what she has gone through is truly backwards and damaging to our society as a whole.

I’ve come to see this as a societal strategy that keeps the powerful in power. We have a long history of allowing men to act as they wish without questioning while alienating and disbelieving women when they speak up.  

Here are a few reasons the role of victim and perpetrator get flipped:

Lack of empathy for the victim, empathy for the accused

We generate more empathy for those accused of sexual assault than we do for victims. When we only see victims as that, victims, we don’t have the opportunity to understand how sexual abuse and assault impact a victim’s life.  Additionally, we don’t build our understanding of who the victim is beyond the trauma itself.

Many victims remain anonymous or are unknown, but the accused often have names we know and perhaps we love them from afar. We have increased understanding of the perpetrator and, therefore, more empathy. We think about the perpetrator in other contexts, maybe as a beloved actor or successful businessman, and we have a hard time squaring that he can be two things at once–successful and good in some realms, while also capable of sexual assault. We identify more with his positive or admirable traits. We have empathy for him.

Additionally, when an accusation against a powerful man surfaces, we can see how the it impacts his life. We can see his losses. They are often external: career, reputation, money.

What the victim loses is more nuanced and often internal. Her losses include depression, anxiety, coping with trauma triggers, insomnia, difficulty trusting, isolation, panic, nightmares, and more. These can be difficult, if not impossible to see from the outside. She may still be smiling. She may be going to work and carrying on. Without understanding and hearing victims’ voices and stories, we don’t have the opportunity for empathy.

She is deemed the troublemaker for speaking up

As a society, we see her as the troublemaker for speaking up. She is breaking the rules of being a “good girl,” accepting whatever treatment is offered to her. There are unspoken societal rules that she should stay quiet, that good girls don’t make a scene or cause problems.

We view her speaking up as more of a problem than his wrongful actions. She spoke the truth, she didn’t create the truth, but somehow, these two become muddled. If she had only stayed quiet, this wouldn’t be a problem.

It’s a strategy to keep powerful men in power

These ideas and messages have been running through our society, conditioning us over decades. They allow the powerful to stay in power and keep the vulnerable quiet. Through the conditioning of shame, either victims’ voices aren’t heard, and things stay the same, or victims’ voices are heard, they are the ones blamed and shamed, and things stay the same. We therefore reinforce the cycle of not hearing the voices and stories of victims, further decreasing our empathy for them.

2) Reporting Sexual Assault Means Loss of Privacy

We all value our privacy, but it is essential to someone who has been abused or assaulted. After losing privacy in the most fundamental way, restoring one’s sense of boundaries and ownership over her life is essential to re-establish safety after sexual assault.

Reporting sexual assault means publicly airing your entire history. It means a complete loss of holding anything private. A victim doesn’t choose what details of her life are spared; she must succumb to the process. Not only will her privacy become obsolete, but her entire history will be fair game for scrutiny and attacks.

3)  Powerful Institutions Uphold Systems of Abuse

Many powerful institutions surrounding us keep sexual abuse and assault quiet, dismissing victims and defending perpetrators. Victims may come forward within an institution or system, and no action is taken by that system. Or worse, the system punishes the victim for speaking up.  

Systems generally want to stay the same and uphold their reputations. To make an accusation is to shake up a system. Denying an accusation or keeping it quiet has historically kept the overall system and its most powerful members safe. So, they’d rather ignore the health or happiness of what’s seen as ONE person instead of changing the greater systemic issues and admitting wrongdoing.

Of course, there are a few big problems with this line of thinking. One is that sexual assault is often a problem that runs through these organizations, and these issues are therefore systemic. We should look at every accusation within the context of both the organization and society from which it emerges. It should not be viewed as an anomaly, as it usually is not. Everything has a context.

I do believe we are seeing the tides turn here, slowly but surely. As a society, we are no longer willing to accept the claim of ignorance from organizations.

4)  The System Is Too Fragile or Unstable

A child can’t report without telling a safe person first. If there isn’t a safe person, this can’t happen.  If a system is too fragile, it cannot hear a claim of wrongdoing. If a family is too dysfunctional or financially insecure, they don’t have the bandwidth to sit with something so destabilizing. If a corporation is simply trying to survive, they don’t have room to process this. If a system has a culture of denial and secrecy, they likely don’t know how else to operate when an accusation comes forward except to deny and hide.

          Obviously, this doesn’t make it right, but the culture or fragility of a system matters greatly to what gets reported. Often, victims come forward to someone in an organization or system and feel that they’ve done their job to report. The process is squashed if that accusation never has the opportunity to leave the system.

5) Reporting Sexual Assault Can Be Re-Traumatizing

The process of reporting is in direct opposition to trauma-informed care. The health, wellness, and healing of the victim are not at the center of the process because that’s not the point of the process. The system itself is not trauma-informed.

Going over your story repeatedly without a safe listener, being questioned on every aspect of what happened to you, being challenged, attacked, and thrown into a system where you have very little control and agency. This is the opposite of how I’d train a therapist to work with a survivor of abuse or assault.

If a victim is only managing to stay afloat, reporting has the power to destabilize her fully. It can therefore be dangerous for a victim to report due to increased suicidality and re-traumatization.  Additionally, she may feel threatened by her perpetrator, and this process opens her up to counter-attacks and retaliation. Likely, she already feels unsafe after going through abuse or assault, and after reporting sexual assault, those feelings will likely increase significantly.

Plus, the numbers are not in her favor to get a conviction, so the likelihood that her efforts will pay off is low. What victim wants to report what happened to her when she may be re-traumatized and her efforts won’t likely lead to a conviction?

 When taken together, the question, why didn’t you report it? seems laughable and the ultimate form of victim-blaming. If coming forward is not likely to amount to change and potentially further traumatize the victim, what is the point? We are told our stories and histories don’t matter, that we will be the ones who are shunned. We’ve seen it again and again.

My point isn’t believe all women and it’s not all men should be scared because anyone could say anything at any time. It’s about balance. It’s about valuing girls and women (and boys and men). It’s about taking them seriously, allowing them to have a voice, and respecting that the sequelae of trauma are significant and damaging. We should therefore do our best to protect our society from perpetrators who hurt people over saving the reputations of all-powerful men. What would it mean to victims if we valued them at least equal to how we value the perpetrator? What would it mean to give them both a fair shake?   

Righting the ship means caring about protecting the lives and mental health of our people as a whole, at least as much as we care about protecting the powerful’s reputations.

Righting the ship includes hearing the voices of more girls, women, and victims. Understanding builds compassion. Every voice matters, even if in the moment, it feels like dropping a penny in a deep well, not even making a splash. At some point, those pennies add up and amount to something that cannot be denied. While it’s deplorable that often dozens or hundreds of accusations are needed to bring a conviction (Epstein, Weinstein, Cosby, Kelly, Nassar), each individual voice is paramount to the whole. And hopefully, over time, each individual account will be held with the gravity it deserves.     

To those struggling through the process of reporting sexual assault–I see you, I appreciate you. I hope this post can help you build self-compassion and understanding of how hard this process is and why it takes the time it takes. There are also reasons why disclosure and reporting can be very healing, which I’ll talk about in my next post.

Thanks for being here. You’re not alone. XOXO. 

Resources

Chanel Miller’s book, Know My Name is an excellent read. I plan on writing more about her work on the blog. If you are looking for a wise and compassionate voice to help you through the process of reporting or a trial, check her out HERE. 

If you’re looking for a lawyer, or other legal resources and support, check out RAINN HERE. 

The Zero Abuse Project has great resources for professionals as well as victims/survivors. Check them out HERE.