Everything We Think We Know About How Victims Should Behave Is Wrong

Why is the cultural narrative so far from the truth?

A few days ago I was having an exchange with Eric Leroy around a variety of topics related to women and their pervasive traumatic experiences in our society. Eric asked me why a woman would wait years or even decades to come forward about an attack. What followed was a detailed response which he recommended that I publish as a separate essay. This is what I wrote. It gives a thorough picture of just how wrong most of the cultural narratives are around what it’s like to be a victim/survivor.

I’ll not delve in the Kavanaugh thing directly because there are too many political elements that do further complicate it, but there are many, many reasons why women don’t come forward immediately. They aren’t always intuitive to someone looking in from the “outside” but do have a lot of science and logic behind them when you actually understand the elements in play.

“A door opens and a police officer is suddenly staring at the wrong end of a gun. In a split second, his brain is hyper-focused on that gun. It is very likely that he will not recall any of the details that were irrelevant to his immediate survival: Did the shooter have a moustache? What color was the shooter’s hair? What was the shooter wearing?

The officer’s reaction is not a result of poor training. It’s his brain reacting to a life-threatening situation just the way it is supposed to — just the way the brain of a rape victim reacts to an assault. (emphasis mine) In the aftermath, the officer may be unable to recall many important details. He may be uncertain about many. He may be confused about many. He may recall some details inaccurately. Simultaneously, he will recall certain details — the things his brain focused on — with extraordinary accuracy. He may well never forget them. All of this, too, is the human brain working the way it was designed to work.”

I had a friend tell me the other day that her daughter just now told her about being raped 10 years ago. If women are afraid to tell their own mothers, imagine how difficult it would be to tell authority figures, particularly when you can reasonably expect that you will be vilified to some extend in the process. Just a few months ago a young woman took her own life as a result of the way she was treated during her rape trial. This is par for the course, to further traumatize the victims. Everyone knows that and many choose to not subject themselves to it.

“Victims are often too ashamed to come forward. Sexual assault is a very humiliating and dehumanizing act against someone. The person really feels invaded and defiled, and there is a lot of shame attached to that,” Beverly Engel told ABC News.

She continued, “Attached to that shame is a lot of self-blame. Victims of sexual assault almost always blame themselves, and we can understand why, because in our culture, we tend to blame victims in general. We say things like, ‘She shouldn’t have been wearing that kind of outfit, she shouldn’t have drank so much, why did she go to that party?’ We find some reason to blame the victim.”

To compound that, the reporting process can be traumatizing in itself and the victim may be further blamed or shamed by her community. In fact, she may feel as though she is the one being put on trial. This recently published article from The Washington Post details a particularly heinous example of a victim being re-traumatized after she reported being raped immediately after it took place. It’s no wonder so many women and men do not report, or do not do so until years later.

There’s an entire Twitter hashtag now WhyIDidn’tReport. If you want to actually understand the myriad reasons why victims don’t immediately report being attacked, go check it out. There are nearly 37 thousand tweets already.

The cultural narrative around false accusations is another problem. The FBI (and many other organizations who track such things) put false accusations at about 8%. Meanwhile, there’s this notion that it’s rampant. And the types of situations in which false accusations occur is pretty well codified and understood, although perhaps not widely known. This should be talked about more openly as a way to challenge the myths. And the number of false accusations that lead to someone being arrested are even smaller than that. (Read the article below for more)

“But if a woman without any history of dramatic falsehoods says she went home with a man and, after they’d kissed a while consensually, he held her down and forced her into sex — in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, you can just assume it’s true. This is not because of any political dictum like “Believe women.” It’s because this story looks exactly like tens of thousands of date rapes that happen every year, and nothing at all like a false rape accusation.

So, absolutely, there should always be some kind of investigation and due process, but quite often this type of thing happens when only 2 people are present. None-the-less, we can still tell a lot from the demeanor of the two people, from the way they respond to questioning, etc. We do this all of the time in police stations and in courts of law. There’s a whole methodology around verbal interrogation. It’s not perfect, but it works well a lot of the time. “Former police detective and crime expert, Stacy Dittrich, says that the police can often tell if a suspect is lying the first time they come into contact with them, even if their story seems to otherwise line up.” For more about what those are read this:

And, when anyone alleges any other kind of crime, we always start off by believing them, up until such time that further investigation reveals that we should do otherwise. This is not the case with rape and sexual assault or harassment. We start out with “prove it” and go from there because there is cultural bias against women/victims and a false narrative that purports that large numbers of bitter and vindictive women are making this shit up to hurt men. Meanwhile, this is only very rarely the case and in nearly all instances, where there is smoke, there is actually fire. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t still have due process and further investigation, but what the science and the statistics support is 180 from the myths about this subject.

And if you want to go into Innocent Until Proven Guilty, I’ve written an article on that also.

“According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the presumption of the innocence of a criminal defendant is best described as an assumption of innocence that is indulged in the absence of contrary evidence.” In other words, when we have probable cause to suspect someone, we do not owe them an assumption of innocence. Innocent until proven guilty is really a phrase that only applies to who has the burden of persuasion in a trial situation. If we truly believed everyone who had been indicted (or accused) was innocent, our court system would be more clogged than it already is. Probable cause is just that!

If someone is accused of a crime or of impropriety, it should be taken seriously and investigated and we should start with believing that the accuser has a valid reason to complain until the investigation indicates otherwise. For the most part, this is not what happens now. It took 60 women to bring down Bill Cosby. We do not like to think that people/men whom we like or admire could do terrible things and we as a society also have a built in bias against victims because there is some notion in a dominance hierarchy that if something bad happened to you, you must deserve it somehow. Think about Trump speaking about John McCain and saying how he wasn’t a hero because he’d been captured and Trump only likes those who didn’t get themselves captured. This is a common sentiment even if it’s not always outwardly voiced in this blatant way. That’s another article in the works, right there, so stay tuned!

So, this is what you get for asking me what I think about a topic that I’ve thoroughly researched and written extensively about! 😁 Sorry that it got so long, but here is the synopsis:

False accusations are very rare and tend to happen under certain conditions.

All accusations should be taken seriously and thoroughly investigated, even if the only way to do so is by verbal interrogation of both parties.

We need to keep educating the public about what the brain science is around how victims respond because it often looks quite different than what an uninformed bystander might imagine. And we need to keep educating first responders and others on how to properly obtain statements from potential victims.

The victims, most of them women, often had trouble recalling an attack or couldn’t give a chronological account of it. Some expressed no emotion. Others smiled or laughed as they described being assaulted. “Unlike any other crime I responded to in my career, there was always this thought that a rape report was a false report,” says Tremblay, who was an investigator in Burlington’s sex crimes unit.

Nearly everything that is commonly believed about how people “should” behave in these situations is completely wrong. Beyond fight and flight, common human responses to trauma are also freeze or fawn (trying to appease the attacker). It’s imperative that all of this come more fully into our public consciousness.