If You Don’t Know Anything About Trauma Response or Rape Aftermath, Stop Telling Survivors How They Should Have Acted!

Your Uneducated Pontificating Isn’t Helping and It’s Mean

“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 mustache? 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.”

This is a very well understood and well-documented phenomenon. Just because you don’t know about it or don’t understand it very well does not diminish that.

“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,” 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 drunk 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 world of sexual assault and trauma response may not take place in the way that makes sense to you. But just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean you get to demand that it be the way you think it should be. Stop making victims wrong for not doing things as you see fit. It’s not helpful and it’s not kind!

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.