****TRIGGER WARNING****
This is part one of a three part blog that discusses rape, child abuse and includes my personal experiences in some graphic detail. Please don’t read these blogs if it will put your mental health at risk. There are resources listed at the bottom of this blog if you or someone you know is/becomes a victim of any sexual crime, please reach out to get help.
It took me a few days to decide what my second blog should be about. I finally realized it needed to be about victim blaming/shaming, something I have experienced, and still do, every single time I talk about the abuse I have suffered (if you haven't read my first blog, please do, https://sophpratt.wixsite.com/celiacsophiesblog/post/why-i-share-my-experiences I discuss the different types of abuse I've suffered in that blog).
As I sat to write this piece I realized there were so many other topics that go along with shaming/blaming so I decided this was too important to condense into one blog post. In part one of this blog I'm going to touch on the following; "What is victim blaming/shaming?", "What is secondary victimization?", "What are some examples of statements victims hear?", "Why they are either inaccurate or harmful" and I'm including some stats on these crimes at the end of part 1. Part 2 will focus on the stigma of sexual crimes/rape culture/rape day, as well as "Why victims may blame themselves," "Why victim blaming/shaming is harmful," "How the media contributes to victim blaming," and "What can you do to prevent this/help victims?" Part 3 will include my own personal experiences with several of these things and it will go into detail on some of the abuses I have suffered, it may be difficult for some people to read but I wanted to give a face to these things. All three parts will end with a list of resources for victims, parts one and two will include citations of sources I used.
As you read these blogs ask yourself, have you ever thought or said these things about or to someone? How would you feel if someone said these things to you? At the end of this blog hopefully you will have more of an understanding on why this is so harmful to victims and what you can do to make sure you aren't blaming anyone for horrific trauma that happened to them.
"WHAT IS VICTIM SHAMING/BLAMING?"
Victim shaming/blaming is when a victim of a crime is held entirely or partially at fault for the trauma they experienced, it's the perception that victims are in any way responsible for the actions of offenders. Throughout history (and even in current times) there is a lot of prejudice against the victims of domestic violence or sex crimes such as rape, molestation, date rape, etc. There is huge tendency to blame victims of rape rather than victims of robbery or even murder. This is especially true when victims and abusers knew each other before the crime occurred. Victim blaming is often seen in courtrooms where defense attorneys insist that victims are at fault. It’s also often seen in the media and sometimes victims even blame themselves for what happened. Whether the shaming/blaming is outright said or implied it is harmful to all victims of sex crimes.
“WHAT IS SECONDARY VICTIMIZATION?”
Secondary victimization is the re-traumatization of the sexual assault or abuse by the perpetrator, authorities, court representatives or others who victim blame, shame, don’t believe the victim or minimize the severity of the assault or abuse. While it is most common in cases involving drugs, alcohol and acquaintance/date rape, the majority of victims of sexual crimes experience secondary victimization which can be just as harmful to the psyche of the victim as the rape or abuse itself.
“WHAT ARE SOME EXAMPLES OF BLAMING, SHAMING AND/OR SECONDARY VICTIMIZATION?”
"She was asking for it." "She provoked him." "She seduced him."
An example of this is a case from 2011 in Cleveland, Texas. During the trial a defense attorney accused an 11-year-old female rape victim who suffered repeated gang rapes of being a seductress who lured men to their doom. The attorney "asked" a witness the following, “Like a spider and the fly, wasn’t she saying, ‘Come into my parlor,' said the spider to the fly.” Personally I find that completely immorally reprehensible. As a victim of child sexual abuse my heart goes out to that little girl, no child ever asks for this, nor are they a seductress, that’s sick! A lot of people don't realize that even child victims are blamed, shamed and face secondary victimization.
"Was she drinking?" "What was she doing there?" "What did she expect?" "But she went to his place/invited him to her place." "She was flirting with him." "She should have known better."
These all go hand in hand really. First off, the beverage(s) a victim may have consumed doesn't commit the crime, the criminal and only the criminal commits the crime. On occasion people ask if the rapist was drinking as well, as if that would excuse his behavior. A drunk person isn't more likely to rape then they are when they are sober, a rapist will rape whether they have been drinking or not.
Secondly, Flirting is not the same as giving consent, that should be an obvious thing to everyone but apparently it isn’t. Flirting doesn’t imply a person wants to act on those actions. Even if consent is given in a previous encounter that doesn’t mean it’s a green light to do whatever you want to the person, whenever you want. Consent can be removed at any point, before or during the act and it only gives consent to that particular encounter, not future ones.
Third, inviting someone to your home or going to someone else's home doesn't mean you intend to have sex with them. There are many reasons why someone might accept an invitation to go to someone's home or invite someone to their home. Perhaps, they have known this person for a long time and trust them. Even if a person chooses to go to someone's home when they don't know them well, or invite them to their home, it doesn't make it okay for someone to rape them, it doesn't excuse the behavior of the perpetrator. I'll touch a bit more on this later on when I talk about my own story.
Finally, "she should have known better," is such a stupid statement, known better than what? She should have known better than to get raped? Really?
"She was wearing provocative clothing." "What was she wearing?"
Statements such as these focus on the victims clothing/appearance, as if they were responsible for the assault because of her clothing choices or their hair, makeup, etc. Sexual assault is something that happens to someone, not something they choose to bring upon themselves. Clothing, hair, makeup, none of that is responsible for rape. When we focus on a victims appearance we are ignoring what the rapist has done, we are essentially trying to excuse the criminal's behavior, that is not okay.
"She couldn't have been raped because she is a slut or a prostitute." "She's been with a lot of people."
No matter how many times a person has had consensual sex, they still have the right to say no to sex. It doesn’t matter if their profession is a sex worker, they too have the right to say no. It’s also important to know that hyper-sexuality is a type of coping mechanism (though not a good one) that is often seen in victims of sexual crimes.
Scientifically, we know that trauma actually causes the brain to believe it's been injured, so multiple trauma's means multiple injuries. The trauma of sexual assault can sometimes cause to engage in a lot of sexual activity. Why does that happen? It’s the brain’s way of trying to figure out what happened to it, it’s also the brain's way of trying to regain a sense of control and to heal the injury it thinks it has sustained. On the opposite spectrum some victims become totally abstinent. Either way, it is important not to shame a victim for trying to regain some control over sexual encounters. This is actually an important step in healing, however, hyper-sexual behavior can lead to victims becoming victims again. If that happens, again it is not okay to blame the victim for becoming a victim again. I understand this concept may be difficult to understand for those never having been raped or sexually abused, but as I’ve said, the victim is never at fault, absolutely never, I can’t repeat that enough.
"She is lying." "She should have come forward immediately." "She must be lying since she didn't come forward earlier." "The DA dropped the case so it must not have been true/it didn't happen."
Imagine for a second, if you can, you were sexually assaulted, the horror of that crime, the violence of that, the trauma you might feel, the shame, the guilt, the violation, the way society treats victims, what people will think, what they might say, these are all part of why victims don’t come forward immediately. Not every victim is prepared mentally to come forward right after immediately being raped. As I said above, the brain quite literally thinks it's been injured (I will actually be doing a full blog on this topic soon). By saying someone must come forward immediately or they are lying, we are expecting someone with the equivalent of a brain injury to come forward, remember every detail and tell their story repeatedly to people who make them feel like they are at fault. Why do we people do that? I really don't understand. Quite honestly, all I wanted to do was take a shower & get his stench off of me, I wanted to curl up in a ball on the floor of my shower and cry. We can’t expect someone who experienced such trauma to come forward immediately, in an ideal world that would be the best outcome, we do not live in an ideal world, if we did, there wouldn’t be rape or abuse. Do we usually blame children for not telling someone they are being abused? Most of us don't blame children so why is it okay to blame rape victims for not coming forward immediately?
Another way people shame is when they point to the fact that the victim can’t tell their story the same way each time. Here is the problem with that. Recalling information from a time when we are under extreme stress from trauma is very different than recalling it when we aren’t. A victim may be experiencing dissociation (another topic I plan on talking about in a future blog), something the brain chooses to do to protect oneself, to continue to survive, or because it believes you are not ready to deal with the trauma. Our brains only allow us to deal with what the brain assumes we can handle at one particular time or another. An article I read explained it this way, a memory that might normally look like A->B->C->D->E->F->G might look more like B->G->F->?->?->A->?. It pointed out that victims of other types of traumatic events (natural disaster, terrorist attacks, car crashes, etc.) often react the same way, yet we would never say to those survivors that they were lying. Oftentimes, it’s only with therapy that victims can begin to start to put the pieces back together and hopefully through that therapy they can begin to find ways to cope and deal with their trauma.
So why do DA's drop cases? Does it mean the victim is lying? DA’s are elected officials, they are usually elected based on their win records. If they believe they can’t win the case, whether it's a good case or not, they won’t take it. Remember they also get promoted based on wins vs. loses. If they don’t take the case, it doesn’t affect their win/lose ratio. This doesn’t have anything to do with the victim, it’s usually a case of them not having enough resources, not enough witnesses or physical evidence (A lack of witnesses and/or physical evidence doesn’t mean the crime didn’t occur) or sometimes a victim asks for a case to get dropped. So why would a victim ask for a case to get dropped. That’s not a simple answer, there are a lot of reasons why they may do that, similar to the fact that there are a lot of reasons why victims don’t come forward. Victim blaming/shaming may be one of those reasons, the victim may be getting harassed, even getting death threats, or their attacker may have intimidated them into dropping the case. They may have withdrawn the case in order to keep their self-preservation. These are just a few of the things to keep in mind when you hear a case has been dropped, or when you hear a victim didn’t come forward immediately or didn’t bother to report it at all. Another thing to remember is the system is very much to blame for victims not coming forward or choosing to drop the case. The process can be very re-traumatizing for victims. People often say when a victim retracts their statement it’s because they lied. That’s simply not true 99.9% of the time. A lack of evidence doesn’t mean they lied, that is an assumption people make because it’s easier to believe someone lied than it is to believe someone committed a sexual crime, especially if you know the person being accused or if the victim and perpetrator share a social group. Retracting their statement, no matter how they choose to retract it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Another issue that is important to know is that in the USA there are still states with loopholes in their laws regarding rape, especially in situations where the victim knows the perpetrator. It's only been since 1993 that every state made it illegal to commit sexual violence against a spouse or partner. Unfortunately, as I said, there are loopholes, some states still have laws on the books such as "women must perform their wifely duties," "the only real rape is stranger rape." These loopholes need to be changed because it allows rapists to use the argument that you are their wife or girlfriend so you have an obligation to perform "wifely duties." Regardless of your relationship to your rapist, assault is assault, abuse is abuse, period. Knowing your attacker, being in any relationship with them does not ever take away your right to legally consent or to say no. You do not have an obligation to consent to anyone, period.
Women are victim shamed based on characteristics such as being careless, too trustworthy, wearing the wrong thing while men tend to face victim blaming differently based on behavioral characteristics such as not being strong enough or not fighting back. Again it all boils down to this, anyone can be raped at any point in their lives in any circumstance and they are never to blame. The only person ever to blame is the perpetrator.
"STATS"
(see more information on how RAINN collects these stats below the citations at the bottom of this blog)
Every 73 seconds an American is sexually assaulted, every 9 minutes that victim is a child.
80,600 Inmates a year are victims of sexual assault
60,000 children a year are victims of substantiated or indicated sexual abuse
433,648 American’s age 12 or older are sexually assaulted or raped yearly
18, 900 military people experience unwanted sexual contact yearly (I know one of those male military victims).
1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime
3% of American men (1 in 33) have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime
34% of victims of sexual assault and rape are under the age of 12 (this stat doesn’t include adult cases)
66% of child victims are ages 12-17
9 out of every 10 victims is female (90% female vs. 10% male)
What was the victim doing when the crime occurred? (Also stats from RAINN)
48% were sleeping, or performing another activity at home
29% were traveling to and from work or school, or traveling to shop or run errands
12% were working
7% were attending school
5% were doing an unknown or other activity
World stats tend to lean towards the following; every second a person is sexually assaulted, that makes 86,400 people in a 24 hour period. That number is increasing every year, just based on the people who report sexual assault, if you consider how many aren’t reported, that number is probably astronomical. 1 in every 3 females will be raped, while 1 in every 9 will be raped according to world stats.
FACT: As many as one-third of all high school and college-age young people experience violence in an intimate or dating relationship.
FACT: Survivors exhibit a spectrum of emotional responses to assault: calm, hysteria, laughter, anger, apathy, shock. Each survivor copes with the trauma of the assault in a different way.
FACT: Reported sexual assaults are true, with very few exceptions. According to CONNSACS, only 2% of reported rapes are false. This is the same rate of false reporting as other major crime reports.
If you or someone you know is a victim please see the resources below for help. I’m here to listen if you want to tell me your story, I promise to keep whatever you tell me confidential unless I have your written permission to do otherwise. To my fellow survivors I see you, I hear you, I care about you and I stand with you!
Go to Part 2 of this series here; https://sophpratt.wixsite.com/celiacsophiesblog/post/sa-series-part-2-what-is-victim-shaming-blaming-why-is-it-bad
RESOURCES
National Sexual Assault Hotline 1-800-656-4673 Available 24 hours
CITATIONS
Understanding RAINN’s statistics
Sexual violence is notoriously difficult to measure, and there is no single source of data that provides a complete picture of the crime. On RAINN’s website, we have tried to select the most reliable source of statistics for each topic. The primary data source we use is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is an annual study conducted by the Justice Department. To conduct NCVS, researchers interview tens of thousands of Americans each year to learn about crimes that they’ve experienced. Based on those interviews, the study provides estimates of the total number of crimes, including those that were not reported to police. While NCVS has a number of limitations (most importantly, children under age 12 are not included), overall, it is the most reliable source of crime statistics in the U.S.
We have also relied on other Justice Department studies, as well as data from the Department of Health and Human Services and other government and academic sources. When assembling these statistics, we have generally retained the wording used by the authors. Statistics are presented for educational purposes only.
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