Don’t listen to Donald Trump. Many rape victims ‘don’t scream’ – and most never report their assaults
In just four sentences, Trump managed to spread multiple harmful myths about sexual assault
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Your support makes all the difference.Am I at all surprised that Donald Trump has appalling views on rape? No. I did not expect that the man who gave us the phrase “grab them by the p***y” to have a comprehensive, well-informed, empathetic understanding of those matters. So, I can’t say I fell off my chair in shock when the former president, in responding to the rape claims he is currently facing in court, managed to spread multiple harmful myths about sexual assault in four short sentences.
To recap: Trump is currently a defendant in a civil lawsuit filed by the writer E Jean Carroll, who alleges that Trump raped her in 1996, in the fitting room of a department store in Manhattan. Trump has denied those claims.
Carroll filed the lawsuit, for defamation and battery, last year under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which enables survivors of sexual assault who were over 18 when the abuse occurred to sue their abusers, regardless of when the abuse happened. (That case is separate from another defamation lawsuit Carroll filed against Trump in 2019, in which she alleged Trump defamed her in statements he made denying her claims.)
The 2022 lawsuit has now gone to trial. Proceedings started on Tuesday (25 April), and it took Trump less than 24 hours to go one one of his signature rants on Truth Social, the social media platform he created after being banned from Twitter and Facebook following the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021.
I’m not going to share Trump’s comments in full, because life is short. Instead, I am going to share just four sentences that caught my eye.
“She didn’t scream?” Trump wrote of Carroll. “There are no witnesses? Nobody saw this? She never made a police complaint?”
Trump isn’t asking those questions in good faith, obviously. He’s using them to undermine Carroll’s credibility. The blank you’re supposed to fill is this: “If someone is raped, they scream. If someone is raped, there are witnesses. If someone is raped, someone sees. If someone is raped, they make a police complaint.”
Those four concepts reflect common misconceptions about sexual assault and rape. They are part of a whole body of falsehoods that continue to make it unnecessarily hard for victims of assault to rely on the justice system, and to feel safe doing so. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), out of every 1,000 sexual assault perpetrators, 28 will be convicted of a felony, and 25 will face incarceration.
And so, just because Trump’s comments are sadly expected, doesn’t mean we should let them go unchallenged. Below, a rapid fact-checking of the president’s comments on rape.
“She didn’t scream?”
Obviously, not all victims of rape or sexual assault scream, yell, or fight back while it’s happening. Some can’t. Some people – shockingly – are too scared to do any of those things while being the victims of a violent crime.
James W Hopper, a clinical psychologist and a teaching associate in Psychology at Harvard Medical School, wrote in a 2015 for The Washington Post, titled “Why many rape victims don’t fight or yell”: “In the midst of sexual assault, the brain’s fear circuitry dominates. The prefrontal cortex can be severely impaired, and all that’s left may be reflexes and habits.”
Hopper wrote about “freezing”, “a brain-based response to detecting danger, especially a predator’s attack”, as well as “tonic immobility” and “collapsed immobility”, two examples of “extreme survival reflexes” that can kick in during an attack.
“There are no witnesses? Nobody saw this?”
Due to the nature of sexual assault, it’s not exactly uncommon for those attacks not to have any direct eyewitnesses. But that doesn’t mean there are no witnesses to bring forward in court. Typically, a plaintiff’s team will look for people whom the victim may have told about the alleged assault after it happened.
Carroll, who took the witness stand on Wednesday (26 April), said she told two friends about the alleged attack. Those friends, Carol Martin and Lisa Birnbach, have both previously confirmed that Carroll told them in the 1990s that she had been sexually assaulted by Trump.
“She never made a police complaint?”
Most victims of rape and sexual assault do not report their attacks to the police.
According to RAINN, out of every 1,000 sexual assaults, 310 are the subjects of such reports. Looking at violent crimes reported from 2005 to 2010, RAINN said victims had given the following reasons for not filing a report: 20 per cent feared retaliation, 13 per cent believed the police wouldn’t do anything to help, 13 per cent believed it was a personal matter, 8 per cent reported the attack to a different official, 8 per cent believed the attack was not important to report, 7 per cent didn’t want to get the perpetrator in trouble, and 2 per cent believed the police could not do anything to help. Another 30 per cent gave another reason, or did not cite one reason.