Why sexual assault survivors forget details... And four other misconceptions about sexual violence.

Pedro_P

▼ Barely a week goes by now without another case of rape or historic sex abuse being splashed across the news and picked over by critics. Yet misunderstanding about the nature of sexual violence leads to distorted opinions, which can further  enhance victims’ feelings of  shame, guilt and self-blame. Common myths about rape and sexual assault also undermine  jurors’ ability to objectively  assess the factswhen such cases come to court.
Here are five common myths and the facts behind them.
1. Most sexual assaults are committed by a stranger
The narrative of a woman being sexually assaulted while walking down a dark alleyway may still play out on many TV screens. But in the real world, rape and serious sexual assault is far more likely to occur in the home and at the hands of someone familiar. In England, Wales and Australia, around one in five women have  experienced sexual violenceat least once during their lifetime; the US’s national sexual violence survey similarly estimated that one in five women, along with  one in 71 men, have been raped.
But in the UK, for example, a separate report found that the  perpetrator was a stranger in  only 10% of rape and serious  sexual assaults, while in 56% of cases it was the victim’s partner, and for the remaining 33% it was a friend, acquaintance, or other family member.
2. A ‘real’ sexual assault survivor always reports immediately
According to UK Home Office data, 46% of recorded rapes were  reported on the day they took  place– while 14% of people took more than six months to report that they’d been assaulted. If the victim was a child, they were even more likely to delay coming forward: just 28% of those aged under 16 reported the offence on the day it happened, while a third waited for longer than six months.
That is just for assaults that ultimately are reported. Many others are not. In the US, for example, studies have estimated  that two out of three sexual  assaults never are reported.
There is no evidence that suggests the timing of when you report is linked to the genuineness of the report – Nicole Westmarland
There are many reasons why some people either delay reporting or never do, as testified to by the “#WhyIDidn’tReport”  hashtagon Twitter. “A lot of people don’t report because they don’t want the perpetrator to go to prison: maybe they’re in love with them, or it’s a family member, or it’s a partner and are reliant on their income,” says Nicole Westmarland, director of Durham Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse in the UK. “Another common reason I hear from students is that they don’t want to ruin the rest of the person’s life.”
Even so, “there is no evidence that suggests the timing of when you report is linked to the genuineness of the report", she says.
3. If assaults were reported immediately, it would be relatively easy to investigate and press charges
It is true that survivors of rapes and sexual assaults who come forward quickly are more likely to undergo a forensic medical examination, which involves taking swabs and samples from the body to identify the source of any semen, saliva, or DNA. Examiners also document injuries such as cuts, grazes or bruising, which could support allegations of force.
But undergoing a physical examination doesn’t necessarily mean an offender will be caught and convicted, or even that the case will be investigated – as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands of rape kits that sit  untested in police departmentsand forensic storage facilities across the US. And physical evidence tends to be less helpful if the person you’re accusing is a partner or close acquaintance. “Most cases these days don’t come down to whether sexual intercourse happened – or forensic evidence of intercourse. They come down to whether that intercourse was consensual or not,” says Westmoreland.
In the US, only 18% of reported rapes lead to an arrest and 2% result in a conviction
According to UK Home Office data, 26% of rapes and serious sexual  assaults reported on the same  day resulted in someone being  charged, dropping to 14% once a day or more has elapsed. Those who reported the offence on the day it took place also had significantly higher odds of seeing their case get to court – although it made less of a difference if the victim was under the age of 16. In the US, meanwhile, separate reports have found that only 18% of reported rapes lead to an  arrestand 2% result in a conviction.
4. If you didn’t ‘really’ want it, you’d fight back
People vary in their response to rape and sexual assault. In her 2008 book, Serial Survivors, the University of Wellington criminologist Jan Jordan describes the very different techniques employed by 15 women who were sexually assaulted by the same man: some tried talking to him; others fought back; still others tried to mentally remove themselves from the situation – a process psychologists refer to as ‘dissociation’.
Another study, which examined 274 police reports from the US, found that only 22% of survivors  resisted rape through fighting  and screaming. The majority (56%) tried begging and pleading with their offender, while others reported feeling ‘frozen with fright’. Different scenarios were more or less effective in different circumstances. Women who fought back, for example, were more likely to avoid rape – but they also ran a higher risk of greater physical injury if a weapon was present. On the other hand, pleading, crying or reasoning with the perpetrator was associated with increased physical injury if the attack took place indoors and increased sexual abuse if environmental intervention (such as someone intruding) occurred.
It is also important to recognise that people can’t necessarily control their responses in such situations. Some enter a state of involuntary physical paralysis known as ‘tonic inhibition’ when confronted with an extreme threat. A Swedish study of 298 women who visited an emergency rape clinic within a month of having been sexually assaulted found that 70%  reported significant tonic  immobility and 48% reported  extreme tonic immobilityduring the assault – and that those who experienced it were also more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder and severe depression in the coming months.
5. Traumatic experiences scramble your memories: maybe you’ve misremembered what happened
Many people who have been raped or sexually assaulted often claim to have vivid memories of certain images, sounds and smells associated with the attack – even if happened decades earlier. Yet when asked to recall exactly what time of day it was, or who and what was where at any given time – the kinds of details police and prosecutors often focus on to establish the facts of a crime – they may struggle or contradict  themselves, undermining their testimony.
“There is this tragic discrepancy between what is expected within the criminal justice system and the nature of trauma memories and how people are likely to be reporting them,” says Amy Hardy, a clinical psychologist at Kings College London.
There is this tragic discrepancy between what is expected within the criminal justice system and the nature of trauma memories and how people are likely to be reporting them – Amy Hardy
This is because memories of traumatic events are laid down differently to everyday memories. Usually we encode what we see, hear, smell, taste and physically sense, as well as how that all slots together and what it means to us – and together, those different types of information together enable us to recall events as a coherent story. But during traumatic events our bodies are flooded with stress hormones. These encourage the brain to focus on the here and now, at the expense of the bigger picture.
This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. “When we are under threat, it is much better that we focus on what we are experiencing, which triggers us into fight, flight or freeze-type responses, than to focus on the bigger meaning and making sense of it,” says Hardy. “We also know that if people dissociate during trauma – where the cognitive part of the brain shuts down and they go a bit spacey or numb – it exaggerates this fragmentation process, so their memories have an even more here-and-now-type quality.”
Hardy has examined the impact of these memory processes on survivors’ experience of reporting sexual assault to the police. She found that those who reported  higher levels of dissociation  during the assault perceived their  memories to be more fragmentedwhen interviewed by police and that those with greater levels of memory fragmentation were more likely to feel that they had given an incoherent account of what happened. And these factors, in turn, left them less likely to proceed with the legal case.

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parivijesh100

Sexual assult is horrific for sufferer & they mentally want to come out of suffering & thought of such experience. That is why, they do not remember it for longer period. It is a sort of self healing process in one way.

harpreetsembhi

Sexual assault memories stick!! We do remember selective important stuff

subscraxme

The biggest myth : sexual assault is done only by mentally deranged /criminal people

Face facts - 99.9% of ALL male fantasize about sex in their course of life...(the rest .01% either are having mental wiring problems or are LIARS :-)

Even the so called most decent and well behaved man can have a moment of aberration and can have a sexual escapade which can be construed as a sexual assault (our laws are also skewed).


So what are the answer to this ? I guess there is NO easy or quick solution - Probably there is no solution.
Of the few hundred cases reported, thousands and thousands go unreported. No amount of punishments or policing or laws is going to change this. This has been there from the beginning of evolution and will continue till life exists. These are hardwired into the genetic make-up.


teach kids (from a small age itself) the importance of self-control and train them how fickle their own minds can be and how to identify and respond to situations. Easy ? Absolutely Not .......but what other options ??