OVERCOMING SEXUAL ASSAULT

Watch any TV show about criminals and the people who catch them for long enough, and you’ll inevitably see an episode that begins like this: A lone woman out for a jog early in the morning, or drunkenly walking to her car after a night at a club, is suddenly not alone. She may not know it — she might have headphones on or be fiddling with her phone — but we, the viewers, see her stalker appear. He — burly and indistinct, maybe wearing a ski mask or hoodie — slinks out from behind a tree or a parked car and creeps up behind her, weapon in hand. She might notice him just in time for a cut-off scream, or the scene might just fade to black.

The next time you see this woman, she’ll either be in a hospital bed, or detectives will be crouching over her body searching for clues. In rarer scenarios, her screams will attract attention from other people who come to the rescue, or she’ll manage to fight him off herself and immediately report the incident to the police.

There are a lot of dangerous misconceptions about sexual assault in this country. Some of them exemplified by the situation above. There’s an idea that rape is perpetrated by strangers, that it only happens when people don’t pay attention to their surroundings or let themselves get drunk, or that they’re bringing the risk on themselves by being in the wrong place, dressed the wrong way, at the wrong time of night.

Other common myths are that rape and sexual assault are rare, that it’s a thing that only happens to women, and that it always results in easily perceptible violence. After all, can a person have been raped if they don’t show signs of a struggle? If they didn’t even fight back? Can we call it rape if they were drunk, or high, or said “yes” at the beginning of an encounter and only switched to “no” once things were already underway?

Data collected by the Department of Justice and the FBI over decades show that rape and sexual assault are crimes experienced by 1 in 6 American women and 1 in 33 men. Eight out of 10 rapes are committed by someone known to the victim, usually either an acquaintance or a former/current partner,