Over the past year, as the #MeToo movement has grown and national figures such as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and movie mogul Harvey Weinstein have faced allegations of sexual misconduct from women they knew years ago, one question has continued to surface:
Why would someone claiming abuse wait so long to come forward?
Research indicates the answer is complicated. There are a wide range of reasons people don’t report their experiences with sexual harassment and assault to authorities and, oftentimes, even hide them from friends and family members.
One reason is self-blame, said Karen G. Weiss, an associate professor of sociology at West Virginia University whose research focuses on sexual violence.
“The public may not realize just how many victims of any crime blame themselves for their own victimization,” Weiss told Journalist’s Resource in an e-mail interview. “Self-blame is often reified by ‘well-intentioned’ confidants to whom they disclose. Seemingly innocent questions from family and friends can trigger self-doubt and prevent victims from reporting to police. They may also question what they did wrong and believe it was their fault.”
Another reason: Many people who have been raped don’t recognize it as rape, even when it fits the legal definition, a finding revealed in a review of 28 academic studies.
Below, we’ve gathered and summarized a sampling of peer-reviewed research — including two academic articles from Weiss — that investigates why many people don’t report sex crimes. This list includes studies that look at factors that discourage or prevent reporting among specific groups, including teenagers, college students, prison inmates and women serving in the military.
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“Meta-Analysis of the Prevalence of Unacknowledged Rape”
Wilson, Laura C.; Miller, Katherine E. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, April 2016.
Laura C. Wilson, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Mary Washington, led this review of 28 academic studies to estimate how often women who’ve been sexually assaulted do not label their experience as rape. The 28 studies focused on the experiences of a total of 5,917 women who had been raped at some point in their lives after age 14.
Across the studies, the researchers find that 60.4 percent of women, on average, did not recognize their experience as rape even though it fit the definition — an unwanted sexual experience obtained through force or the threat of force or a sexual experience they did not consent to because they were incapacitated.
“This finding has important implications because it suggests that our awareness of the scope of the problem may underestimate its true occurrence rate, depending on the type of measurement,” the authors write. “This impacts policy reform, allocations of mental health services, survivors’ perceptions of their experiences, and society’s attitudes toward survivors.”
The authors stress that their results may not generalize to men who have experienced sexual assault or to women who experienced it before age 14.
“’You Just Don’t Report That Kind of Stuff’: Investigating Teens’ Ambivalence Toward Peer-Perpetrated, Unwanted Sexual Incidents”
Weiss, Karen G. Violence and Victims, 2013.
In this study, Weiss investigates why many teenagers who experience unwanted sexual contact from other teens trivialize those experiences as unimportant or normal. She relies on data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, administered each year to tens of thousands of individuals aged 12 years and older. Weiss examined information collected on sex-related incidents between 1992 and 2000.
According to survey data, 92 percent of teens who say they experienced some form of unwanted sexual contact are girls, 81 percent are white and 13 percent are Hispanic. Just over half of these incidents — 53 percent — involved sexual coercion such as rape and attempted rape while 47 percent involved other contact such as groping. Almost half of teenagers — 44 percent — said the perpetrators were other youth between the ages of 12 and 17.
A key finding: Teens who experience unwanted contact rarely report it. Five percent of incidents were reported to police and 25 percent were reported to other authorities such as school officials or employers.
Weiss finds two common reasons why teenagers don’t report perpetrators who are teenagers: 1) uncertainty that the incidents are real crimes or worth reporting and 2) adaptive indifference, which she describes as “an avoidance response that allows teens to do nothing, thereby remaining loyal to their friends, dating partners, schoolmates and peer groups.”
“Ambiguity reflects the difficulties of recognizing crime due to cultural messages that trivialize certain situations (e.g., sexual coercion by dates and unwanted sexual contact by schoolmates) as normal or as an inevitable part of youth,” Weiss writes. “Indifference reflects the social pressures for teens to ‘do the right thing,’ which often means conforming to group norms that discourage reporting to police. In this manner, ambivalence protects teens, at least temporarily, from social disapproval and interpersonal conflict associated with disclosing peer offenses.”
“Too Ashamed to Report: Deconstructing the Shame of Sexual Victimization”
Weiss, Karen G. Feminist Criminology, July 2010.
In another study from Weiss, she “deconstructs shame as both a culturally imbued response to sexual victimization and as a much taken-for-granted reason for why victims don’t report incidents to the police.”
Weiss analyzed statements made by men and women as part of the annual National Crime Victimization Survey. She examined their responses to a survey question asking them to describe what happened to them. She also examined structured responses to questions about sex-related incidents. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics allowed her to access photocopies of information collected from survey respondents between 1992 and early 2000. The sample for this study consisted of 116 females and 20 males, most of whom were under age 25.
What Weiss found was that many respondents expressed shame as part of their description of what happened and why they didn’t go to the police. Thirteen percent of incidents made some reference to shame. For example, a 19-year-old women stated that she was ashamed and felt partly to blame for a male acquaintance raping her because she couldn’t stop him.
“Foremost, women’s shame narratives draw upon cultural assumptions about how ‘good girls’ should behave and how ‘bad girls’ will be judged after rape or sexual assault,” Weiss writes. “Women fearing they will be blamed, disgraced, or defamed are often too ashamed to report sexual victimization to the police.”
Shame also was a strong deterrent for men.
“Acknowledging crimes that are not supposed to happen to men, or at least real men, may threaten their masculinity, and challenge their sexual identities,” Weiss writes. “Unwilling to risk emasculation or exposure, men are choosing to remain silent rather than report sexual victimization to the police and others.”
“Barriers to Reporting Sexual Assault for Women and Men: Perspectives of College Students”
Sable, Marjorie R.; Danis, Fran; Mauzy, Denise L.; Gallagher, Sarah K. Journal of American College Health, 2006.
For this study, a research team from the University of Missouri-Columbia surveyed students at a large, Midwestern university to better understand what they perceive as the biggest barriers to reporting rape and sexual assault for men and women. Of the 215 students who participated, 54.7 percent were female and 83.6 percent were white.
Students rated “shame, guilt and embarrassment,” “confidentiality concerns” and “fear of not being believed” as the top three perceived barriers to reporting rape among both men and women. However, students rated shame, guilt and embarrassment as a much larger barrier for men than women. Another major barrier to reporting for men, according to students, is the fear they could be judged as being gay.
“Compared with women, men may fail to report because reporting is perceived to jeopardize their masculine self-identity,” the authors write. “The high score that being judged as gay received by the respondents may acknowledge society’s consideration that male rape occurs in the gay, not the general, community.”
Among the barriers perceived to be much larger for women than for men were “lack of resources to obtain help,” “cultural or language barriers to obtaining help” and “financial dependence on perpetrator/perpetrator interference in seeking help.”
“Reporting Sexual Assault in the Military: Who Reports and Why Most Servicewomen Don’t”
Mengeling, Michelle A.; Booth, Brenda M.; Torner, James C.; Sadler, Anne G. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, July 2014.
For this study, researchers interviewed women who had served in the U.S. Army or Air Force and acknowledged at least one attempted or completed sexual assault while they were in the military. Of the 1,339 women interviewed, 18 percent said they had experienced sexual assault while serving on full-time active duty. Meanwhile, 12 percent said they had experienced sexual assault while serving in the Reserves or National Guard.
Among the key findings: Three-fourths of servicewomen did not report their assaults. Eighty percent of women who said they’d been assaulted identified the perpetrator as U.S. military personnel. The researchers found that sexual assaults were more likely to be reported if they occurred on base or while on duty or if they resulted in a physical injury. They also found that enlisted women who had never gone to college were most likely to report.
The most common reasons women gave for not officially reporting their assault were embarrassment and not knowing how to report. Other common reasons included worries about how reporting might affect their careers and whether confidentiality would be kept. Some women believed nothing would be done and some blamed themselves for their experiences. A few women said they did not report because the person they had to report to was the perpetrator or a friend of the perpetrator.
“Study results reinforce earlier work showing that servicewomen continue to significantly underreport SAIM [sexual assault in the military],” the authors write. “For many servicewomen, the disadvantages of reporting outweigh the advantages.”
This photo, taken by Fibonacci Blue and obtained from the individual’s Flickr account, is being used under a Creative Commons license. No changes were made.
