“Why didn’t she go to the police straight away?”

CONTENT WARNING: RAPE, SEXUAL ASSAULT

Yesterday I posted about a high profile sexual assult case that was announced a mistrial in Canberra this week. Many media platforms were posting about this. One comment I saw over and over again, including on my own post, read along the lines of “why did it take her so long to go to the police?” 

There have been many cases in the media in the past few years that have gotten the same question “why did she not just go to the police when it happened?” 

I want to you to consider what a person who has just experienced a sexual assult has just been through. They have been violated, often by someone who is in a position of power over them. They feel shame over their experiences. They are confused. They’re shocked. They have just experienced a significant trauma that they are going to be dealing with for the rest of their lives. 

The statistics show that most sexual assults that are reported as historical, they have taken place weeks, months or years before hand. Only a very small number of rapes are reported within a small time frame that would allow for the gathering of forensic evidence. The idea of someone administering a “rape kit” after you have just had your body violated is incredibly overwhelming and confronting. The idea of recounting what had JUST happened to you, not even having a second to process your thoughts yourself, but re-telling the horror you just experienced to a stranger is not something that you want to push yourself on. 

Remembering, reliving every vicious detail of what had happened to you only minutes, hours ago, is not the first thing you want to do after being violated. You want to go home, you want to wash away any trace of the perpetrators hands on you, of any evidence of what has just happened. You want to go to bed and hope that you wake up and it was just a bad dream. You do not want to head to your nearest police station and report that you have just been raped. 

A rape kit is actually known as a “forensic medical examination kit” or a “sexual assault kit” neither of which make it any more appealing to have one administered after you have just had your body taken advantage of. Swabs taken from parts of your body that have marks, physical or not, on them. Photographs taken of your aching body. Bright lights used to inspect every inch of your body. Their skin taken from under your fingernails. You sexual history recorded. Your clothing and underwear taken from you, bagged up and taken for testing. Screenings for any sexually transmitted diseases, toxicology testing, could you be pregnant to this monster? 

Some women fear a hostile reaction from the public. They fear the reactions from police officers, from family, from friends. They fear victim blaming, which is rampant. She fears being labelled a “slut”. She fears being told she was “asking for it”. She fears being told she was remembering the event differently, that her mind is playing tricks on her. She fears being accused of trying to ruin someone's life. She fears being accused of chasing money or attention. 

She knows that while her abuser is the one to have done something terrible, there will still be people who blame her. That her reputation is likely to be damaged instead of his.

Take from this recent case another reason women may not want to go through with going to the police. The victim in this case has had intense media scrutiny since the reporting of the attack. Her motivations, her credibility, her memories have all been put under the microscope. She was cross examined for days. She sat in court for days as her accused abuser said nothing but maintained his innocence. His lawyer questioned every single detail of this case, as did the media. Why didn’t you go to the doctor straight away? Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t she wear underwear the night of the alleged attack? Every single element of her traumatic event, questioned, scrutinised, examined. 

“It took me more than three days to process my rape” was the reason she gave for not attending a hospital or police station immediately following her violation. 

Not reporting your rape is not a sign that someone did not experience such, that they are “making it up”, it is a sign that the process and the aftermath of reporting a rape is fucking scary.