9781422276075

Copingwith Sexual violence and Harassment

Myth: If someone tried to rape you but didn’t succeed, there was no crime, and the cops won’t care. Fact: Attempted rape is a serious (and prosecutable) crime. Do not assume you shouldn’t report a crime because it “wasn’t that bad.” Cops will care. assault. It has no correlation with the reality of traumatic experiences. The good news is, the reasonable-resistance requirement is on its way out of the U.S. legal system. For example, Maryland, which had been one of the remaining holdouts, finally got rid of its “fight-back” requirement in April 2017. The bad news is that same basic idea still lingers in the subconscious of many people. But, in reality, the issue of resistance is incredibly complex, both physically and psychologically. Often, the “choice” of whether or not to resist is not one you get to make — evolution made that choice for you, long ago. Here are some reasons someone might not resist: • Self-preservation. Sometimes people do make a conscious choice to not resist because they are afraid of making the attack even worse. If an attacker is substantially larger, seems “crazy,” or if there’s more than one, it’s totally understandable that someone might decide it’s wiser to not resist. Data suggests that victims are indeed more likely to be seriously injured if they fight back. Should I have fought back? Whether or not they “should have” resisted an attacker is a central question for many survivors of sexual violence. Until recently, many legal definitions of rape required that victims be able to show they attempted to escape or “reasonably resist.” If you didn’t fight it, the thinking went, you must have wanted it. This is a wrongheaded and, frankly, cruel way of looking at

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