All of the fear, extra scrutiny and skepticism that women face when coming forward after being harassed or assaulted directly discourages reporting and keeps women silent and afraid.
There are.
People don’t believe victims of sexual assault because it’s simply easier not to. But it also goes deeper than laziness or loyalty. The widespread disbelief of rape has a complicated history but a relatively simple cause: People don’t believe women.
The idea that rape is a crime against a woman, and specifically a crime against a woman’s body, is relatively new. For most of human history, rape has been treated as a property crime against a woman’s husband or father, since they effectively owned her.
For most of American history, women have had to prove that they were chaste, and that they put up extreme resistance, in order to have any hope of winning a court case.
Marital rape has only been illegal in the United States for a few decades, since a husband was considered to have complete authority over his wife. (This dynamic may also complicate how we see the wives of accused rapists who were married decades ago, like Camille Cosby or Hillary Clinton, Rebecca Traister argued at New York magazine.)
It would be naïve to think that the weight of this history has been lifted by a few decades of rapid social progress on feminism. Women are still blamed for sexual assaults committed against them, and they are still blamed for bringing down the promising careers of famous or beloved men.
Women are blamed because they have nearly always been considered, legally and socially, to be worth less than men. They are satellites to male stars, auxiliaries, not full people in their own right. It’s easier to discount their stories because it’s easier to discount them as people.
Male victims face similar problems because sexual assault, and the dismissal of it, has been so strongly gendered for so long — and sex stereotypes of women can also be used as weapons against men.
It’s no longer socially acceptable to say out loud that women are worth less than men. But implicit assumptions can be a lot slower to evolve than outward norms.
Most of us believe deep down that women can’t be trusted
There are some understandable reasons why law enforcement officials, for instance, tend not to believe victims who come forward about rape.
We are only just beginning to understand the scienceof how the brain processes trauma. Memories are stored in a fragmented way, and emotional reactions can seem “off.” Both of these things can raise suspicions among police officers who are accustomed to using rigorous interrogations to ferret out inconsistencies in a story, and rigorous interrogation only makes things worse.
But there’s clearly something deeper going on when a police department calls its sex crimes investigative division the “lying bitch unit.”
And law enforcement officials aren’t the only ones who don’t believe rape victims. Too often, entire communities turn againstsurvivors of sexual assault who come forward.
The idea that women are inherently deceitful, especially when it comes to sexuality, is deeply rooted in our culture. Soraya Chemaly has written extensively about the ways we teach our children that women are liars.
Our pop culture and religious teachings alike are fraughtwith descriptions of women as untrustworthy — from Eve and the apple to Gossip Girl. Teenagers and police officers alike radically overestimate the number of women who lie about rape. This has real consequences in nearly every walk of life, Chemaly writes:
Women’s credibility is questioned in the workplace, in courts, in legislatures, by law enforcement, in doctors’ offices and in our political system. People don’t trust women … not to be bosses, pilots, employees. Last year, a survey of managers in the United States revealed that they overwhelmingly don’t believe women who request flextime. Until relatively recently, in order to hedge against the idea that women lie, many U.S. police departments had “corroboration requirements” for rape reports, unlike any other crime. Pakistan’s controversial Hudood Ordinance still requires a female rape victim to procure four male witnesses to her rape or risk prosecution for adultery.
Damon Young of Very Smart Brothas wrote about how the Cosby situation made him realize that he didn’t truly trust his wife, and that most men don’t trust women. He said he trusts her not to cheat and to be a good partner, and he trusts her opinions on important things:
But you know what I don’t really trust? What I’ve never actually trusted with any women I’ve been with? Her feelings.
If she approaches me pissed about something, my first reaction is “What’s wrong?”
My typical second reaction? Before she even gets the opportunity to tell me what’s wrong? “She’s probably overreacting.”
Female hysteria is another deeply rooted gender stereotype, and it tells us that women can’t even be trusted to know their own feelings. These stereotypes cause doctors to ignore women’s symptoms of pain, and they inspire lawmakers to pass abortion waiting periods because they don’t think women consider their decision carefully enough. Meanwhile, men are perceived as smarter and more authoritative than women.
Our society, which is less separable than we’d like from the cruder societies that came before it, has created a perfect storm of reasons to dismiss rape victims.
A woman can’t be trusted to know her own feelings, which means she either secretly wanted sex while saying she didn’t, or wanted it at the time but changed her mind afterward.
A woman isn’t her own person, not really — so it matters less that believing him means disbelieving her.
A woman can’t be trusted not to lie, so it’s safer to disbelieve her than to risk ruining some innocent fellow’s life.
And men are the ones with money, social status, and something to lose, so they are the real stakeholders in any rape case.
Rape is horrifying and messy, and sometimes it’s easier to disbelieve that it happens at all. But that option isn’t open to victims of rape and sexual assault.
Denying rape means believing that victims are lying. It means denying their humanity and worth. And it’s a denial that has been made far too easy by thousands of years of habit.
