Dead Wild Roses

Watch the presentation or read the full transcript here.   Now watch what happens when we bring an empirical fact based approach to understanding why our justice system is broken when it comes to sexual assault.  So, now we have some evidence of what is happening to people who have experienced sexual assault, it is our duty to push for changing the system to move toward a more just application of the law and concomitantly a more just society.

[ed. I think this is a very important presentation, I encourage everyone to reblog, excerpt, and reproduce this or the original article]

“I want to discuss how research can inform a very longstanding problem in the criminal justice system — sexual assault case attrition. We know, of course, that not all victims report the assault to the criminal justice system, but of those that do — of the reports that are made to the police — only a small number of them are actually going to be prosecuted.

So what I want to do today is bring together research from multiple disciplines to try to understand how and why this is happening. I’m going to begin by talking about what we know from criminal justice research on the problem of sexual assault case attrition. Then I want to bring in what we know from psychology and psychiatry about victim behavior and the neurobiology of trauma. If we bring these two worlds together, do we get empirically based recommendations for how we can change practice?

So to that end let’s start off by talking about what we know from criminal justice research on the problem of sexual assault case attrition. I want to start with three simple quotes — three short quotes from qualitative research I’ve done. One quote is from law enforcement, one is from a rape victim advocate, and one is from a survivor.

So let’s start off with a quote from law enforcement. This is a very seasoned detective, 15 years in a sex crimes unit. When I asked him sort of what happens when victims come in to report an assault to the criminal justice system, this is what he said. He said: “The stuff they say makes no sense” — referring to victims — “So no I don’t always believe them and yeah I let them know that. And then they say ‘Nevermind. I don’t want to do this.’ Okay, then. Complainant refused to prosecute; case closed.”

So now let’s loop in the rape victim advocate perspective: “It’s hard trying to stop what police do to victims. They don’t believe them and they treat them so bad that the victims give up. It happens over and over again.”

So now let’s loop in the victim’s perspective. In reference to her interactions with her law enforcement officer, she said the following. She said: “He didn’t believe me and he treated me badly. It didn’t surprise me when he said there wasn’t enough to go on to do anything. It didn’t surprise me, but it still hurt.”

So what do we get from these three simple quotes? What these three quotes show us right off the bat is that sexual assault case attrition happens very early on in the criminal justice system. It’s happening in the first interactions between the victims and law enforcement. Indeed, if we take these qualitative data and look at them from a quantitative perspective, we see very similar findings.

So this is a quantitative study that my colleagues and I just finished. This was an NIJ-funded research project looking at the issue of sexual assault case attrition in six different communities: two rural communities, two mid-size communities, two large urban communities. All six of these communities had sexual assault nurse examiner programs, so there was a place in each of these six communities where victims could get a good quality medical forensic exam. So what we did with these six communities is start with the same program the patients that came in for a medical exam. We wanted to see what happens afterwards. So did they make a police report? And if they made the police report, now let’s track and see how far it goes through the criminal justice system.

So then what you see going along the side there are the different outcomes that we coded. So when a case came in, had the exam, and made a police report, what was the final outcome? Was the final outcome that it was not referred by police onto the prosecutors or if it made it to the prosecutors it wasn’t charged? Was the final outcome that it was charged by the prosecutors but was then dropped, for whatever reason? Was the final outcome that it was plea bargained? Was the final outcome that it went to trial but acquitted? Or was the final outcome that it went to trial and it was convicted?

So we looked at over 12 years of data across these six different jurisdictions, and here’s what we found.

This is the row that you want to pay attention to. This is the very first step in the criminal justice system. On average, 86 percent of the reported sexual assaults never went any further than the police. The vast majority of these cases were never referred by the police on to the prosecutors.

So let’s dig a little deeper now and try to understand what is happening in this interaction between the victim and law enforcement — that very first interaction. Well, unfortunately, the research tells us that what’s happening in that first interaction between the victim and law enforcement is what we call “secondary victimization.” Now secondary victimization refers to the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of social system personnel that victims experience as victim blaming and insensitive. It exacerbates their trauma, and it makes them feel like what they’re experiencing is a second rape — hence the term “secondary victimization.”

Now, over the course of my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview victims about secondary victimization. What behaviors, what happened in your interactions with law enforcement or doctors or nurses that led you to feel upset and re-traumatized. I’ve also had the opportunity to interview law enforcement and doctors and nurses about secondary victimization behaviors. And I asked them, “Did you do these things?” And I was actually kind of expecting the sort of not quite crossing — oh no, everybody agrees. Everybody agrees that this is happening. You ask the victim, they say “Oh yeah, I encountered this.” You ask law enforcement, he says, “Oh yeah, I did that.”

So what are they doing? Well, what I represent in this graph are some of the most common secondary victimization behaviors. Again, these are composites. This is regional data from large metropolitan surveys. This is not national work, so keep it in that context. But when a victim goes forward to law enforcement to report the assault, on average, victims and law enforcement agree that 69 percent of the time, law enforcement tells them, “Don’t do this.” They discourage the victim from making the report in the first place. On average, 51 percent of the time, law enforcement tell victims what happened to them is not serious enough to pursue through the criminal justice system. Seventy percent of the time, law enforcement ask victims about their dress or their behavior or what they might have done to provoke the assault. On average, 90 percent of victims encounter at least one secondary victimization behavior in their interactions with law enforcement during that first reporting process.”

Brutal.  Systemic change is desperately required.

That’s the more theoretical point I want to make, I also want to excerpt another part of the presentation dealing with the victims of sexual assault –

“Tonic immobility is often referred to as “rape-induced paralysis.”

It is an autonomic response, meaning that it’s uncontrollable. This is not something a victim decides to do. It is a mammalian response. It is evolutionarily wired into us to protect the survival of the organism. Because sometimes the safest thing to do to protect the safety is to fight back. Sometimes the safest thing to do is to flee. Sometimes the stupidest thing to do is to flee because it will incite chase. Therefore, our bodies have been wired for a freeze response too — to play dead, to look dead, because that may be the safest thing for the survival of the organism. So it is a mammalian response that is in all of us — we can’t control it. And it happens in extremely fearful situations.

Behaviorally, it is marked by increased breathing, eye closure, but the most marked characteristic of tonic immobility is muscular paralysis. A victim in a state of tonic immobility cannot move. She cannot move her hands. She cannot move her arms. She cannot move her legs. She cannot move her torso. She cannot move her head. She is paralyzed in that state of incredible fear.

Research suggests that between 12 and 50 percent of rape victims experience tonic immobility during a sexual assault, and most data suggests that the rate is actually closer to the 50 percent than the 12 percent.

There’s also some emerging data that suggests that tonic immobility is slightly more common if a victim has a prior history of sexual assault. So if he or she had been sexually assaulted as a child and then was subsequently assaulted in adolescence or adulthood, the likelihood of experiencing tonic immobility at those later assaults tends to increase.

So what I want to do now is share with you a case example from my research on tonic immobility — again, sort of what the victim’s perspective on it is, what law enforcement’s perspective is on this.

This is a case example that I did through research at my university. This was a college student house party — a very common situation for a lot of campus-based sexual assaults. So you see the plastic chairs there, the beer cups, the Miller Lite beer boxes hanging out there.

So this was a 20-year-old woman who went to this party with her friends.

She met a guy there, flirting, liked him. He says, “Do you want to go back to one of the bedrooms?” She agrees. They’re messing around, sexual activity — not intercourse.

She doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse. She gets afraid. She’s like “No, no, no. I don’t want to do this. I don’t know you. I don’t want to do this.”

He doesn’t listen. He physically pins her upper body down with his elbow to hands, not a particularly complicated hold. That hold terrifies her enough that when the HPA axis kicks in she freezes and she goes into a state of tonic immobility during the assault. And she is completely frozen throughout the assault.

He finishes sexually assaulting her. He gets up, sees her laying there, he goes out and tells his friends at the party, “Hey, I just had sex with so-and-so and she’s still there.”

So the men lined up on the porch to take turns going in and sexually assaulting her. And she was multiply raped throughout the course of that evening by men, still lying there in a state of tonic immobility.

Now one of the friends that she was with at the party heard this. She heard the men talking about this lining up to go in and sexually assault her. So she barges in, she gets her friend out, describe — I had the opportunity to talk to the friend — she’s like, “I felt like I was lifting a dead body. I was like shaking her, trying to get her to kind of snap out of it. I had to sort of physically drag her out of there.” And then the tonic immobility state was released.

Took her to the hospital. The nurses there did a medical exam and a forensic evidence collection kit, and she filed a police report.

The police refused to pick up the kit. Because she had been sexually assaulted by multiple men at that party, they referred to it as a sloppy mess — that it would be too difficult to take apart the exam, to take apart the kit to figure out whose DNA was there.

And then they closed the case. I had the opportunity to ask the police officer why he chose to close this case, and here’s what he said. He said, “Well she just laid there, so she must have wanted it. No one wants to have a train pulled on them, so if she just laid there and took it she must have wanted it.”

Now we could have an entire discussion about this one quote. There’s things about it that are very disturbing, and there’s things about it that are very curious. You can hear the questioning in his voice. “She just laid there, so she must have wanted it.” He’s trying to make sense of this. He doesn’t understand why somebody would lay there. So the attribution is “Well, she must have wanted it” because he doesn’t know of any other explanation.

There is another explanation. He didn’t know about it. The explanation is tonic immobility. This is a documented neurobiological condition. This law enforcement had no idea what this was. I brought it up to him in the course of the interview. He literally cuts me off and he says “It’s too late now; the case is closed.” And I said, “It’s too late for this case, but here — let me give you a mini presentation on the neurobiology of trauma” and so on and so forth. And he’s like, “I didn’t know. I did not know that this could happen.”

Tonic immobility is an aspect of our survival mechanisms.  We need desperately to change our societal practices and expectations to accommodate these facts.