Victim Blaming: When Your Own Friends Turn Against You
An unexplored reason why many collegiate women are afraid to report their rape
Rape on college campuses is an epidemic of plague-like proportions. It seems like a new assault is reported to have occurred at a U.S. college every single day. In a National Institute of Justice study conducted in 2007, 19% of women and 6% of men were found to be the victims of sexual assault since they entered college. 1 in 5 women in the United States have reportedly been sexually assaulted while in college. But reporting rates are frighteningly low; in a survey conducted by Roger Williams University, only about 12% of victims will take legal action against their attackers.
Why don’t these numbers match up?
There are a vast amount of reasons why women do not report their rape or assault. Perhaps they know their attacker personally; in fact, the odds of this being the case are astonishingly high. The National Institute of Justice reports that up to 90% of female victims know the person who assaulted them. The idea of reporting an assault that was committed by someone you once thought to be your friend is unthinkably painful for a lot of women, especially women who are young and insecure about their social status and may not be entirely sure of who their friends really are.
It seems obvious to some that a friend who commits such a horrific crime against someone else is not a true friend. But sometimes, the lines can be more blurred: what about the friends who defend your attacker and single you out? Are they just friends being brutally honest with you about what they perceive to be promiscuity, or are they people you should cast out of your life?
This decision to report rape is harder for college-aged women than it is for adults.
College-aged women are facing a time in their lives where they don’t know what a true friend really is. Most freshmen lose touch with their high school BFFs quickly after entering undergrad full-time, too busy with classes and extracurriculars to keep in touch with the people they once saw every single day. They make friends quickly with anyone they seem to have anything in common with, searching for people they can connect with the same way they connected with their high school friends. The threat of losing those tenuous friendships is scary to young collegiate women; they’ve just found a niche where they feel they fit in, and telling them that someone they all know is really a rapist scumbag could be the way to lose them.
It is often the people closest to us that cut us the deepest with their response to our personal traumas. We hear all the time that people say “you were asking for it,” “you shouldn’t have gone home with him,” or “you shouldn’t have dressed that way if you didn’t want it.” But hearing those words from people you consider friends can hurt more than hearing it from strangers, police officers, medical examiners, or anyone else. And when faced with that kind of victim blaming, many would rather just keep their mouths shut.
