Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Appease
“Why didn’t he fight back?” “Why didn’t she try to escape?” These questions are often asked by uninformed jurors during rape trials. For this reason, the anti-sexual violence community has long argued that using “fight or flight” to describe responses to being attacked is inadequate because freezing is also a completely normal biological response to danger. Think of a deer in headlights. This is known as tonic immobility, and is so common that studies have shown a majority of rape victims experience a kind of involuntary paralysis where they literally felt they couldn’t move, yell, or fight back.
At the same time, many survivors — women especially — adapt other survival strategies that might confuse a person who is uneducated on trauma. UCLA social psychologist Shelley Taylor has compiled research on how women respond to stress and threats of attack in her book, “The Tending Instinct.” She found that women, interestingly enough, felt less fear when being attacked, and were more likely to calm their perpetrators down or take care of them emotionally rather than risk “making a scene” by punching the abuser and running away. In other words, a common response for women who are assaulted is to freeze, appease, and befriend. So, for example, a victim may give their perpetrator a ride home as a way to extricate themselves from the situation without threat of escalation of violence. We’ve even heard from survivors who attempted to stop a rape by offering to give oral sex to her perpetrator. They may even make their abuser breakfast in the morning as a way to smooth things over.
Whether these responses are a product of biology or social conditioning is unclear. But the point is this: all of these decisions constitute agency on the part of survivors and should be respected. Submitting to a perpetrator in this context is a lifesaving defense mechanism that is anything but “passive.” Those who preach fighting back forget that doing so can often come with serious consequences — ranging from assault and murder to incarceration. An untold amount of survivors have been victim blamed or even doubted if they’d been raped because of actions that were essentially a harm reduction strategy. No survivor should ever feel guilted for how they responded to being sexually assaulted. We should always place the lens on the perpetrators and the cultural institutions and practices that both shape them and allow them to get away with their crimes!
