Donald Trump says that if Brett Kavanaugh really assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when she was 15 years old, surely she would have told her parents and they would have reported it to the police. Aside from being victim-blaming viciousness, this goes against basically everything we know about sexual assault survivors. According to statistics from the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, only 310 out of every 1,000 rapes are reported.
The women and girls (overwhelmingly so) who don’t report being raped have their reasons, starting with the criminal justice system: of the 310 out of 1,000 rapes reported to police, just 57 lead to arrests, 11 are referred to prosecutors, seven lead to felony convictions, and six lead to incarceration for the rapist. Rape victims report long-lasting consequences, including PTSD, suicidal thoughts, problems at work or school, drug use, and more.
And some of the actions most typical of women who’ve been raped or sexually assaulted or abused are frequently used to question whether they’re telling the truth. It’s common for assault survivors not to come forward immediately—like Christine Blasey Ford. It’s common for them to have trouble recalling every detail accurately—like Christine Blasey Ford.
If Donald Trump doesn’t know this from the statistics, he knows it from his own experience and has relied on it as someone with a long history of sexual assault—a serial groper, harasser, ogler, pussy-grabber….
In an article we published earlier this year, we took a close look at what data from The National Crime Victimization Survey says about victims of sexual assault and how they respond to being attacked. Seventy-seven percent of incidents of rape and sexual assault were not reported to the police in 2017, according to the survey. You can read more about what it found below….
FiveThirtyEight