Believing Victims Is the First Step to Stopping Rape

Believing survivors is not just the right thing to do. It’s the best thing to do if we want to stop sexual violence. The popular myth that women lie about rape doesn’t just hurt the survivors we accuse of lying. It hurts our entire society because it allows rapists to continue harming — unpunished and undetected.

The only way we will have a chance of eradicating sexual violence is if we stop letting thoroughly and repeatedly debunked rape myths rule how we treat survivors.

There is no privilege to being a survivor; there is nothing to gain from being raped. The opposite is true: survivors have a lot to lose, including their privacy — in addition to the economic, emotional and psychological costs of the trauma they endured. Yet the assumption that people lie about being victimized prevails.

There is no other crime where we expect a lifetime of perfection from the victim to give them a chance to be believed. Many people struggle to remember what they ate for breakfast last week, but we demand survivors to recount the most traumatic moments of their lives with pinpoint precision. There is a neurobiological basis for the discrepancies that survivors may have when they tell their stories, but it’s still used as an excuse to believe that somehow every person that comes forward is part of the estimated 2 to 8 percent of false rape reports.

Society says it’s the victim’s responsibility to stop sexual assault by reporting their attack to the police. Yet disbelief of rape victims runs rampant in all levels of the institutions that are supposedly designed to help them whether it's the police, judge and jury in the criminal justice system or administrators on college campuses. Only when people start to believe survivors will we be able to hold rapists accountable through the systems that claim to protect us. Until then, it can feel impossible to find divulging your story worthwhile. We need to believe survivors so they are able to come forward and know they have a fighting chance of getting justice.

Yes, a tiny number of people lie about being raped, but almost all rapists lie about raping.

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