On Friday September 21, President Trump issued a tweet regarding the allegations Christine Blasey Ford made about his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Christine Blasey Ford, 51, is an American professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is a wife, a mother, and the first woman to publicly accuse Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh for sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers. According to Ford, Kavanaugh pinned her down on a bed, groped her, and covered her mouth to keep her from screaming. Ford’s opening statement during Judge Kavanaugh’s hearing described her experience with Kavanaugh as terrifying and life-threatening. She “believed he was going to rape [her]” and “thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill [her]”.
President Trump’s tweet had reiterated a question sexual assault survivors hear constantly: Why didn’t you say something sooner?
Survivors of abuse responded by rallying around a new hashtag, #WhyIDidntReport. Using the hashtag, victims of rape and sexual assault were able to put into words just how hard it is to come forward about such traumatic events. The stories these women and men shared were able to paint an honest picture of the shame, confusion, embarrassment, and personal responsibility these people hold themselves to. These powerful tweets were able to give victims a voice and explain to people that have not gone through sexual abuse what it feels like to go through something so distressing.
Our society has a tendency to blame the victim immediately. The first questions any victim of sexual assault or rape hears are not empathetic. They are welcomed with doubt and criticism. That is why most victims of sexual assault and rape remain silent. Ford’s bravery to come forward and speak about her own experiences with sexual assault decades later was powerful enough to reach victims around the world and make them feel strong enough to their stories publicly. 77% of people who experienced rape or sexual assault say they did not tell the police, and likely this statistic is much higher. The excess of tweets that were shared using #WhyIDidntReport show us that this is too common. They give faces and names to the term “victims of abuse.” It showed that it does not matter when a sexual assault or rape occurs. What matters is that we as a society need to let victims come forward in their own time and believe them when they do. Doubt should not be the first emotion they are welcomed with.