The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
‘AS HE RAPED ME I DID NOTHING. I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND WHY’
The reality is that this is a common response to sexual attacks – even though the myth is that you would fight tooth and claw. Anna Moore investigates how damaging attitudes to rape are stopping women from reporting life-shattering assaults
he first time Abbi Lawther was sexually assaulted, she was sitting on the kerb outside a nightclub, surrounded by friends.
Though she had never met her attacker Simon Cash before that evening in December 2018, they had been invited to the same birthday celebration and he had shadowed her constantly. ‘Anywhere I was, he seemed to appear,’ says Abbi, a beauty therapist, now 22. ‘He was big, scruffy, quite quiet – but he just gave off a weird vibe. One person that night had told me she’d known him all her life and wouldn’t walk on the same side of the road as that guy. You don’t want to hurt anyone, but it had got to the point where I was actively trying to avoid him.’
As the group waited for a taxi to take them back to her friend’s house, Abbi felt someone sit beside her on the pavement and knew straight away that it was Cash. ‘He started rubbing my back, and I thought, “What the hell is he doing?” Then he put his hand on my leg and gradually moved under my dress, further and further up.
‘I did freeze,’ continues Abbi. ‘I was sitting there, thinking, “Why am I not doing anything?” It was the scariest thing, like an out-of-body experience that I can’t even explain. Even if I’d opened my mouth, no words would have come out.’ The assault was over quickly – the taxi arrived and Abbi bolted inside. ‘My legs were like jelly, I couldn’t speak. If you’d seen me, you’d have thought I was drunk but I was completely sober. I’d been at work all day and felt really tired so had hardly drunk anything.’ The taxi had three rows of seats for the four passengers and everyone spread themselves on different rows – except for Cash, who sat right beside Abbi in the darkness. ‘I crossed my legs and thought surely he’s not going to do anything here, but again, he forced my legs apart. Later, he took his hand around my hand and used it to do things to himself.’
It was a karaoke taxi – the others were singing, partying, distracted. The assault continued for the 20-minute ride. ‘I had no control over my body. I was completely paralysed. I don’t want to say “I let him do it” but that was why I hated myself afterwards,’ says Abbi. ‘You grow up thinking that if anything like this ever happens to you, you’d fight and scream and stop it. So why couldn’t I move?’ In fact, this ‘freeze’ reaction is the most common response to rape and sexual assault – although it doesn’t fit with the popular perception of how a ‘real victim’ would react.
An alarming new study – the largest ever in the UK – attempted to look behind the scenes of a typical jury deliberation after a rape trial and found that myths and
misunderstandings are all-pervading. For this research, published in the Journal of Law and Society, hundreds of people were gathered to form mock juries. After watching a simulated rape trial, they were recorded as they discussed the case to reach a verdict.
The transcripts revealed fixed ideas of what a ‘genuine reaction’ would look like. First, a victim would fight. (In the words of one juror, ‘You would scratch, you would scream, you would try and do anything possible to get him off.’) Then the victim would call 999. (‘Why would you phone your sister and not the police?’ asked one juror.) Next, a victim would wash. (‘You would go straight to the shower.’) There were also narrow views about what constitutes a ‘real rapist’ – described by one juror as ‘a big bad guy out on the streets roaming about wanting to rape a woman’. Someone known to the victim – a partner, former partner or friend – does not fit that profile. It’s hardly surprising then, that of 32 mock juries, only four reached a guilty verdict, four were hung (undecided) and 24 acquitted the defendant.
These attitudes begin to explain the recent Home Office figures which showed that fewer than one in 60 rape cases reported to police result in a charge. Katie Russell, spokesperson for the campaigning and support charity Rape Crisis, believes rape myths are ‘incredibly pervasive. You see them in the media, throughout society and the criminal justice system,’ she says.
According to Russell, one of the most common is around a victim’s ‘typical reaction’. ‘We’ve all heard of the “fight or flight” response to trauma but “freeze”, “flop” or “friend” are well documented and much more likely,’ she says.
‘When you’re in imminent danger, the body’s response can be to freeze, disassociate or go completely limp. Though none of this is conscious, it’s an attempt to prevent any escalation, to minimise further harm.’ (To understand how this evolved as a survival mechanism, look to the animal kingdom. Freezing often makes prey invisible to predators who are looking for movement, while ‘playing dead’ can prompt predators to release their prey.)
‘Another response is to attempt to appease the aggressor, to talk and connect in some way, or to bargain,’ says Russell. ‘Again, it’s a survival tactic when your life is in danger, but this is often used against the victim in court as evidence of consent.’
The idea that a victim would call 999 within minutes is also unrealistic, says Detective Superintendent Melissa Laremore from the Metropolitan Police rape and sexual offences unit. ‘Someone is more likely to tell a friend or a family member first,’ she says. ‘The victim is often in a state of disbelief, shock, denial – they literally cannot believe what has happened to them, they’re trying to process it.’
Reactions are highly complex – and to an outsider ‘nonsensical’. ‘When the suspect is known to them, they may text them afterwards, they could ask to meet them,’ says Laremore. Demi Lovato risked public condemnation when it was revealed that the singer had been raped twice and, both times, met the men again to have sex with them. (In the midst of trauma, this can be an attempt to ‘reframe’ an assault, to convince yourself that you’re in control, that you weren’t a ‘victim’.)
‘In almost any case, you would probably want to tell someone you trust and get to a place of safety before calling the police,’ says Laremore.
This was certainly true for Abbi. When the taxi arrived at her friend’s house, she shut herself in a bedroom and texted her friend. ‘I was so cold, shaking constantly – I almost couldn’t believe Simon was in the house.’ Her friend phoned Abbi’s elder sister who immediately called Abbi. ‘When I took the call, I burst into tears, the kind of crying you can’t stop,’ she says. ‘My sister said, “Either you phone the police or I’m doing it.”’
Ellie Clarkson was 17 when she was raped on a night out. She was celebrating the completion of her As-levels with a group of friends, but when she arrived at the pub in Bexleyheath, there was one much older man – he was 59 – with them. Ellie asked who he was and was told he was a pub regular. At the end of the evening, this man invited everyone back to his house to
‘NINETY PER CENT OF RAPES AND SEXUAL ASSAULTS ARE COMMITTED BY SOMEONE KNOWN TO THE VICTIM’
party and Ellie soon felt extremely unwell. Her friends found her an empty room, put her on a sofa tucked under a blanket and left her. Shortly afterwards, the older man crept in, barricaded the door shut with a chair and proceeded to rape her. Like Abbi, Ellie didn’t ‘fight back’.
‘He was a big man, I was a small woman,’ says Ellie, now 23. ‘If someone had the audacity to do this to me when there were six people in the next room, what more might he do? I remember just wanting my friends to come – and finally they did.
‘Suddenly loads of people were in the room. I remember someone holding my face and saying my name, then walking me to the door.’ In this case, Ellie told her friend what had happened, who told her mum, who told Ellie’s dad. Within hours, the police had been informed – but to this day, Ellie isn’t sure who actually called them.
Perhaps the biggest ‘rape myth’ of all, says Katie Russell, involves the rapist himself. ‘Many of us still understand rape as something done by a stranger in an alley, but 90 per cent