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17 Women Explain Why They Didn’t Report Their Sexual Assaults

17 Women Explain Why They Didn’t Report Their Sexual Assaults

Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault. 

Each time news breaks of a woman accusing someone of sexual assault, or coming out about being assaulted, she is almost always criticized and disbelieved. Inevitably, there is always a question asked of the victim; “if it happened, why didn’t you report it?”

The implication here is that if someone is “really” sexually assaulted or raped, they would go to the police and file charges, and if they don’t, they must be making it up for attention, to ruin a mans life, or out of spite.

But this is one hundred percent false.

According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), only 310 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults are ever reported to the police. This means that two out of three assaults are unreported.

There are countless reasons someone might not report being raped or sexually assaulted, and not one of those reasons is that it isn’t ‘bad’ or ‘real’ assault.

On Twitter, people have been sharing their reasons they did not report their sexual assaults to bring attention to the fact that the validity of assault and reporting it are not mutually exclusive. It is a confronting, and yet crucially important hashtag to look through.

Here are 17 of the tweets in the #WhyDidntIReport hashtag, showing the many reasons someone might not disclose their assaults to police…

Images and media via twitter and tumblr.

Comment: Why didn’t you report? 

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