It’s Not Just Fight or Flight

One of the most harmful questions a person can ask those of us who have endured sexual violence is: "Why didn't you fight back?” It's a question rooted in misunderstanding and blames us for the crime. To move to a safer society - one where people don’t ask this question - it’s important for people to understand the full range of physical responses that a victimized person may demonstrate during a traumatic event.

Biologically and barring the introduction of controlled substances, each of our brains wanted to minimize the severity of the harm we saw coming. Our automatic survival responses, all designed to maximize the chance of us staying alive, were activated. The decision is made in fractions of a second and outside of our conscious control. These survival responses, also known as trauma responses, vary per person and may vary between like assaults.

Building a society where most people understand trauma responses can change the conversation in a way that shifts focus away from judgment and toward compassion. Below are the known responses and a  high level understand of each: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and flop.

Fight

A victimized person may yell, push, kick, or physically resist. Fight is the body's attempt to aggressively remove the threat through confrontation.

Because movies, tv shows, and [online] content often portray this response, many people mistakenly believe it's the only response we "should" demonstrate when confronted with violence.

Flight

The instinct to escape means avoiding the danger as much as possible. Some victimized persons are able to run away. Others look for opportunities to reach temporary safety by hiding or creating distance from the danger in order to either call for help or wait for the predator to leave.

When the brain determines that escape is possible, it prioritizes getting to safety as quickly as possible. Outside of “fight”, this is the only other trauma response that minimizes the amount of victim blaming a sexually victimized person would realize.

Freeze

Freeze is a lesser known trauma response. Instead of fighting or running away from the harm, the body becomes still. During this state of immobility, muscles may feel locked, speech feels impossible, and our thoughts become difficult to organize.

During this trauma response we don’t feel like we have control of our bodies despite being in our bodies. This happens because our respective nervous systems made that decision before our conscious minds ever had the chance. It was determined that we weren’t strong enough to successfully fight back or outrun the danger.

Fawn

Trying to reduce the severity of the danger through compliance, appeasement, or keeping the perpetrator calm is another way a victimized person responds to trauma. Whether smiling, “agreeing” to do or say things the perpetrator instructs them to, it’s all a means to minimize or avoid sexual violation.

To someone unfamiliar with trauma, this response can seem like the harmed person is consenting when they actually aren’t. What’s happening is that the nervous system has assessed the perpetrator as being less likely to impose more severe violation of death of the victimized person appears to comply.

Flop (or Collapse)

Some of us experienced an overwhelming shutdown during the sexual assault(s) or sexual abuse. Our bodies may have felt heavy, numb, disconnected, or almost impossible to move. This response involved a sense of emotional or physical collapse.

Like the other trauma responses, it’s involuntary. And, the body was doing everything it could to survive overwhelming danger.

None of these trauma responses invalidates allegations of sexual assault or abuse. Each simply reflects how different nervous systems respond to stress, in this case per sexual trauma.

For all people, understanding these responses can be life-changing. Many of us who have been victimized may spend years carrying shame for not reacting the way we believed we "should" have. Learning that the brain and body automatically choose how we survived the assault can begin to loosen the grip of blame and societal division.

Many non-victimized persons spend years victim blaming people who come forward, causing undo harm. For this group, this knowledge matters just as much because it changes the questions that are mostly asked in society.

Instead of asking, "Why didn't you fight back?” People can accept that the nervous system made the decision in order to keep us alive. And, this shift matters because blame moves away from us and onto the perpetrators.

This is important because justice becomes more possible when society understands that trauma doesn't follow a script. And, neither do the people who live through it.