A forced sexual assault, or rape, is defined as the action of consummation that has been forced on another person. This act of plunder does not omit any race, age, sexual orientation, or gender. Sexual Assault is about authority over another person and taking away their privilege to assert no. There are two types of forced sex, one is where the assailant is a stranger and the other, the victim knows the attacker (“HerBody”). Since rape is such a brutal act with a nature of extreme force, the victims endure a severe damage and trauma. Trauma from the attack ranges from lack of self-esteem, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and a liability to kill oneself. Throughout the world, millions of victims of sexual assault suffer from trauma, without treatment, lack of memory of the incident, and without support from family, friends, and law enforcement. 

Sexual assault is a very traumatic and brutal experience, like any attack, your body reacts. When intense fear and anxiety settles in a victim, it triggers the amygdala. The amygdala is the region of the brain that concerns alarm and apprehension processing, experiencing emotion, and stress response. This area of the brain sends the body into high warning alert and survival mode. In times of stress the adrenal glands respond to the amygdala’s signals and secrete an excess of hormones. These opioid boosting hormones are meant to help the person come to terms with the physical and emotional agony of the traumatic circumstances, but they also disturb the victim’s remembrance of the incident. The hormones that are released make it more strenuous for the hippocampus and the amygdala to unify the information of the event. Due to this strain on the brain, majority of the victim’s memories of the event are scattered and blacked out. The loss of recollection or cracks in memory in sexual assault survivors is popular, but it gives the victims the notoriety of fabricating the allegations since they cannot recall the story straightforward. Even though there are many neurological studies on the topic, how to efficiently question and interrogate, and how to support the victims, law enforcement and campus officials infrequently take in this fact under consideration. Due to this stain, the criminal justice system, health care facilities, friends, families, and organizations tend to not trust the victim and denounce them. With this stigma, thousands of victims never obtain the professional guidance they so desperately require (Gregoire, 1-2).

When the majority of the public doubts a sexual assault victim, it is because they have heard of a case in the past, that has installed a permanent suspicion in all survivor’s story’s. One case that is well known around the country in the Rolling Stone scandal about the University of Virginia. In December 2014, Rolling Stone Magazine wrote an article called “a Rape on Campus”, about a girl named Jackie who was ruthlessly raped by multiple men at a fraternity party at the University of Virginia (Coronel et all., 1). Jackie shared her extremely descriptive story of how seven men took turns raping her in the Phi Kappa Psi house on campus. Rolling Stone wrote a several page spread on her story, how the university was swiping sexual assault under the rug, the school’s reputation, and how justice was never received (Coronel et all., 1). Later, the Washington Post revealed several details that suggested the alleged rape could not have happened like that. Soon after, the news exploded, and it made Rolling Stone’s reputation look like liars just wanting a story. Once the victim, Jackie, was interviewed again, several flaws in her story came to light and multiple specific facts that she could not keep straight. There was also come miscommunication between the writer, the witnesses, and the victim where key facts were written wrong (Gregoire,1-2). Due to multiple discrepancies, many news sources and article’s called Jackie’s story a hoax or a trick. Once this scandal blew up, Rolling Stone retracted its article and issued a statement of apology to the victim, the fraternity, the school, and all sexual assault victims (Coronel et all., 1).. In the backlash of this story, many activist organizations for sexual assault victims were troubled that the bad and atrocious press would cause a common tendency to doubt the victims. This tendency to doubt all victims, off a few popular cases were the facts are blurry, is common. The UVA case is just one example of many, of how the memory of the victim can cause the case to be thrown out, and no justice is ever found. 

Almost all survivors struggle in the five areas affected by victimization. These five regions are intimacy, esteem, control, safety, and trust. (Resick and Schnicke, 2). When a victim specifically struggles in the departments of trust and safety, a post-traumatic stress disorder can show in victims. Sexual assault contains many consequences, they range anywhere from sexually transmitted diseases, possible pregnancy, physical damage, emotional disturbance, suicide, and substance abuse, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (Petrak et all., 19). For most trained medical professionals, the physical pain and injuries are the most important, to where mental health takes a back seat. A small amount of medical research professionals are discovering new paths every year for specific treatments for sexual assault victims. While everyone heals in their own way, one specific treatment has been created for rape victims that suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. They are able to construct a method specifically for rape survivors, because majority of victims suffer from similar aspect of post-traumatic stress disorder that would be different, for example a soldier. The method is called Cognitive Processing Therapy, or CPT, created by two doctors, Patricia Resick and Monica Schnicke. This specific therapy selects facts from the “processing theory of PTSD that proposes that information about a traumatic event is stored in the brain’s fear network” (Resick and Schnicke, 3). This fear network is where the brain recognizes similar situations from their attack and sends the body into a panic attack. This therapy’s goal into address the victim’s intense feelings that are causing a form of road blocks from the body’s natural healing, these road blocks in turn cause the post-traumatic stress attacks in victims. In some victims, if no form of therapy is ever sought, the brain cannot move past these road blocks on its own. This is a great example of when therapy is necessary for the victim and is impossible to receive if the victim does not have access to health care.  

There are several organizations around the world that do not truly investigate the crimes of sexual assault and do not legitimately aid their victims. The United States Military is one of those organizations, there are hundreds of accounts of victims coming forward, with no justice received and then being dishonorably discharged from that branch of the military. In 1990, Shelby Willis, an Air Force airwoman, submitted more than ten complaints to her superiors about sexual harassment from a senior airman. Seven months later, the eighteen-year-old was attacked by the same airman. When she voiced her concerns and filled a report, her staff sergeants claimed she was causing trouble and gave her extra cleaning duty. Willis claimed that the “more they [staff sergeants] ignored her report, the more arrogant he [the attacker] became” (Sarhan, 1). Willis was then recommended for discharge due to minor offenses, that there is no trace of. Her attacker was never punished or discharged.  Willis filed her story with the Human Rights Watch to find some kind of justice. After her discharge, Willis was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression, but due to her loss of benefits she was not able to receive treatment from a VA hospital for sixteen years (Sarhan, 1).  This organization believes that survivors of sexual assault in the military that are given improper discharges, rather than the true aid they need to heal. The military hides under the charges of drug use, stealing, minor offenses and personality disorders to be able to dishonorable or honorable discharge their soldiers. Due to these improper dishonorable discharges the military hands out to victims, they lose all health care benefits and are not able to receive the care he or she needs to heal. The Human Rights Watch published a one hundred and twenty-four-page research document called “Booted: Lack of Recourse for Wrongfully Discharged US Military Rape Survivors” (Sarhan, 1). This report is filled with over one hundred and sixty interviews of sexual assault victims from all branches of the military over a twenty-eighth-month time range. Over seventy-five percent of those victims reported that they were discharged for minor offenses, and as a result lost all of their benefits. Due to this loss of benefits, they were unable to receive the therapy and aid they so desperately needed to heal. 

Another organization, or branch of government, that discriminates against sexual assault victims is the Police Department. Sadly, this institution’s purpose is to support the victims and to investigate their claims. The Police Department is supposed to be the place where the victims feel safe enough to share their story and get justice for the wrong doing that has occurred. Instead, their met with suspicion, disbelief, and harsh interrogations. Slate, a daily online magazine, interviewed a cop from the Burlington Police Department in Vermont. The officer, Tom Tremblay, shares that when he first entered the force, he was shocked by the amount of officers in his unit that automatically distrusted and wrote off rape victims cases. The National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women published a statistic that claims that only two to eight percent of cases nationally are false accusations (Allen, 1). Officer Tremblay claimed that just under half of all rape cases are considered false under police suspicion year after year. Once Tremblay joined the sex crimes division of the police department, he realized where all the doubt and suspicion comes from. He explains that from the standard cop’s point of view, there is a certain conduct that a victim should follow that makes less suspicious. For instance, they should be able to clearly recall the story the exact same, every time. This is almost impossible for sexual assault victims to do because of the amygdala’s flight or fight response, that sends out an overwhelming amount of hormones, causing a gap in memory of the incident. The police also expect the victim’s to be emotionally overwhelmed, but again the amygdala can cause a dissociation from the attack. So when the victims are being interviewed, some show no emotion which leads to the police, prosecutors and judge’s doubt and suspicion to grow. When victim’s sense the police department or other organizations do not believe them, majority of the cases end up being dropped and no justice is ever found. 

For years, scientists have been trying to convince the justice department that the same harsh interrogation techniques used for homicide and larceny cannot be used in sexual assault cases, because it has no benefit on the victim’s recollection. In this case when the victim is forced to tell a story they do not have all the pieces to, it causes skepticism and discrepancies from the law enforcement’s point of view (Allen, 1). Officers are now using a method called the open ended approach. This approach lets the victim tell the story of their attack in their own words with the information they already know. During this approach they slowly push the victim’s memory to see what else they can remember from the basic facts they have. Officer Tremblay recalls a case where a woman could only remember the footsteps of the assailant, by recalling and focusing on the footsteps, she was eventually able to also recall his voice. When she recalled his voice, she recalled what he was saying which gave key evidence in finding him (Allen, 1). Even though this technique is incredible, the only way police departments receive the training is if an outside source is approved to come teach it, which due to multiple nationwide budget cuts, this training is not happening. Based off the improvement of how many cases are tried and executed perfectly through this method, it should be built into the budget or into the police academy training. As many organizations want to see this training come about, the Office of Violence Against Women has donated four hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. They have come up with a three-year plan to retrain cops in twenty main cities across the country. The only downside to this amazing progression is that a sexual assault occurs almost every two to three minutes nationally, so a three-year plan is not keeping up with the pace of the crimes (Allen, 1). 

In modern times, scientists and researchers have been looking into different avenues of therapy and treatment to aid sexual assault victim’s in their healing process. The main controversial point in the science community was, is therapy necessary for sexual assault victims to heal? In 1982, three doctors conducted a research experiment to observe what happens to rape survivors that receive therapy and those who do not, for one year following their attack. In their research, they observed one hundred and fifteen sexual assault victims and examined their advancement or deterioration at multiple periodic checkpoints during the victim’s rehabilitation.  The doctors examined the victims relatively two weeks and at 1, 2, 4, 8, and 12 months’ post rape. To do this experiment, the doctors had three victim groups, one that received therapy at all the checkpoints, one group that received therapy at only one of the check points, and a group that did not receive any treatment. The research concluded that depressive symptoms were substantially higher in the survivors that received little to no therapy (Atkenson et all, 1-2). In the experiment’s report, the results “of the present study indicate that victims of rape do exhibit depressive symptoms following the traumatic event of assault” (Atkenson et all, 1). This concept, was a major breakthrough for the nineteen eighties, it depicted, officially, that therapists, counselors, and law enforcement should be aware and sensitive to the apparent existence of depressive symptoms. In several trials, it is found that women who do not seek out therapy, see a rise in their depressive and post traumatic symptoms. This experiment portrays the notion that almost all victims suffer from depressive trauma, but mostly emphasizes the concept that therapy is needed to aid the victim. 

Throughout the world, millions of victims of sexual assault suffer from trauma, without treatment, lack of memory of the incident, and without support from family, friends, and law enforcement.

Around the world, people of all genders, ages and races suffer from the traumatic events of rape. Millions of victims do not seek the aid they truly need to heal and the support from their love ones and employers.  Due to the body’s natural flight or fight response, the victims have a fuzzy recollection of memory. This stain causes health care facilities, families, law enforcement, and friends to distrust and be suspicious of the rape survivor. When an employer is skeptic of the victim or their symptoms effect their work ethic, they can be let go. Multiple common scenarios lead to paths where the victim loses their health care and cannot receive their treatment for trauma. When the law enforcement does not believe the victim, it causes a trickle effect where no justice is found, others begin to doubt the victim, and they may not be able to receive therapy. Healing treatment is critical to the healing process of the victims. When a victim does not receive treatment they are a higher risk for depression, suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder, and various anxiety disorders. The concept of the stain that surrounds rape victims is outdated. There are hundreds upon thousands of journals that explains the victim’s lack of memory and it is still not enough for law enforcement. Still, every year thousands of rape cases have no justice due to the constant state of suspicion in the cop’s eyes. Sexual Assault is not a new crime. This assault has been around since the dawn of time. It is sad to think that in a civilization so advanced and progressive mentally, technologically, scientifically, and physically would be more sensitive and helpful to the topic. The fact several organizations that is meant to protect and serve our nation is not capable of not only seeking justice, but also doubting their own employees is shameful. Times are changing, it is the twenty first century and the idea that science, law enforcement, psychology, and medicine are changing and progressive, except for this field is ignominious. Sexual Assault Trauma is real, backed up science, and has affected millions of victims. We, as a modern society, need to accept these facts, spread awareness and education, and end the negative attitude surrounded by the concept. 
