9781422276075

Chapter 1

Coping with Sexual Assault

What did I do wrong? Should I not have gone to that party? Maybe I shouldn’t have had a second drink? These questions often haunt survivors of sexual violence. People who fought back wonder if they shouldn’t have, while those who didn’t fight worry whether they should have. People who’ve been abused by an intimate partner blame themselves for not leaving sooner, or for choosing that person in the first place. The self-interrogation goes on and on. Many survivors obsess over every detail, trying to find the single wrong turn that, if corrected, would have made everything turn out differently. It is normal to think this way, but also profoundly unhelpful. If you’ve been attacked, abused, harassed, or stalked, you didn’t do anything wrong. No decision you made makes you responsible for the decision someone else made. Indeed, there’s just one answer to the first question on this page: Someone else did something wrong, not you.

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