#whyididn'treport

In the year since Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, one exchange has replayed in my mind more than any other. It happened on the day Christine Blasey Ford testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a high school gathering in 1982. Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the most strident Kavanaugh supporters on the committee, was storming through the Capitol during a break in that day’s hearing when activist Robyn Swirling approached him. “Sen. Graham, I was raped 13 years ago,” Swirling said.

Graham had been telling reporters that Ford’s inability to pinpoint the date of her alleged assault had made him doubt her story. Swirling told him that she, too, could not remember the exact date of her rape. “I’m so sorry,” Graham said, without making eye contact.

Swirling continued, “You’re so sorry, but do you believe me?”

“You needed to go to the cops,” Graham said. “Go to the cops.”

In some ways, it was a routine and minor moment: a clash between a progressive activist and a conservative lawmaker in a basement hallway in the Capitol. But the whole scene—Swirling’s insistent telling of her rape, Graham’s invocation of the police she didn’t call as a way to dismiss her story entirely—encapsulated, in just a few seconds, the dynamic conservatives had established to defend their own from allegations of sexual assault. Graham didn’t know whether Swirling had reported her rape to the cops, didn’t care that she wasn’t accusing a specific person or trying to get anyone in trouble. His knee-jerk response to an allegation of rape made in a vacuum, by a woman he knew nothing about, was to tell her she was doing it wrong.

Police reports, or the lack thereof, have loomed large in recent years in right-wing bids to discredit women who accuse powerful men of sexual abuse. In 2016, Bill O’Reilly said on his dearly departed Fox News show that he refused to “get into” the sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump unless police were taking on the cases. Conservative columnists have used the absence of law enforcement involvement to cast doubt on the stories of Ford and E. Jean Carroll, who in June accused Trump of having raped her in a department store fitting room in the 1990s. When Ford first came forward with her allegation against Kavanaugh, Trump tweeted that “if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says,” she or her parents would have promptly notified the authorities.

That tweet prompted thousands of sexual assault survivors to explain their own reasons for deciding not to tell the police (or, in some cases, anyone) about what happened to them, using the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport. People wrote of feeling sure they wouldn’t be believed, worried about preserving professional relationships with their assailants’ friends, or embarrassed that they’d been drinking too much. Many said they’d played out a possible police report in their minds—and the interrogation, public scrutiny, and invasive investigation that could follow—and decided it wasn’t worth the slim chance at seeing justice served.

I reported it the first time. Didn’t get much out of that. The person who did it to me did go to jail. They got out very early. I learned that people who had ruined my life, who had hurt my body, could still be good enough for the people who ran the law. He hurt me and he got away with it, as far as I was concerned.

When I was with a girl, I didn’t tell anyone when she was abusing me. I didn’t open up about it to people, even after she turned me into a pariah. I simply told them the tail end, and no one believed me because she had already woven a story. 

When I reached college and experienced physical domestic abuse with a guy who wanted to date another girl, who wasn’t even with me, who I’d never even kissed. It took me months to work up the courage to report it to the police. I had screenshots, pictures of my bruises, and the names of others who witnessed the events. His friends sided with him. The police said I should just avoid him, the college banned us from each others’ dorms, meaning I was stuck in mine...with all of his angry friends whose names I had listed as being witnesses. 

So when I experienced domestic abuse with a boy who told me he loved me, including bruised eyes and broken bones, I didn’t bother to report it to anyone. I didn’t bother to leave. 

When I was fucking a guy and he didn’t stop when I said to, I blamed us both. I blamed me too. He said he didn’t hear me, so I believed him, and I shoved it down when it happened again and he told me to just shut up, that it never happened. 

When a guy expected me to fuck him in order to have a place to live, I did it. When he broke his side of the agreement, I knew no one would care, so I kept doing it. 

When a girl preyed on me and expected me to fuck her. When she said she’d kill herself, when she asked me to look at her ass and when she came in the room and laid down I didn’t tell anyone except my boyfriend. When she tried to butt in on my boyfriend and I’s relationship, I expressed discomfort but I didn’t stop her. I knew no one would stand up for me, and when she assaulted me no one did.  I didn’t let her touch him.

At least I didn’t let her touch him.

That one who hurt me when I was a kid. He hurt more. They let him out. And he hurt more. 

Less than a week after Christine Blasey Ford spoke publicly for the first time about her allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump defended his Supreme Court nominee on Twitter and suggested that Ford was not telling the truth. In response to Trump's tweets, survivors of sexual violence used the #WhyIDidn'tReport hashtag on Twitter to discuss why they didn't report their own experiences with sexual assault, and voiced solidarity with Ford.

In a letter sent to California lawmakers over the summer, Ford, now a professor in California, alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in the 1980s, when they were both high school students. Kavanaugh has denied these allegations, stating that he "did not do this back in high school or at any time.” On Friday, Trump defended Kavanaugh on Twitter, implying that the judge's reputation was unfairly under attack.

"Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a fine man, with an impeccable reputation, who is under assault by radical left wing politicians who don’t want to know the answers, they just want to destroy and delay," Trump tweeted. "I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!"

For many people on Twitter, Trump's tweets were reminiscent of the doubt and skepticism survivors often face when they report sexual assault. As a result, his defense of Kavanaugh prompted thousands of tweets under the #WhyIDidntReport hashtag.