The Brain Under (Sexual) Assault

Thawing the Freeze

Unfortunately, freezing is human. It doesn’t matter how tough you are or what gender you are, sometimes our uncontrollable stress response is just to freeze. Cops and soldiers have brains wired by the same evolution as the rest of us — the reason they don’t freeze to the same extent is training, falling back on ingrained habits about what to watch for, when and how to move, etc.

So to the extent we can identify those vulnerable to sexual assault (statistically women and girls, although that doesn’t come close to covering it), can we provide similar training to overcome responses like freezing?

Kind of.

“Self-defense and situational awareness — where you pay attention to your surroundings in an effort to protect yourself — make a huge difference,” says Allred. She says such training can heighten the senses and make it easier to physically react to danger, just like it does in cops and soldiers.

But as she points out, civilian self-defense classes aren’t usually anywhere near as sustained and intensive as military or police drills. “Just as you had to put in the hours to earn a drivers license, you need hours of practicing, anticipating, learning, remembering, and breaking down different counters in self-defense,” Allred says. “Soldiers frequently talk about how an attack suddenly slows and they can ‘see’ it in slow motion. That only comes from hours of training, and self-defense works the same way.”

The trick seems to be twofold. First is simple repetition — literally wiring new crisis-management habits into the brain, the same way cooking a favored dish or the car route to your workplace becomes second nature. But the other element, which law enforcement and the military excel at but which is harder to transpose to sexual assault awareness, is practice in situations where the training can be applied. It’s why armed forces are always developing more advanced simulations. Gamifying stress awareness, if you like.

But despite the difficulties, the evidence seems good. In 2005, the Journal for Interpersonal Violence reported on a study where participants in a 16 week training program followed by recreational kickboxing or martial arts responded with situational awareness (physically responding to a person and/or environment prior to a possible assault) over 50 percent more often than a control group with no training.

A 2015 study randomly selected 800 women entering Canadian universities to receive “resistance training” and concluded that “a rigorously designed and executed sexual assault resistance program was successful in decreasing the occurrence of rape, attempted rape, and other forms of victimization among first-year university women.”

But it goes further than just anticipating and physically fending off a sexual assault. It’s about mental habits too, which can not only prevent assaults but change cultures. According to a story by Hopper about sexual assault self-defense training on Psychology Today, those habits “involve ways of thinking about and owning one’s sexual desires and values, and ways of thinking about any attempt by another person to manipulate, coerce, or otherwise push you to do things that you don’t want to do or have done to your body.”

He also points out that training habits relating to our sexual desires, values, and rights can be done anytime, and we can use them to respond to the sexual behaviors of people around us — peers who are drunk, impulsive, sexually awkward, likely to miss signals, or just don’t care about the sexual rights of others.

“That makes those habits protective in another way too,” Hopper continues in his post, “by preventing or at least delaying such escalation [we] can safe-guard rational and flexible thinking, thereby increasing the odds of responding effectively to unique and complex situations (for example, manipulative coercion coming from someone you thought you could trust).”

But we should beware. Telling anyone they can prevent being raped if only they have the correct means at their disposal is extremely fraught territory. Such a stance is dangerously close to the victim-blaming rape victims have always faced (if only you hadn’t been drinking, if only you hadn’t worn a short skirt, etc.).

Not only that, self-defense training is no guarantee. There’s less chance of the assault taking place if the attacker isn’t bigger, stronger, or more able to overpower or dominate the victim, after all, giving her less chance of successfully fighting back.

Then there’s the possibility training might not kick in at all. Justin Boardman is a former police officer who’s created what he calls a trauma-informed interview protocol for law enforcement based on experience in trauma’s impact on the brain. “If someone is trained but freezes when attacked, they can feel even more guilt and confusion,” he says. “That creates issues in healing from and reporting the event.”

Boardman also points out that because the perpetrator is known by the victim in many assaults, he will carefully groom her and construct circumstances to reduce her perceived credibility if she reports the assault. “Learning to be aware of circumstances and prioritizing one’s safety over hurting others’ feelings can be the most effective self-defense training,” he says.

Nonbinary Victims

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, LGBTQ people are sexually assaulted at rates which are similar or higher than their heterosexual peers. Most studies assert that around 50 percent of transgender people will experience sexual violence.

Despite enjoying more acceptance in today’s world than ever before, LGBTQ people still face considerable prejudice and hate. Licensed clinical social worker Melissa Ifill says while there’s no specific set of trauma effects or behaviors particular to LGBTQ rape victims, they can add to what might already be a history of trauma associated with their sexual identity.

“Sexual assault can further damage perceptions of self and sexual identity that may create further cognitive dissonance or disconnection from the body,” she says. “What happens if you’re a transgender woman who identifies as lesbian, you’re sexually assaulted by a man and your body reacts physically to the assault in a way that’s disconnected from your emotional experience, like an erection? How does that affect you if you’ve working through self-acceptance around your identity and your body? What if your family isn’t accepting of your identity and told you bad things would happen?”

Related Articles

• Healing Systematically: A Q&A With Dr. Glenn Saxe
• How The Body Keeps The Score: An Interview with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
• Know Your Brain: How Trauma Affects Memory
• Memory Man: An Interview with Dr. Eric Kandel
• Power Against Violence: Brain-Based Education in El Salvador
• Resilience: How Your Brain Helps You Bounce Back