When Reporting Isn’t Safety

I never thought of myself as a person who kept secrets.

I was bold and fierce. I came out as queer at a young age because I refused to let society define me. I was open-hearted. I was a good friend. I was a competitive athlete.

Then the rape happened.

Something inside me broke.

I did something I never imagined I would do: I remained silent. I hid behind the part of myself who thought I was bold and fierce — the part of me that felt I had to stay strong.

I did not report. I told no one.

Part of this was my own shame and guilt. Part of it was because I didn’t think people would believe me. But I think the biggest reason I didn’t report was that, deep down, I understood all too well what reporting would mean. I would have to repeat every humiliating detail to police officers I did not know. People would ask me questions I was not ready to answer, like when I finally did disclose and was asked, “Are you sure it just wasn’t rough sex?”

I just wanted to be a normal 16-year-old kid. I didn’t want to be a “victim.” So I remained silent for fifteen years and slowly did the healing work. As an adult whose career focuses on studying sexual violence, I now understand that choosing not to report was not a failure.

It was a bold and fierce choice. It allowed me to survive, to move toward wholeness and healing on my own terms and in my own time.

Still, many conversations I have begin with a familiar refrain: “Why didn’t you report?”

It is almost a reflexive move that assumes the legal system is safe, accessible, effective, equitable, and trustworthy.

As a queer teenager, I already knew that these core assumptions about our legal system did not apply to me. As an academic and restorative practitioner, I have come to realize that these core assumptions don’t really apply to anyone. Not even the perfect victim.

A closer look at the numbers dramatically changes the narrative about our legal system.

Importantly, only about 20% of people who experience sexual harm will ever report their experience to law enforcement. It is the least reported crime.

That means that nearly four out of every five survivors never even come into contact with the system. And their reasons are not mysterious or irrational. Just like me, they experience shame and guilt. Some deal with community pressure to protect their own. Others have immigration concerns. Many distrust or fear the police. Some have had past negative experiences with the criminal legal system. Still, many just want to move forward on their own terms.

And most survivors inherently know something that society does not want to acknowledge.

Of the small percentage of survivors who do report, few will see their cases result in formal charges or convictions. This is known as the “criminal justice funnel.” It is a known and inevitable phenomenon. However, it is particularly damaging to people who experience sexual harm, because the legal system is not designed to center survivor needs.

Proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is an extraordinarily high bar for any prosecutor — even the most victim-centered ones.

This is in part why the result is so staggering. For every 1,000 rapes committed in the United States, only six people will ever spend even one single day in prison.

Six.

The criminal legal system fails first because it is not designed for survivors to ever come forward in the first place. It fails again because its structure rarely produces any justice.

I am not advocating for prison time. I am simply suggesting that when we rely solely on the criminal legal system to address sexual harm, we are asking an extremely narrow system to solve a very human problem — one that also requires community responsibility, prevention, healing-centered responses, and alternative forms of accountability. It is a human problem that requires as many individually tailored solutions as there are survivors.

The question, then, is not “Why didn’t they report?”

The question is: How do we create more pathways to safety, healing, and accountability — ones that don’t depend on a system that fails 994 out of 1,000 survivors?

Real justice requires that. It requires us to be creative and open to what survivors say they need.