In more than thirty years of working in mental health and over a decade working directly with survivors of sexual violence, I’ve had the privilege of sitting with hundreds of people as they told their stories. During my years as a sexual assault coordinator alone, I worked with more than 700 survivors.
Not one of them was a “perfect victim.”
In fact, I’m not convinced such a person exists.
What I found instead were human beings trying to make sense of experiences that never should have happened to them.
Some cried.
Some laughed.
Some were angry.
Some were numb.
Some talked openly.
Others could barely find the words.
Many questioned themselves far more than they questioned the person who harmed them.
One of the most memorable conversations I ever had was with a professional who spent her career helping others. She was intelligent, compassionate, highly educated, and deeply skilled at recognizing abuse when it happened to someone else.
Yet when she described being sexually abused by an adult when she was twelve years old, she still wasn’t entirely sure she was a victim.
Think about that for a moment.
Someone who could clearly identify abuse in another person struggled to apply that same understanding to herself.
Trauma has a way of doing that.
It creates confusion where there should be clarity. It creates self-doubt where there should be accountability. It teaches people to question their own experiences rather than the actions of the person who harmed them.
Over the years, I’ve heard countless versions of the same questions.
Why didn’t I fight back?
Why didn’t I tell anyone?
Why did I go back?
Why didn’t I leave sooner?
Why can’t I remember everything?
What strikes me is that these questions often come from survivors themselves, but society asks them too.
We seem to have a picture in our minds of what a “real” victim should look like. We expect immediate reporting. We expect crystal-clear memories. We expect visible distress. We expect people to react dramatically and consistently.
Real life is rarely that neat.
One of the biggest misconceptions I encounter involves the idea that victims fight back. People imagine screaming, kicking, punching, and escaping.
Certainly, that can happen.
But in my own experience working with more than 700 survivors of sexual violence, I cannot recall a single person who described successfully fighting their way out of the assault.
What I heard over and over again was something else.
They froze.
Children froze.
Teenagers froze.
Adults froze.
People who were assaulted decades ago described freezing.
People assaulted just weeks earlier described freezing.
The details were different. The ages were different. The circumstances were different.
The nervous system’s response was often remarkably similar.
Many survivors later judged themselves harshly for that reaction.
The truth is that freeze is not weakness. It is not permission. It is not consent. It is not failure.
It is a survival response.
The body makes a split-second decision in the face of overwhelming danger. Long before logic has time to weigh in, the nervous system takes over.
Survivors often tell me they feel ashamed of that response.
What I wish they understood is that their bodies were doing exactly what bodies are designed to do: survive.
Children face additional challenges. Many have been groomed, manipulated, threatened, or taught to keep secrets. Some are made to believe the abuse is normal. Others are convinced nobody will believe them.
Years later, people ask why they didn’t tell.
But when a child has been trained to stay silent, secrecy becomes part of survival.
Trauma also affects memory in ways many people don’t understand. Survivors often remember pieces rather than perfect timelines. They may remember a smell, a sound, a feeling, or a single image while struggling to recall what came before or after.
This is not evidence that they are lying.
It is evidence that trauma affects how memories are stored.
The longer I do this work, the more convinced I become that we spend too much time evaluating how victims behaved and not enough time understanding how trauma affects human beings.
Trauma is messy.
Survival is messy.
Healing is messy.
Human beings are messy.
Maybe that’s exactly why the perfect victim doesn’t exist.
What exists are real people doing the best they can with experiences they never should have had to endure.
And they deserve compassion, understanding, and support—not because they responded perfectly, but because they were hurt.
Perhaps the problem was never that victims failed to meet our expectations.
Perhaps the problem is that our expectations were wrong to begin with.