How Trump inadvertently spurred sexual violence survivors to create what may be the largest “source of data from survivors who do not report”
On Twitter (as it was called at the time), of course
In the events surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court way back in 2018, then-President Donald Trump’s public mockery of a victim of sexual violence lead thousands of women to take to Twitter to share their stories of sexual violence and their reasons for not reporting it.
Ordinarily, researchers find it difficult to study reasons for not reporting sexual violence because such victims are difficult to access.
But Stephanie Fohring, a senior lecturer in criminology at Northumbria University the U.K., realized this outpouring on Twitter provided a unique opportunity.
She would later describe the data set she collected as “potentially the largest ever source of data from survivors who do not report.”
Fohring has analyzed these tweets in research published earlier this month, but before discussing her findings, I’m going to back things up a bit.
One day in 2018, Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor at California’s Palo Alto University, learned that someone she went to high school with, Brett Kavanaugh, had been nominated to the Supreme Court. Blasey Ford realized she had information the Senate, which was considering the nomination, needed.
She wrote to Senator Dianne Feinstein, saying that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a party in 1982, when she was 15 and he was 17.
The nomination proceedings were put on hold and both Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh testified before the Senate.
Despite Blasey Ford’s testimony, the Senate voted 50-48 to confirm Kavanaugh’s nomination.
The following week, then-President Trump publicly mocked Blasey Ford’s testimony at a rally in Mississippi. The crowd cheered.
“Several myths can be identified in Trump’s mockery,” Fohring writes of those mocking statements in the new research. “First, that a ‘real’ victim will report rape immediately to the police; second, a victim will always fight back; and finally, a real victim will consistently remember what has happened.”
Trump may have expected his repetition of these myths to go unchallenged.
They didn’t.
Thousands of women took to Twitter (now X) with the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport to challenge Trump’s rape myths. They shared their stories of sexual violence and why they didn’t report. There were over 720,000 tweets recorded in the first weekend.
For Fohring, this was a unique opportunity to access sexual violence victims who don’t report, people who make up “so-called ‘hard to access’ populations.”
Fohring initially sampled 1,000 tweets. After eliminating retweets and other tweets irrelevant to her research, Fohring was left with a sample of 734 tweets, which she analysed.
In these hundreds of tweets, Fohring found an overarching theme of “multiplicity and complexity.”
Multiplicity and complexity
Fohring notes that the abuse reflected in the sample is often ongoing over time and from an early age across the life course. Many victim/survivors also mentioned many reasons that worked together to stop them from reporting.
“These include but are not limited to,” writes Fohring, “age and a relationship with the perpetrator, power imbalances such as abuse by an employer, fear and the use of threats, blame, shame and stigma, fear of not being believed, impact on career prospects, wanting to spare other from harm, an unjust CJS, and changes in identity and relationships.”
Fohring connects the multiple abuses experienced by so many in the sample to well researched trends in the wider literature showing that “while most of the population is free from criminal victimisations, a small proportion of victims experience the bulk of crime.”
Fohring also discusses three sub-themes found in her sample, writing about how the tweets revealed how vulnerability, shame and blame, and fear prevented victim/survivors from reporting their sexual abuse.
As with the overall theme of multiplicity and complexity, she discusses consistencies between these sub-themes found in her sample and the wider research literature.
Fear
In discussing fear, Fohring notes the link between the fear of “not being believed and [of] punishment and/or humiliation” before returning to Dr. Blasey Ford.
She writes:
“In the context of Dr Blasey Ford’s experience, who was not believed and mocked by a sitting president, such fears are far from irrational. Time and again we are witness to sensationalised court cases where complainants are not believed, humiliated, ‘outed’ online, harassed and threatened. After her disclosure, Dr Blasey Ford had to hire security guards and move home no fewer than four times after receiving a barrage of abuse including threats to her life.”
(Indeed, as this NPR interview gets into, Dr. Blasey Ford is still suffering from testifying in this matter.)
Limits and future work
As valuable as the sampled tweets are for delving into the experiences of some of those who don’t report sexual violence, there are limits to what they can tell us.
For example, Fohring sought to protect the anonymity of those whose tweets she analysed, choosing not to explore profiles.
“Anonymity was sought,” she writes, “as although the data collected was in the public realm, tweeters could not be asked to participate in the research or give consent to their tweets being used in such a way.”
Fohring writes that “little can be said about the demographic nature of the sample,” but notes that it’s safe to say that “most of the sample is composed of women” and “most of the data would come from American sources.”
Using tweets as data creates issues, for example, with how much Fohring’s findings can be generalized to everyone who doesn’t report sexual violence.
In terms of future research, Fohring argues that “more qualitative work is needed with victims/survivors who do not report sexual victimisation to the police – which in turn requires the need for novel approaches to collecting data from this group.”
In terms of what we must all do, she writes that deterrents to reporting “are persistent both within the criminal justice system and society at large.” So, not only is “procedural fairness” important, but the response of everyone around the victim/survivor, including their “friends, family, and social networks more generally.”
Fohring’s research, #WhyIDidntReport: Exploring victim accounts of non-reporting, was published by Criminology & Criminal Justice and is available to read in its entirety.