The appalling reason victims always text their abusers

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Some years ago, I was in the pub with my then-partner when he “flipped.” In less than half a minute, he went from being totally calm to screaming in my face. I fled the pub, crying. The next morning, I messaged him to apologise for making him angry in the first place.

It is no wonder to me that there was a widely shared meme that showed women felt safer with bears than with men. And it’s because of this small personal experience that I understand very well “Jane Doe’s” initial reaction to the “Cornell 7” the morning after they allegedly subjected her to repeated sexual assault.

The by-now notorious allegations – in which the unnamed woman says she was drugged, given alcohol and gang-raped at the now-defunct Chi Phi frat house at Cornell University in New York, in October 2024 – have opened up bitter debate about the behaviour of male students on campus, but also about our willingness to hear and believe women’s accounts. If the woeful number of rape prosecutions in this country and elsewhere weren’t indication enough, we are sorely lacking in that willingness.

It’s no accident that “Jane Doe” has been receiving hateful abuse and death threats. Her lawyer has reported she was “swatted” in a fake 911 call that sent armed police to her home. She has been branded a “liar” because texts have emerged which appear to show her initially messaging one of her alleged attackers to accept his apology for “how things went down”.

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It doesn’t shock me to read her texts and witness her seeking to downplay what she later claims happened. I can see how she rushes to take equal responsibility for what happened; that she diminishes her state of victimhood; offering up that her memory was “super clouded”, that “non[e] of the sexual stuff was illegal”; that she brushes off the idea that “we should feel any shame” and states: “our body our choice.”

And it doesn’t surprise me how things change over the next two weeks, as she slowly comes to terms with it all, later writing (according to TMZ, which published the messages) that the events of the night made her feel “like a sex doll/worker”: “Let’s be clear that 90% of what happened that night was not consensual. i was given more [ket] than i can remember and i know that i told u i felt uncomfortable and i didn’t know anyone in the room.”

Frankly, anyone who thinks this is an example of someone “changing their story” is showing how little they know about being assaulted. Try asking someone who’s been raped or otherwise sexually abused how long it took to realise that what happened to them was not okay. Sometimes it’s immediate, but often it takes days, weeks – even months or years – to understand, process and name it. And I know this, because it happened to me.

To take you back to my initial story – you might be asking, why did I do that? Why did I apologise to my aggressor, a man who screamed at me for something as innocuous as suggesting a day out with friends? Years on, I look back and marvel at it – and I still don’t have an easy answer. After all, it was objectively his fault, because I’d done nothing “wrong”; certainly nothing to warrant being screamed at.

The context doesn’t really matter, though, when you’re handling a hair trigger. My reaction, of appeasement and de-escalation to get back to safety by smoothing everything over, is perhaps understandable.

But it was also more than that: if I could tell myself it was “fine”, that it was “no big deal”, then I could handle it. Control it, to an extent, and thus avoid the responsibility of looking at the truth, right in the eye. If I acknowledged it for what it really was, then I would have to act on it – and that was truly terrifying.

As a friend who has been raped told me: “Accepting you were the victim of something horrible makes it real.”

We already know that two-thirds of assaults are perpetrated by people the victim already knows; that five in six women who are raped don’t report it to the police. Twelve years ago, one study which looked at a large sample of undergraduates at a US university found that nearly two-thirds said they knew one or more women who were victims of sexual assault, and just over half said they knew one or more men who had perpetrated sexual assault. Another study comparing acknowledged and unacknowledged rapes in college victims of alcohol-facilitated assaults found that almost 30 per cent of the victims continued their relationship with the perpetrator afterwards.

You might just handle things differently in a close-knit environment like a university where everyone knows each other, where you’ll probably see your abuser at lectures or in the canteen, where shame follows you in corridors. It might take you a little longer to be brave and to speak up. And wouldn’t it be nice to be taken seriously when you do?

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