https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/06/23/why-many-rape-victims-dont-fight-or-yell/?utm_term=.88d44a8a3377



Why many rape victims don’t fight or yell

By James W. Hopper June 23, 2015

James W. Hopper, PhD, is an independent consultant and part-time instructor in psychology in the Department of Psychiatry of Harvard Medical School. He has conducted research on the neurobiology of trauma, and trains investigators, prosecutors, judges, and higher-education professionals on its implications. Here, he offers his explanation of why people don’t always respond to an attack the way others might expect:

By James W. Hopper, PhD

In the midst of sexual assault, the brain’s fear circuitry dominates. The prefrontal cortex can be severely impaired, and all that’s left may be reflexes and habits.

In the Washington Post’s recent series on college sexual assault, many victims describe how they reacted – and did not react – while being assaulted. Another article also published this month, in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, shows that some responses have been programmed into human brains by evolution.


Bringing together the accounts of those who have been assaulted with the neurobiology of trauma can play an essential role in supporting healing and the pursuits of accountability and justice.

For example, freezing is a brain-based response to detecting danger, especially a predator’s attack. Think deer in the headlights.

As one woman told the Post, “I didn’t say no, but I didn’t really know what to do. I just kind of froze.”

Freezing occurs when the amygdala – a crucial structure in the brain’s fear circuitry – detects an attack and signals the brainstem to inhibit movement. It happens in a flash, automatically and beyond conscious control.

It’s a brain response that rapidly shifts the organism into a state of vigilance for incoming attacks and avenues of escape. Eyes widen, pupils dilate. Hearing becomes more acute. The body is primed for fight or flight. But as we shall see, neither fight nor flight necessarily follows.

Simultaneously with the freeze response, the fear circuitry unleashes a surge of “stress chemicals” into the prefrontal cortex, the brain region that allows us to think rationally – to recall the bedroom door is open, or that people are in the dorm room next door, for example, and to make use of that information. But the surge of chemicals rapidly impairs the prefrontal cortex. That’s because, despite our dominant role on the planet now, we evolved as prey, and when a lion or tiger is upon us, stopping to think is fatal.

Indeed, no one understands better than the military that intense fear impairs our prefrontal cortex and capacity for reason.

When bullets are flying and blood is flowing, you had better have some really effective habit learning to rely upon. That’s why combat training is rigorous and repetitive – to burn in habits of effectively firing weapons, executing combat formations, etc.

But what if you’re being sexually assaulted and there’s no effective habit learning to fall back on?

What if you’re a woman and the only habits your brain cues up are those you’ve always relied upon to ward off unwanted sexual advances – like saying, “I have to go home now” or “Your girlfriend will find out”? Those phrases, and passive behaviors that go with them, may be your only responses, until it’s too late.


Countless victims of sexual assault describe just such responses. Too often police officers, college administrators, even friends and family think to themselves – and say out loud – “Why didn’t you run out of the room?” “Why didn’t you scream?”

For those who assume a functional prefrontal cortex – including many victims as they look back on what happened – passive habit responses can be baffling. They seem exactly the opposite of how they surely would – or should – have responded.

But when the fear circuitry takes over and the prefrontal cortex is impaired, habits and reflexes may be all we’ve got.

And if the fear circuitry perceives escape as impossible and resistance as futile, then not fight or flight, but extreme survival reflexes (which scientists call “animal defense responses”) will take over. These can activate automatically when the body is in a predator’s grip – and when, as half of rape victims report, we fear death or serious injury.


One such response is tonic immobility. In freezing, brain and body are primed for action. But in tonic immobility, the body is literally paralyzed by fear – unable to move, speak, or cry out. The body goes rigid. Hands may go numb.

Collapsed immobility is another. Think possum, playing dead. To see what this looks like (and get a humorous break from this difficult topic), you can watch the YouTube videos that come up for “passes out on Slingshot ride.”

Some people describe feeling “like a rag doll” as the perpetrator did whatever he wanted. And thanks to rapid drops in heart rate and blood pressure, some become faint and may even pass out. Some describe feeling “sleepy.”


Too often, from precinct stations to courtrooms, victims are met with disbelief: How could it be rape if you were sleepy?!

Another, more common reflexive response is dissociation: spacing out, feeling unreal, disconnected from the horrible emotions and sensations of such an intimate violation.

Unless someone is drugged or intoxicated into unconsciousness, eventually the brain’s fear circuitry will detect the attack.

Most victims will freeze, if only briefly. Some will fight back, effectively. Some will resist in habitual, passive ways. Some will suddenly give in and cry. Others will become paralyzed, become faint, pass out or dissociate.

Few who have experienced these responses realize that they are brain reactions to attack and terror.


They blame themselves for “failing” to resist. They feel ashamed. (Men especially may see themselves as cowards and feel like they’re not real men.) They may tell no one, even during an investigation. Sadly, many investigators and prosecutors still don’t know some or all of these brain-based responses.

[Men with unwanted sexual encounters often fear they won’t be taken seriously.]

None of these responses – in women or men – entails consent or cowardice.

None is evidence of resistance too insufficient to warrant our respect and compassion.

They are responses we should expect from brains dominated by the circuitry of fear (just as we should expect fragmented and incomplete memories).

May the day come when everyone who knows someone who has been sexually assaulted – which is all of us, whether we know that yet or not – understands these basic ways that our brains can react to such attacks and uses this knowledge to foster healing and justice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/06/23/why-many-rape-victims-dont-fight-or-yell/?utm_term=.88d44a8a3377

Hmmmm...

Spread until BF is hung by the balls

#JusticeForDakolo
#HangBFbyTheBallz

sAY NO TO RAPE!

all these bruhaha over allegations that may very well be false..

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sexual-assault-may-trigger-involuntary-paralysis/

MENTAL HEALTH
WHY SEXUAL ASSAULT VICTIMS DON'T FIGHT/SHOUT

*Sexual Assault May Trigger Involuntary Paralysis*

“Tonic immobility” hinders the ability to fight and is linked to high rates of depression and PTSD

By Francine Russo on August 4, 2017
Sexual Assault May Trigger Involuntary Paralysis
Credit: sdominick Getty Images

Survivors of sexual assault who come forward often confront doubt on the part of others. Did you fight back? they are asked. Did you scream? Just as painful for them, if not more so, can be a sense of guilt and shame. Why did I not resist? they may ask themselves. Is it my fault? And to make matters worse, although the laws are in flux in various jurisdictions, active resistance can be seen as necessary for a legal or even “common sense” definition of rape. Unless it is clearly too dangerous, as when the rapist is armed, resisting is generally thought to be the “normal” reaction to sexual assault.

But new research adds to the evidence debunking this common belief. According to a recent study, a majority of female rape survivors who visited the Emergency Clinic for Rape Victims in Stockholm reported they did not fight back. Many also did not yell for help. During the assault they experienced a kind of temporary paralysis called tonic immobility. And those who experienced extreme tonic immobility were twice as likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and three times more likely to suffer severe depression in the months after the attack than women who did not have this response.

Tonic immobility (TI) describes a state of involuntary paralysis in which individuals cannot move or, in many cases, even speak. In animals this reaction is considered an evolutionary adaptive defense to an attack by a predator when other forms of defense are not possible. Much less is known about this phenomenon in humans, although it has been observed in soldiers in battle as well as in survivors of sexual assault. A study from 2005, for example, found 52 percent of female undergraduates who reported childhood sexual abuse said they experienced this paralysis.


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The new study, published in Acta Obstetrecia et Gynecologica Scandinavica,reports that of nearly 300 women who visited the rape clinic, 70 percent experienced at least “significant” tonic immobility and 48 percent met the criteria for “extreme” tonic immobility during the rape. (The condition’s severity was assessed using a scale that measured feelings of being frozen, mute, numb and so on.)

This latest research is important because of its large sample size (298 women reporting, 189 of whom returned for a follow-up assessment after six months) and because they related their experience within 30 days of the assault, thus reducing the possibility of faulty recall. These findings strongly support previous research that links this involuntary paralysis with greater psychological harm following the assault. The 2005 study, for example, found an association between having experienced tonic immobility and significant psychological impairment.

The connection between this paralysis response and suffering greater PTSD and depression makes sense at the intuitive level, clinicians say. Women, men and children who are sexually assaulted and think they should have resisted but did not may also be prone to feeling guilt and shame. The correlation is strong although it does not prove causality. “I am not surprised that tonic immobility is common,” says University of Sydney psychiatrist Kasia Kozlowska, who has recently published, with her colleagues, a study in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry about the brain’s involuntary defense mechanisms in humans and other animals. “After all,” she wrote in an e-mail, “tonic immobility is designed to activate when there is contact with a predator (akin to the sexual abuse situation). Theoretically, one could expect it to activate when there is physical contact, high arousal and fear, and no possibility of running away.”

This “rape-induced paralysis,” she explains, is one of six automatically activated defense behaviors in animals and humans that make up the “defense cascade.” Typically, nonhuman animals are programmed to go through each of the states as the proximity of the danger escalates. The stages are: arousal (alertness to possible danger); freezing (momentarily putting flight or fight on hold while assessing danger); “flight or fight”; tonic immobility; collapsed immobility (fainting in fear); and quiescent immobility (a subsequent state of rest that promotes healing). People who experience sexual assault may go through several of these stages, or skip straight to tonic immobility.

Each of the defense reactions, she explains, involves activation of motor and arousal centers in the brain and changes in pain and sensory processing. When flight or fight is possible, motor programs for running or fighting are activated, the arousal system is switched to a high-energy setting and nonopioid analgesia is switched on. This helps the victim either run away or fight the predator. When flight or fight is not possible, immobility motor programs are activated, causing the paralysis. At the same time, the arousal system is switched to a low-energy setting, and the brain is flooded with “opioid analgesia” to reduce the intensity of the fear and pain.

Humans and other animals cannot control these defense mechanisms. In humans who are being raped, tonic immobility may be immediately triggered when their sensory inputs (touch, smell and so on) reach a critical threshold and they feel there is no escape.

The implications for rape survivors in the legal system are immense, experts say. If courts demand these people prove they resisted, says Kozlowska, “these courts are actually causing psychological harm to the women and failing to recognize the body’s innate response to serious attack.” Police and soldiers, she adds, also experience tonic immobility in traumatic situations and similarly suffer from unnecessary guilt.

The phenomenon of tonic immobility during an attack is not well known within the legal and judicial system, but people working with sexual assault survivors have long been aware of it, says James Hopper, a psychological trauma expert and teaching associate at Harvard Medical School. Since 2012 Hopper has been training civilian and military investigators and prosecutors around the country, and has found them very receptive.

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It is critical, says Karolinska Institute gynecologist Anna Möller, the current study’s lead author, for rape survivors themselves to understand that their ability to fight was out of their conscious control. Education could be instrumental in altering their interpretations of their behavior after the fact, reducing their shame and guilt. It could provide them, the study authors say, “with evidence that they do not choose the path their bodies ultimately went down.”

For more on the prevalence of tonic immobility during sexual assault, go to this site. For more on the relationship between tonic immobility and PTSD, see this site. For more on the protective function of tonic immobility, see here.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sexual-assault-may-trigger-involuntary-paralysis/

RAPE RAPE RAPE, the only news in Nigeria now, Na waoo, abegi Nigerians dey hungry. Buhari when are you appointing your so called ministers. When are we seeing the effect of the minimum wage.

THUNDER4real:
RAPE RAPE RAPE, the only news in Nigeria now, Na waoo, abegi Nigerians dey hungry. Buhari when are you appointing your so called ministers. When are we seeing the effect of the minimum wage.

Everything must not be about this ur post

This is how Nigeria can grow, we must speak up against all of our social problems on our nation cyberspace till we learn new solutions and information about it.

Enough of Ned/Reginatu News,

Very solid article on the science of responses to fear and danger.
But, I don't expect blockheads to read or understand the prose.

life2017:


Everything must not be about this ur post

What we need in Nigeria is growth of the economy, not rape stories. Those that were genuinely raped should sue the rapist, instead of coming to social media to tell us Super story.

Xisnin:
Very solid article on the science of responses to fear and danger.
But, I don't expect blockheads to read or understand the prose.

blockheads think with the other head

Hmmmm...Quite enlightening!

the article is epic. I believe that all allegations of rape are true but difficult to prove. For example date rape,very rampant and under reported and difficult to prove. I have realized some girls behaviours send wrong signals to men who eventually rape men.