the majority of sexual assaults are committed by strangers.

Offenders encourage confusion and shame and exploit people’s reluctance to identify themselves as victims. Scott Berkowitz, the president of RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, said confusion and self-blame are common: “A lot of people who call the national hotline, one of the first questions they ask is, ‘Was I raped?’” Reah Bravo, one of several women who say that the broadcast journalist Charlie Rose made unwanted sexual advances while they were working for him, told The Washington Post, “It has taken 10 years and a fierce moment of cultural reckoning for me to understand these moments for what they were.” Experts point to a more fundamental issue: When the perpetrator is someone they trusted, it can take years for victims even to identify what happened to them as a violation. After being approached by a Washington Post reporter, she agreed to tell her story, and later said, “If anything, this has cost me.”īut negative consequences are not the only thing to keep victims from coming forward. She said she worried for years that going public would affect her children, and that her history of divorce and financial mistakes would undermine her account.

Moore, sexually assaulted her when she was 14, nearly four decades ago. Last fall, a woman named Leigh Corfman helped upend a Senate race in Alabama when she said that the Republican candidate, Roy S.

The majority of sexual assaults are committed by strangers.