The neurobiology of trauma: addressing the ignorance

The neurobiology of trauma

Addressing the ignorance

The assumption that survivors recall every detail of an assault and would report right away is inaccurate. In the wake of #MeToo, this assumption has been a loud counterargument, used recently in the Brett Kavanaugh case: if Kavanaugh really had done something wrong, his accuser, Dr Christine Blasey Ford, would have immediately come forward to report the crime.

On average, 86 percent of the reported sexual assaults in the United States never went any further than the police; the vast majority of these cases were never referred by the police on to the prosecutors. The initial report to the police is known as the first interaction and it’s clear many victims here are experiencing secondary victimisation. This refers to the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of social system personnel that victims experience as victim blaming and insensitive. It’s where a lack of understanding about a survivor’s state of mind, combined with rape culture, wilful ignorance, misplaced blame and doubt, contribute to a survivor not being believed. It’s common for survivors to have difficulty remembering details or recalling events in a linear fashion—to the average, untrained police officer, this may seem as if they are being untruthful. The story seems to change. Not being believed exacerbates the trauma and convinces victims they will not experience justice. When victims do continue to push for help and support, 69 percent of the time, law enforcement discourages them from officially reporting. Of these, 51 percent of victims are told that what happened to them is not serious enough to pursue through the criminal justice system. 70 percent are asked about their dress or their behaviour or what they might have done to provoke an assault. On average, 90 percent of victims experience at least one secondary victimisation behaviour in their interactions with law enforcement during their first interaction.

#WhyIDidntReport is a hashtag where survivors of rape, sexual assault and molestation are sharing their reasons why they didn’t report their assaults. Their accounts and reasons are diverse and heart-breaking.

Victim blaming—the social construct that we all prescribe to—tells us there must be a reason for an assault, and it must be because something the victim did meant they were asking for it. This is most commonly attributed to women survivors: a short skirt or accepting a drink in a bar. As damaging as this is to female sexual agency and the right to wear what you want without being afraid, consider the implications here: men are so animalistic they can be provoked into assault by the sight of a leg or bit of midriff. Victim blaming is offensive to the women who experience it and to perceptions of men in society. It begs the question: why are we teaching women to be afraid of men and not teaching men to not rape?

So, survivors aren’t believed because it must have been their fault, and they aren’t believed because their story seems inconsistent. This is where neurobiology needs to be factored in. After a sexual assault, a victim’s reaction may not conform to our expectations—because trauma causes short- and long-term changes to the brain that impact memory and behaviour. When a person is subjected a potentially life-threatening event—and the body interprets sexual assault at that level of severity—the brain and body go into survival mode and produce a mixture of hormones meant to help the person survive. The hypothalamus communicates to the pituitary gland that a trauma is occurring, threatening survival. The pituitary gland signals the adrenals to produce catecholamines, one of which is adrenaline. The catecholamines are the hormones involved in the fight or flight response which is usually combined with the release of cortisol, the hormone that gives the body the energy it needs to fight or flee. But traumatic events often involve physical pain along with emotional pain and to combat these, the adrenals produce opiates—natural painkillers including oxytocin. The oxytocin floods the body to blunt the pain, interfering with the release of cortisol. The fight or flight response becomes fight, flight or freeze: the hormonal response to their trauma triggers tonic immobility, often referred to as ‘rape-induced paralysis’.

This is an automatic, mammalian response, evolutionarily wired into us to ensure survival. Breathing becomes heavier, the eyes close and the muscles are paralysed—it’s playing dead to try and survive in terrifying situations. Research suggests around 50 percent of rape victims experience tonic immobility, and some data suggests its more common if a victim has a prior history of sexual assault. If you don’t know about tonic immobility or the hormonal activity during assault, it’s easy to question why someone didn’t just fight back or run away: ‘if they’re just lying there, they must have wanted it.’ To the rational mind, there’s no other explanation. 

#WhyIDidntReport is a hashtag where survivors of rape, sexual assault and molestation are sharing their reasons why they didn’t report their assaults. Their accounts and reasons are diverse and heart-breaking.

Even if tonic immobility isn’t induced, the catecholamines are released in such volumes they impair the circuits in the brain governing rational thought. A sexual assault victim cannot think rationally—the fear and the hormones create temporary structural damage to the cells involved in those circuits. No wonder they can’t work out how to get away. 

These hormones also interfere with the brain’s ability to encode memories. The hippocampus encodes all the visual and sensory cues it is inundated with and organises them into groups, storing them within the brain. But if the cues are charged with emotion or fear, the amygdala intercepts the information. The amygdala is an old part of the brain, responsible for deciphering and processing emotions—if the amygdala is responding to the emotional charge, the primal responses take precedent. The hippocampus is very sensitive to hormone release and when flooded with stress hormones, it becomes impaired—the part of the brain responsible for storing memories struggles to consolidate the information it receives and the storage is fragmented and disorganised. The victim may not be able to recall the finer details; add alcohol and the encoding process might not happen at all.

How many victims do come forward immediately and have their reports cast aside for any of these reasons? How many victims aren’t believed, secondarily victimised, and leave the police station feeling disengaged from the criminal justice system and even responsible for their own assault? After just one point of contact with the system, 86 percent of assault cases are closed.

#WhyIDidntReport is a hashtag where survivors of rape, sexual assault and molestation are sharing their reasons why they didn’t report their assaults. Their accounts and reasons are diverse and heart-breaking.

All sorts of things need to change to help survivors feel they can report their assaults and believe in the justice system. We need to tackle rape culture, that insidious and dangerous way we view certain behaviours as acceptable or natural; we need to provide better training to police officers and detectives on neurobiology and the hormonal responses to trauma; we need to support the women who do stand up and understand why they may have waited; we need to encourage the people we know to report and empower them to do so; we need to teach our children about their sexual agency and that anyone who abuses their agency deserves to face the consequences. Most of all, we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that survivors would have come forward immediately and that if something really had happened they’d have been believed.

Dr Ford is a psychology professor: she understands her inability to recall certain details. She admitted the facts she could not remember, she recited everything she could remember in excruciating detail: she knows why she remembers she was wearing a swimsuit but not how she got home. ‘The neurotransmitter epinephrine codes memories into the hippocampus, and so the trauma-related experience is locked there, whereas other details kind of drift.’

She spoke up out of civic duty, despite her terror and reservations, and Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States.