Establishing consent or lack of it is usually key in legal proceedings for rape or sexual assault. And, within this framework, the victim is often asked why she did not offer more resistance, why she did not fight against her aggressors.
But that question should have its days numbered and should stop being asked in view of the article published by the neuroscientists Ebani Dhawan and Patrick Haggard in Nature Human Behavior, in which they explain that the paralysis or immobility with which victims usually respond to an attack sexuality is probably an involuntary action and has a neuroscientific basis.
Dhawan -who focused his final degree project at University College London (UCL) on analyzing the intersection between neuroscience and law- and Haggard (professor of Cognitive Neuroscience also at UCL) argue that the assumption that victims choose not resisting is stereotyped but incorrect from a neuroscientific perspective.
And they review all the existing evidence on how the brain responds to threat situations to argue that immobility, the freezing in response to extreme threat, is probably involuntary.
According to these experts in cognitive neuroscience, serious and immediate threats, such as physical restraint, restraining someone by force, can trigger a state of immobility in humans and some other animals.
This is so because the neural response to threat is to block the brain circuits that provide voluntary control over body movement.
This biological reaction explains, according to the scientists in their article, that 70% of the women who are treated by the emergency medical services for rape and sexual assault seem to have experienced tonic immobility while the events occurred, and report that they had a strong desire to escape but were unable to do so.
“This is an evolutionarily conserved involuntary response that is characterized by the lack of normal voluntary motor control,” emphasize Dhawan and Haggard, who consider that understanding and assuming that this is an absolutely natural response “can contribute to improving the understanding of the facts in cases of crimes of rape or sexual assault” and at the same time avoid “social errors” when analyzing and judging gender violence “and the realities of the experience and suffering of the victims”.
They recall that these paralysis responses are now often challenged in court, that “legal actors in sexual assault crime cases are susceptible to stereotypes about how a ‘real’ victim would behave, and often interpret their inaction as a reflex.” of a consent”.
For this reason, they consider that knowing that this paralysis is a mechanism marked by biological evolution, an involuntary response, can prevent the victim of a sexual assault from being questioned or blamed unduly in the future.