Rhea Khandelwal
Content Warning: This blog has mentions of rape and sexual trauma. Please read with care.
In July of 2014, an anonymous woman published a non-fiction comic titled “Trigger Warning: Breakfast” (The Nib) illustrating her experience of being raped by an acquaintance. That night after being assaulted, the author allowed her rapist to sleepover. In the morning, she cooked him breakfast— medium-well eggs, a golden-brown toast, and extra-crispy bacon.
The author wonders why she did not respond to the traumatic event in the way ‘women usually do’, by fighting, struggling and repeatedly screaming ‘no’. The answer to her question can be found in recent advancements in the field of psychological trauma, which highlight the role of ‘fawn’, a biophysiological and socially conditioned response to traumatic experiences (Walker, 2013). Additionally, gaps in research reveal how psychology has unintentionally fossilized the myth of the ‘Ideal Victim’ (Taylor, 2002), leading women like the author to believe that they are not real survivors/victims.
‘Trauma’ occurs from singular or lasting events that are physically or psychologically harmful (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). While the DSM-5 considers trauma responses as indicators of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, psychotherapists have begun understanding them as adaptive survival instincts in the face of danger. Trauma-informed clinicians now use a ‘Four Fs Model of Psychological Trauma’ (Walker, 2013). This includes the four responses to trauma— fight, flight, freeze and fawn. ‘Fight’ involves self-preservation through conflict i.e. yelling, kicking, etc. ‘Flight’ is when a person tries to physically flee the danger. The ‘Freeze’ response is passive; it causes immobility. Finally, ‘Fawn’ involves seeking safety by accommodating demands of the person inflicting the trauma through flattery and niceness. The belief sustaining this response is, “If I appease this person, I will be safe from more intense danger”. For example, 4% of survivors/victims in the United States of America have reported orgasming during rape (Levin & Berlo, 2004), some have left love letters for their rapists (Chapin, 2016), and many have even offered them condoms (Levin & Berlo, 2004). As for the author, she fawned by giving into her rapist’s sexual demands, and pleasing him by cooking breakfast (The Nib, 2014).
Since research around the fawn response is in its nascent stages, it is debated whether ‘fawning’ is a result of relatively low levels of testosterone and adrenaline in women, making it less likely for them to use the fight response, or social conditioning since women learn to be accommodating and tend to emotional needs of men instead of resorting to violence (Taylor, 2002).
Biophysiological or culturally learnt, there is consensus amongst trauma-informed psychotherapists that fawn is a protective mechanism, which deserves to be honored (Walker, 2013). This is because fawn is the most complex response to trauma that involves monitoring the aggressor’s behavior, and adapting to the situation to avoid escalation. Fawning is the body’s way of maintaining a sense of safety and agency that traumatic experiences destroy (Hopper et al., 2010, p.82). The author’s fawn response involved having an out of body experience where she did not say no, enjoyed the sex, and had a romantic relationship with the man (The Nib, 2014). In doing so, she imagined a world where she wasn’t a victim, where she was still in control of her body, and by extension, her life.
Additionally, the comic is interspersed with notions of the ‘Ideal Victim’ (The Nib, 2014). The ideal victim continuously verbalizes her non-consent, bites and scratches the assaulter, and yet is virtuous, weak and docile (Islam, 2016). Unfortunately, by not recognizing her fawn response pattern, the author falls prey to this ‘Ideal Victim’ mentality. Evidently, in her writing she refers to herself as a “bad victim”, an “unsympathetic protagonist”, and “not broken in the way [victims usually are]” (The Nib, 2014). She lists out traits like spitting, cursing, and biting, which victims are ‘supposed’ to display, concluding that since her responses were on the opposite end of the spectrum, she did not qualify as a victim.
This archetype has been bolstered, at least in part, through psychological research produced over the decades (Truelove, 2020). One of the first studies on the fawn response (Taylor, 2002) revealed how all research on stress is done on male rats because female rats’ hormonal changes are too rapid to distinctly observe (p.18). Since male rats were evolutionarily more likely to display fight or flight, these two became a cultural truism. Even stress and trauma research in humans held this idea because men were the 85% of the subjects of trauma studies till 1995. It is only recently that researchers are finding that female rats, although they experience the same arousal as male rats, are more likely to fawn or ‘blend into the background’ to protect themselves because trying to flee involves abandoning young kin (p.21).
The implications of how victim behavior and trauma responses are understood go beyond academic discourses to determine the outcome of sexual assault cases in courts (Randall, 2011). For example, in India, countless instances have been documented within the last decade wherein survivors/victims were asked why they sat in the abuser’s car after being assaulted instead of calling the police, if they screamed during the rape, if they scratched the accuser’s back, and how much time did they spend with the accused after the event (Aneja, 2012). In cases where women have fawned, courts have dismissed allegations because the survivor/victim did not meet the ‘Ideal Victim’ prototype. Although a 2015 study (Department of Justice) revealed that 94.3% of reported rape cases in Delhi are acquaintance rapes where women are afraid to actively resist the rapist due to fear of being killed, there is no empirical data revealing how likely women are to use fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses. Conducting further research on women’s tendency to use the fawn defense mechanism will thus help in preventing victim-blaming, distilling rape myths, and in revolutionizing our criminal justice system (Larcombe 2002).
Once we solidify that there is no normative way to respond to trauma, only then will women, like the author, stop being haunted by the question of why, sometimes, they end up making their rapist breakfast.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 5th ed. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association.
Aneja, S. (2012). Sexual Violence Against Women with Special Reference to Rape: Victimization and Judicial Approach in India. Jammu University Department of Law. https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/78428/5/05_chapter.pdf
Chapin, A. (2016, February 13). Writing a love letter instead of a police report: Why victims contact sex attackers. The Guardian. Retrieved February 14, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/13/jian-ghomeshi-trial-sexual-assault-victims-response
Department of Justice. (2015). Towards Victim Friendly Responses and Procedures for Prosecuting Rape. Partners for Law in Development. https://doj.gov.in/sites/default/files/PLD%20report.pdf
Hopper, E. K., Bassuk, E. L., & Olivet, J. (2010). Shelter from the storm: Trauma-informed care in homelessness services settings. The Open Health Services and Policy Journal, 3(2), 80–100. https://doi.org/10.2174/1874924001003020080
Islam, S. (2016). Ideal Victim of Sexualized Violence: Why is it Always Female? European Journal of Research in Social Sciences, Vol. 4 No. 8. https://www.idpublications.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Full-Paper-IDEAL-VICTIMS-OF-SEXUALIZED-VIOLENCE-WHY-IS-IT-ALWAYS-FEMALE.pdf
Larcombe, W. (2002). The `Ideal' Victim v Successful Rape Complainants: Not What You Might Expect Feminist Legal Studies, 10(2), 131–148. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1016060424945
Levin, R. J., & van Berlo, W. (2004). Sexual arousal and orgasm in subjects who experience forced or non-consensual sexual stimulation -- a review. Journal of clinical forensic medicine, 11(2), 82–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcfm.2003.10.008
Randall, M. (2011). Sexual assault law, credibility, and “ideal victims”: Consent, resistance, and victim blaming. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 22(2), 397–433. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjwl.22.2.397
Taylor, S. E. (2002). Tending instinct: Women, men and the biology of nurturing. Times Books.
Trigger warning: Breakfast. The Nib. (2014, July 8). Retrieved February 14, 2022, from https://thenib.com/trigger-warning-breakfast-c6cdeec070e6/
Truelove, M. (2020). In defense of the fawn response. Medium. Retrieved February 14, 2022, from https://maggietruelove.medium.com/in-defense-of-the-fawn-response-eed8af2c09fe
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
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