When Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forward with sexual assault alleg­a­tions against Judge Brett Kavanaugh, one of the first ques­tions to emerge from the judge’s defend­ers was: If she was sexu­ally assaul­ted 36 years ago, why not report it then? 

Prob­ably for the same reas­ons that nearly 80 percent of rapes and sexual assaults go unre­por­ted, accord­ing to a Justice Depart­ment analysis of viol­ent crime in 2016. The real­ity is, it’s very common for sexual assault surviv­ors — most frequently, women — to decline to report the offense to police. At the same time, false accus­a­tions of rape or sexual assault are rare. And that should inform how we weigh Dr. Ford’s alleg­a­tions, as well as those of other surviv­ors. 

It may sound incred­ible that only around 23 percent of surviv­ors report such crimes to police, but it’s true. And that number is in line with past reports: Surveys of 2014 and 2015 both put report­ing rates for rape and sexual assault in the low 30s. (A history of low report­ing rates is one reason the Bren­nan Center declines to analyze trends in sexual assault in our crime reports. And low report­ing rates don’t detract from the broader conclu­sions to those reports, that crime and viol­ent crime remain histor­ic­ally low.)

Rape and sexual assault are seri­ous offenses. So why aren’t they repor­ted? Surviv­ors cite several reas­ons. Twenty percent, accord­ing to the DOJ report, worry about retali­ation — not just from the perpet­rator, but from soci­ety at large. Thir­teen percent said they think the police would not do anything to help. Tragic­ally, 8 percent said they didn’t think the rape or sexual assault was import­ant enough to report. 

Sexual assault surviv­ors struggle with a wide range of emotions that make coming forward diffi­cult: fear of revic­tim­iz­a­tion, distor­tion of alleg­a­tions, and gener­ally not being believed. As psycho­ther­ap­ist Beverly Engel puts it, “victims are often too ashamed to come forward. Sexual assault is a very humi­li­at­ing and dehu­man­iz­ing act against someone.” Why do victims often blame them­selves? Engel contin­ues: “[A]ttached to that shame is a lot of self-blame [. . .] because in our culture, we tend to blame victims in general.” 

For all these reas­ons, unre­por­ted assaults are all too common. Far less common, however, are false accus­a­tions of sexual assault or rape, hover­ing between 2 and 10 percent in the United States. You would­n’t know that from Kavanaugh’s defend­ers, includ­ing the pres­id­ent, who have insinu­ated that the judge’s accusers may be lying. But stat­ist­ic­ally speak­ing, it is far more common for a survivor of sexual assault to decline to report it than for someone to make false accus­a­tions of assault. 

Given these stat­ist­ics, we should be doing everything in our power to remove soci­etal and struc­tural barri­ers that can prevent surviv­ors from coming forward. Ques­tion­ing Dr. Ford’s motives, and asking why she didn’t come forward earlier — as many have done — both run directly counter to that goal. And they may further discour­age surviv­ors from coming forward with their stor­ies, espe­cially if the alleg­a­tions are against those in posi­tions of power. 

The set of stat­ist­ics surround­ing sexual assault tell a clear story. Sexual assault is much more common than we think, while false accus­a­tions are much rarer than some of Judge Kavanaugh’s more partisan defend­ers have sugges­ted. When we confront alleg­a­tions of assault, in polit­ics and in culture, we should under­stand the real­it­ies that sexual assault surviv­ors face when speak­ing out about their exper­i­ences.