Being paralyzed, having the feeling that you are not inside your own body, not being able to control your arms or hands or legs or feet. Freeze. Not from cold, but from fear, and for survival. The scientific term most used in Spain to define this state is tonic immobility and it is something that women in any part of the world tell when they have suffered a rape. However, what many of them narrate has been and is used in judicial processes to assume that, if there was no resistance, there was consent. Also to blame them for that lack of reaction, fulfilling one of the so-called myths of rape: how a victim is supposed to behave during her own sexual assault. Against that idea and to dismantle it, Ebani Dhawan and Patrick Haggard, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, published an article in Nature Human Behaviour: Evidence from neuroscience counters the rape myth.
In it, they explain that neuroscientific research "suggests that fear and threat can block neural circuits for the control of action, leading to involuntary immobility." Understanding this brain process "can help improve the understanding" of the facts in these crimes and "the realities of the experience of the victims and their suffering", to "counter the myths of rape", to correct "social errors about gender violence" and to "guarantee justice".
Through the email, Haggard says that the article came about while working on a project on the importance of voluntariness for legal concepts of liability: "We were interested in some special situations in which loss of control over voluntary action can sometimes lead to reduced liability judgments. We realized that immobility can also be involuntary, so in appropriate circumstances, society should be prepared to grant the same concept of reduced liability to the absence of shares as to the presence of shares. And the case of victims who involuntarily freeze during rape or sexual assault would be an example."
The reality, she adds, is that sometimes "women are blamed for being frozen, or it is insinuated that their immobility is not at all involuntary, but indicates consent." She hopes that focusing on this brain mechanism "can help counteract" the rape myth expressed by the inappropriate question of "why didn't he fight?" Understanding why a victim does not fight involves knowing how human beings function in the face of a threat: the response (both neuronal and behavioral) will depend "on the severity and proximity of the threat and also on the perceived ability to escape," explain in the article Dhawan, already a former student of University College, and Haggard, professor and researcher of Cognitive Neuroscience at that university.
Flight, defense or paralysis
Thus, when a danger appears, the brain reacts, and the one in charge of receiving that stimulus is the amygdala, a small region of the brain the size of a bean that is responsible for managing and storing emotional reactions. Anyone, also fear. When the amygdala has processed the emotion, it sends a message to the motor nuclei of the brainstem and these, to the muscles.
The responses, both of humans and other vertebrate animals, can be multiple: flight or defense, when the threat is slight. "However, sudden and severe threats, such as physical restraint, can trigger a different type of response, known as tonic immobility (prolonged immobility with a fixed posture) or collapsed immobility (characterized by loss of muscle tone) in animals."
The researchers' hypothesis is that this chain of messages sent by different parts of the brain to react to danger is paralyzed in one of the links. It is "the blocking of neural circuits that provide voluntary control over body movements." That whole process lasts an instant, one in which the brain understands that the best way to survive the threat is not to move and that they have seen that it also happens in other areas, such as that of airplane pilots who face emergencies while flying.
Indirect, but "substantial" evidence
At the moment, they explain, "it is still a hypothesis" because experimental studies with humans cannot be done in the face of serious, sudden threats, such as sexual assault, "for obvious ethical reasons," Haggard adds. Therefore, those that are carried out are limited to mild threats, and the evidence collected is "indirect". They are limited to victim testimonies and animal studies, with which humans "share many of the response patterns, reflecting brain circuits that have been conserved throughout evolution for threat processing." Still, they add, "this evidence, though indirect, is substantial and convergent."
Testimonies are abundant in the jurisprudence of any country. A 1992 case included in the United States explains that there was evidence that the victim had said "no" on several occasions, but no evidence that it would have been helpful to resist further. When asked why she had "frozen", she replied: "I don't know, I said 'stop' and it didn't stop, so I thought if he did what he wanted to do, then he would leave and that's it." In another, also picked up by investigators, in 2018, in Australia, the victim is asked if he said anything. "No," she says. If he did anything. "Nope. I just... I didn't do anything," he replies. In Spain, in 2016, during the trial of La Manada, the victim replied: "When I was surrounded I felt afraid, I did not know how to react and I reacted by submitting." He repeated many times that he was "in shock" during that judicial process that was a clear example of how an interrogation for a rape becomes an exercise in victim-blaming.
"Immobility is common during an assault: 70% of women who attend an emergency center for sexual violence seem to have experienced tonic immobility during the assault [by the account of the facts they give]," Dhawan and Haggard cite in the article, where they point out that the contribution so far of neuroscience to the public debate and the legal field on sexual assault has been "limited". They believe it is a mistake because "in many countries, rape myths like this [questions to a victim as to why they did not resist or why they were paralyzed] continue to influence the thinking of juries, lawyers and judges and society at large." Between September 2021 and September 2022, police in England and Wales recorded more than 70,000 rapes. However, only 3% of them were charged [in the same period]."
Neuroscience "can contribute to justice"
The researchers argue that justice "should recognize that the omission of action can also sometimes be involuntary," that the "obligations and responsibilities in aggressions are of the aggressor, and not of the victim," and believe that neuroscience "can contribute to justice."
They give examples such as a recent study, which has shown that training police officers in how this brain mechanism works "reduced acceptance of rape myths." It also "improved victims' willingness to proceed with legal proceedings," so training officers could "potentially improve legal and judicial outcomes." They state that "greater awareness" of this "can benefit the victims themselves by reducing their own blame, including inappropriate feelings of guilt."
As an example of applying that perspective to legislation, they talk about the law of only yes is yes: "A recent Spanish law explicitly requires that consent be expressed freely and clearly. This progressive and enlightening legislation clearly dismisses the rape myth of paralysis, which could never be interpreted as consent." Consent, Haggard stresses by email, "is a crucial principle for organizing relationships between people: it helps us to live without fear of the other and to reach our best potential as rational and voluntary beings."
Why victims' stories are sometimes "disjointed"
Researchers Ebani Dhawan and Patrick Haggard point out in the article published in Nature Human Behaviour a "second problem" that occurs in judicial processes with victims who have suffered a standstill: that their accounts "are often disconnected and lack conventional explanatory terms". And "defense attorneys often exploit this fact and draw attention to the victim's inability to articulate and justify his behavior during the assault."
This also implies a blaming of them, "diverting attention from the behavior of the aggressor to the supposedly strange behavior of the victim." Which, they explain, is not strange, but characteristic "of traumatic memories in general", fragmented and incoherent. The law, they say, "already recognizes in evidentiary evidence guidelines that trauma can affect the ability to recall and explain events, including one's own behavior. But this point often seems to be ignored in legal discussions where immobility occurs during an assault."
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