Sexual Assault Advocate Training Manual - Texas Association ...

S E X U A L A S S A U L T A D V O C A T E T R A I N I N G M A N U A L
women may be the offer of a ride home, help getting the bags of groceries
home from the supermarket or changing a flat tire.
Perhaps even more often, the stranger asks the woman for help with
something. It can be difficult to refuse a request for help, especially for women
who have been taught to be helpful. Statistics show that women in the helping
professions are particularly vulnerable to rape because sometimes answering a
request for help can endanger them. Your safest course usually is a polite but
firm refusal.
RESISTANCE MEASURES
It is not always possible to avoid a rape situation. Even women who are well
informed and careful to practice precautionary and avoidance measures can be
caught in a direct confrontation with a rapist. Escaping from the situation,
running away from the rapist, is of course always the first choice, do it if
possible. The exceptions to this are those situations in which it is clear that
fleeing will not be possible no matter what the woman does, such situations
occur, but they are rare.
When speaking of resistance in a rape situation, resistance measures move into
the part of rape avoidance education which has been most confusing in the
past. Women have been told contradictory things about what they should do
when confronted by a rapist. They have been told that any resistance will only
get them killed. They have been told they should fight back. They have been
told to be seductive and win the trust of the rapist in order to get in the right
position to stick their thumbs in his eyes. They have been told to treat him like
a human being so that he will see them as human. They have been told to
"turn him off" by acting crazy or vomiting.
It is time to move beyond this confusing and contradictory advice. There now
exists good research results from four different studies on rape avoidance.
Women can also use some common sense based on all that they know about
rape. It is time to offer women options - not rules.
The research shows that women have tried a number of different strategies in
rape situations. All of these strategies have worked successfully at times. Some
of them work more often than others, and using more than one strategy
greatly increases the chance of success.
Because physical resistance, fighting back, does work more often than other
strategies, and because many women have been taught to be afraid of fighting
back, this manual examines that strategy more than the others. It is important
to remember that there are options, that no one is bound to any one method
of resistance. If you fear facing a rapist, you are the one who must choose
what to do about it. In that situation, you know better than anyone else what
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