The Idea Of The ‘Perfect Victim’ Is Hindering The Sexual Assault Movement, And It Needs To End
May 6, 2025
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2022,
Tropes & Fallacies
“When you think of the sexual assault cases which become national talking points, do you remember what the victim looked like?”
When you think of the sexual assault cases which become national talking points, do you remember what the victim looked like? Were they young or old? Able bodied or disabled? Caucasian or from a culturally diverse background? Every case is undoubtedly different, but more often than not, the cases that dominate headlines often follow a very similar thread.
This phenomenon is what is known as the ‘perfect victim,’ and it’s a damaging belief about how a victim should look and behave in order to be deemed a credible source. The idea of ‘perfect’ can vary greatly, from how the victim presents themselves in court to how they choose to report the incident. Victims who instinctively know to leave DNA at the crime scene might be heralded as genius, while those who default to freeze mode might be asked why they didn’t fight back hard enough.
Senior sexual assault counsellor Neeraja Sanmuhanathan says that the idea of perfect victim can undoubtedly hinder victim-survivors from coming forward to report, as they battle with something called the ‘goldilocks dilemma.’
“What sexual assault survivors navigate can be described as the goldilocks dilemma of needing to be the perfect survivor; someone who has a clear recall of what happened, who came forward merely hours after an assault to report a crime, was not intoxicated, is ‘trustworthy’ in the eyes of the community, and hopefully someone who can ‘prove’ their sexual assault with evidence,” she told ELLE Australia.
While the focal point of any sexual assault case should always be the perpetrator, more often than not, the spotlight turns toward the victim. From analysing whether or not they’d been under the influence of alcohol to deciphering the timeline of events and how long they’ve taken to come forward, every aspect of a victim’s life falls under scrutiny. Despite what we may think on a human level, the eyes of the law often require them to have lived a blameless life in order to be believed and validated in their assault experience.
