How to Support Survivors

You probably don't know that April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. But do you know how to support a survivor if they are disclosing sexual assault or intimate partner violence, and asking for your help?

The first time I supported a survivor, I was 20, taking a break from university and traveling with a friend. The woman was a little older than us, traveling alone, and had been raped by a taxi driver. I told her to call her embassy and get help going home. 

I didn't know at the time how to provide psychosocial support or how to get her emergency health care. I knew what I was doing wasn’t good enough, but I didn’t know how to do more.

The second time, I was driving to my new home, to sleep there for the first night with my then-partner. We were about halfway down a gravel shortcut when we saw a woman, barefoot, by the road. It’s unusual, so I told him to pull over and within minutes, we were driving her to get help.

This time, I knew to connect her to a doctor for emergency health care, and made sure she got it. When she called me a few weeks later to thank me, I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say, this is what anyone would’ve done.

One of the reasons I moved to New York in my 20’s was to be trained as a rape crisis counselor. I wanted to be able to support the next survivor in my path who needed me.

I wasn’t ready for how biased against some survivors the health system was — and the police were even worse. Each time I volunteered, I left the hospital wishing I'd done better.

Fast-forward a handful of years, and I crowdfunded and created the Rape Crisis Counseling app, with the Washington DC Rape Crisis Center (the first rape crisis center in the United States) and other partners from women's human rights groups around the world.

It needed to be an app because I wanted every single person to be able to find out how to support a friend, family member or colleague in the aftermath of sexual assault.

The app is a mobile in-hand resource for survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence. It covers everything someone needs to navigate getting emergency health care that prevents HIV, sexually-transmitted infections, and pregnancy.

It also helps advocates who accompany the survivor to make sure that she (it's more often a she) is receiving quality medical care. Have a look — it's free and is being used in over 20 countries.

After my company released the app in 2018, one of the things that most surprised me was how useful the material was at navigating disclosure.

Disclosure is the moment when you tell someone else — a health care worker, your best friend, or your partner — what happened to you. It’s a stressful and sometimes retraumatizing situation, especially if the other person victim-blames or doesn’t believe you.

Many survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence wait years or even decades to disclose what happened to them. Silence can seem easier when there is so much public shaming and victim-blaming of survivors.

When someone comes to you to disclose that they are a survivor of sexual assault or intimate partner violence, it is a really tough moment. You very badly want to not make things worse, at the risk of doing nothing or not enough. That’s why it’s good to know how to navigate the important pieces.

If someone comes to you to disclose, you have the opportunity to massively support their recovery. You are not signing up to become their best friend. But by spending a focused amount of time with them, you can help them to move through disclosure towards getting the support they need.

Here are the four basic elements of disclosure, which are covered in far greater detail in the app.

The Simple Basics to Support a Survivor’s Disclosure

Once you understand the frame of compassion and care, you can’t go wrong.  

1. Listen

 Listen to the survivor. Let them tell their story, vent and express their feelings. This is not the time to fact-check or offer any kind of opinion. Be compassionate, go slow, and don’t ask questions. This is not about information, this is about listening wholeheartedly, with as much presence as you can gather.

2. Believe

 As an advocate, it is not your job to decide if what the survivor is saying is true, illegal or "qualifies" as sexual assault.

There is no one way that survivors “should” respond to sexual assault. Every survivor is different, every traumatic experience is different, and trauma can have a lot of unexpected expressions.

Often when we hear someone’s story about trauma, it sounds scattered and disjointed. The timeline might be unclear, or details may shift and change. This is extremely normal.

Give the survivor the benefit of the doubt, and believe what they say. Lying about sexual assault and intimate partner violence does happen, but it is very rare. This is not the time to investigate or try to “understand.” It doesn’t need to make sense to you.

3. Support

Validate the survivor's feelings. Affirm that however they are feeling, it is okay.  

Maybe they don’t look like they “should” as a survivor to you. Maybe they seem normal, or numb, maybe they’re even laughing. You don’t know the effort they’re making, or what’s going on inside of them. Your purpose is to offer unconditional support.

Help the survivor take appropriate action or affirm their decision to do so. This can include connecting them with health services, a women’s shelter, or other support services that may be available in your community, if you’re lucky (these are sadly far too few and far between).

If the sexual assault was at all recent, it’s important for the survivor to get emergency health care that can include HIV prevention, prevention for sexually-transmitted infections, and pregnancy prevention. This is entirely their decision. They can also file a police report, which is entirely up to them.

4. Respect

Keep everything confidential, unless you are concerned that the survivor will harm themselves or others. Always respect the survivor's wishes on how to handle the situation.

The survivor’s consent is primary in this process. They have had consent removed from them, so one of your jobs is to help them build it back.  

Respecting a survivor’s decisions can be hard, especially if they don’t want to do what you “think” is good for them – like going to get emergency health care or filing a police report.

It can be really hard not to pressure a survivor at this stage, but don’t do it. Give them the respect to decide what is best for them right now.

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I hope you can see how important it is to know these skills to better support the survivors in our lives.

Thank you for caring to learn them! We all know someone who has been affected by this, and we can learn how to be more present and supportive through the tough moments. 

I know having conversations like these are really hard. But this is how we shift the silence and the shame around sexual assault and intimate partner violence, one conversation at a time.

Thank you for deciding to be part of the solution.