When sexual assault makes headlines, I pay attention to the questions people ask. Why didn’t someone report sooner? Why did they keep communicating with the person afterward? Had they been drinking? What will these allegations mean for the accused person’s future? 

I find myself thinking about the people listening to those conversations. 

The teenager hearing adults defend someone because they’re a “good person.” The employee watching what happens to a coworker who speaks up. The survivor sitting quietly while friends debate whether someone else’s experience was really assault. 

These conversations teach people whose boundaries matter, whose experiences deserve consideration, and what speaking up might cost. 

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and as this month comes to a close, these questions need to remain in our conversations about relationships. Sexual violence can happen within dating relationships and marriages. Expectations about keeping a partner happy, keeping a family together, or keeping personal matters private can make that harm difficult to recognize and discuss. 

As a sociologist and the executive director of Vista Rise Collective, I think about the conditions surrounding these experiences. The person who commits sexual violence is responsible for their actions. Understanding why it continues also requires us to examine the expectations and power relationships around it.  

When sexual pressure is treated as normal, coercion can become harder to recognize. When status protects someone from scrutiny, harmful behavior can go unchecked. When speaking up threatens someone’s housing, income, or relationships, seeking help can carry real risks. 

These conditions connect what happens between individuals to the community around them. We need to examine how communities create conditions that allow that violence to continue, including through the ways we explain, excuse, and respond to it. 

Three questions can help us examine those connections. 

What are we teaching?

Watch your drink. Don’t walk alone. Share your location. Be careful what you wear. Be friendly, but not too friendly. 

Women and girls grow up hearing these messages. We learn to organize our freedom around the possibility of someone else’s violence: where we go, what we wear, how we get home, and whom we trust. 

We’re also taught to be polite. Don’t be rude. Don’t hurt someone’s feelings. Don’t make a scene. Then, when someone experiences sexual assault, we ask why they didn’t say no more firmly, push harder, leave sooner, or tell someone right away. 

We teach people to accommodate others, then question them for not resisting enough. 

Safety precautions can be helpful. But when they become a checklist for deciding whether someone deserves support, we shift responsibility away from the person who caused harm.  

Gender expectations also shape what people learn about sexual access. Treating persistence after rejection as romantic suggests that boundaries are negotiable. Excusing pressure with “that’s just how he is” asks others to accommodate it. 

Those lessons can also make it difficult to identify harm in our own relationships. Someone may know that consent matters but still wonder whether they’re allowed to refuse their spouse. They may describe repeatedly giving in to avoid anger as keeping the peace. If our understanding of sexual violence only includes a stranger using physical force, we can miss coercion involving someone familiar, trusted, or loved. 

Sexual violence affects people of all genders. Beliefs that men always want sex or should be able to defend themselves can also leave survivors struggling to name what happened. These expectations shape whose experiences we recognize and whose we dismiss. 

What are we rewarding or protecting?

It’s difficult to hear that someone we know and respect may have caused harm. We want to defend our friend, our coworker, our family member. We may feel protective of an organization that matters to us. 

But we need to be honest about what happens when protecting someone’s reputation becomes more urgent than taking a concern seriously. 

Who gets the benefit of the doubt? Who gets questioned? Who is expected to absorb the discomfort so everyone else can move on? 

Power shows up in these decisions. Someone with money, status, or strong community connections may have people ready to speak for them. Someone reporting harm may be wondering whether they’ll lose their job, housing, friendships, or family support. 

There can also be a fear of being seen differently. Will people still see the whole person, or will this experience become what defines them? Someone in leadership may worry that colleagues will question their judgment or ability to lead. Others may fear pity or losing control over personal information. 

When we treat being harmed as evidence of poor judgment or weakness, we help create the shame that can make disclosure so difficult. 

We often evaluate a survivor’s decisions without examining the circumstances in which they had to make them. We ask why someone didn’t leave before asking whether they had somewhere to go. We ask why they didn’t report before considering what happened to the last person who did. We expect people to make decisions that could cost them their housing, income, or relationships, then interpret their hesitation as a reason to doubt them. 

This is where individual experiences become a community responsibility. The options someone has depend partly on the support we provide and the consequences we allow. If we want to understand someone’s silence, we need to examine what speaking might cost. 

What would changing these norms require?

We can start by examining the behavior we excuse and what happens when someone challenges it. 

That includes teaching young people to respect boundaries and making clear that consent matters within every relationship. It includes taking concerns seriously when they involve someone we like, depend on, or consider essential. 

Organizations need to look beyond whether they have a reporting policy. If employees expect punishment or exclusion for using it, the policy offers little reassurance. Leaders need to examine what actually happens when someone comes forward, especially when the concern involves a person with authority. 

We also must invest in support that gives people real options. Housing, financial stability, and confidential services can make it possible for someone to take a step they otherwise couldn’t. Encouraging someone to seek safety carries more weight when we help make safety possible. 

When someone discloses harm, we can listen, ask what they need, and respect their decisions. They should be able to seek support without having to defend every choice they made or surrender control over their story. 

This Domestic Violence Awareness Month, I hope we’ll examine our own responses as closely as we examine a survivor’s decisions. We have influence over what people learn, what they risk by speaking up, and what help is available when they do. 

The next time sexual assault comes up in conversation, think about who might be listening quietly. Are we giving them a reason to trust us with their own story?

-By Chelcee Thomas, Executive Director

Vista Rise Collective