ABSTRACT
This chapter is a reflective essay on the emotional impact of studying rape and sexual assault. Drawing on twenty years of experience conducting community-based research on survivors’ experiences with the US criminal legal system, the author reflects on how data collection methods (e.g., interviews vs archival coding methods) create different emotional strains for researchers. The chapter explores how police reports, in particular, are challenging to study because they reflect sexist, racist, and classist biases on the part of police in how they regard sexual assault survivors. Police reports reframe acts of sexual assault as consensual sex in which the victim willingly engaged, and law enforcement personnel often accuse survivors of making false reports, even though they offer no proof to support their assertions. Some law enforcement personnel reframe survivors’ accounts of sexual assault as pornography. In these “pornified” reports, police use graphic imagery and language in an exploitative way, describing the reported assault using tropes and terminologies common in pornography. The author reflects on how years of exposure to thousands of sexual assault police reports caused vicarious trauma that has had long-lasting effects on her programme of research.
