- Oct 11
Why Don't Assault Victims Fight Back? The Freeze Response Continued
Last week we talked about the freeze response, and many of you wrote to say it gave language to something you’ve been experiencing for years. This week the conversation has moved into the public square. Below, I bring the science with it.
News coverage of a campus sexual assault case has renewed a familiar question. Why would someone not fight, not scream, not run, or not remember every detail afterward?
The answers live in the nervous system, and researchers have been documenting them for years.
In 2017, a Swedish research team assessed 298 women who came to a Stockholm emergency clinic for rape victims within a month of an assault. Seven in ten reported significant tonic immobility during the assault, and nearly half reported extreme immobility.
Tonic immobility is the involuntary paralysis we have been calling freeze, a state where a person is awake and afraid but cannot move or speak. Extreme immobility was also associated with a higher risk of PTSD and severe depression afterward.
This is not confined to sexual assault.
Freeze is the body's response to any threat that feels overwhelming and inescapable, whether an accident, a medical event, or something that happened in childhood.
Lynn Schafran, Esq., who has taught me A LOT about the freeze response over the years, served as Senior Vice President of Legal Momentum and directed its National Judicial Education Program to Promote Equality for Women and Men in the Courts from 1981 until she retired in 2025.
In the 1990s she began teaching judges what rape victims mean when they say "I froze." One Oregon judge wrote on an evaluation, "I didn't know what I didn't know." Most of us don't, until someone explains it.
Memory follows a similar logic.
The Washington Post reported this week that experts describe traumatic overload as too much for the brain to take in at once, so peripheral details are often lost.
Psychologist Jim Hopper has written that under extreme stress the hippocampus, the region that encodes memory, can shift into a minimal-encoding mode. Cortisol also affects memory.
Researchers add that what looks like a memory gap may sometimes be a person who does not yet feel safe enough to share what they do remember.
In the Seven Pain Patterns, this is the territory of the Lock: the pelvic diaphragm.
A body that froze can keep holding the posture for a long time, often through the jaw, the hips, the base of the skull, and the pelvic diaphragm.
Insight alone rarely releases it, because freeze lives below conscious thought. The body needs a felt experience of safety, and that tends to arrive through breath, gentle movement, touch, and time.
If your body froze, it was protecting you.
If you or someone you love needs support, RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline is available at 800-656-4673 or rainn.org. This newsletter is educational and is not a substitute for trauma-informed care.
Sources: Möller, Söndergaard & Helström, Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica, 2017; The Washington Post, October 5, 2026.
With heartfelt thanks to Lynn Schafran, Esq., for sharing her knowledge, her experience teaching judges about the freeze response, and the article that inspired this week's newsletter.
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