Sexual assault: the freeze, resistance and the law

The only cause of a rape or a sexual assault is the person who commits it. Not where someone was, not who they trusted, not what they said or did not say, and not what their body did in the moment. Many people's bodies go still during an assault.¹¹ They find they cannot move, cannot speak and cannot fight, and that stillness isn't chosen and isn't agreement. A survivor who did not fight, did not scream or was not injured did nothing wrong. In England and Wales, the prosecutors' own guidance lists the belief that a real victim fights back among the myths its lawyers have to answer in court, and treats as false the belief that a victim must have screamed, fought or been injured.⁴ This is general information, not legal advice. The law differs by state, and between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The sentences at the top of this lesson aren't comfort offered in place of evidence. Each one rests on a source you can read, and this lesson sets them out: a study of what happens to the body, the prosecutors' list of the beliefs they argue against, and the research on resisting, with what each can and cannot show. It's also what you'd want if a friend ever told you that something had happened to them and asked whether it "counts".

The researchers behind one of the resistance programmes lesson 12 teaches put the same point in their own words, in a paper on their trial's second year: "The program makes clear that perpetrators are entirely responsible for the crimes they commit."¹ They add that sexual assault interventions for women "must not inadvertently suggest that women are responsible for sexual assault".¹ This lesson holds to that throughout, and nothing below should be read otherwise.

Two things about the evidence before it starts.

First, almost all of it is about women. The study of freezing below was of women, and so was the study of training. Men are raped and sexually assaulted too. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated, from the Crime Survey for England and Wales for the year ending March 2025, that 8.2% of women and 0.7% of men aged 16 and over had experienced rape or assault by penetration, including attempts, at some point since they turned 16, a figure from half the usual sample, which ONS says to treat with caution.⁹ Where a finding comes from women, this lesson says so and doesn't stretch it to men. Where a source is written for everyone, as the law and the support lines are, it says that too. The last case in the lesson is a man's.

Second, the order is deliberate. The freeze comes first, then the law, then the research on resisting, because the resistance studies only make sense once you know how often the body does not allow resistance at all, and because nothing in them is a judgement on anyone who could not or did not resist.

Freezing comes first

Lesson 10, "What fear does to you, and the robbery decision", set out one account of the body's defence responses, from a review by Kozlowska and colleagues. Late in it come two kinds of stillness that are not the brief freeze of a startled moment: "tonic immobility and collapsed immobility are responses of last resort to inescapable threat, when active defense responses have failed".³ Lesson 10 left one question for here, because the only study this course found that counted how often it happens was done after rape.

The study is by Möller, Söndergaard and Helström, published in Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica in 2017. This course read its abstract.² It assessed 298 women who had come to an emergency clinic for women who had been raped, within a month of the assault, using a rating scale for tonic immobility. The authors work at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, so this lesson calls it the Stockholm study. It defines the state as "a state of involuntary, temporary motor inhibition": the body stops moving, for a while, and not by decision. It also followed some of the women up, and tonic immobility during the assault was associated with developing post-traumatic stress disorder and severe depression six months later. Women who had been through trauma before, or had had psychiatric treatment, were more likely to report going into it.² The authors conclude that knowing about the reaction matters both in legal cases and in the health care that follows.

Three limits come with the 70%. It's one sample, of women, at one clinic in one city, so it cannot tell you how common the state is in men, in other countries, or among people who never went to a clinic. The abstract doesn't say this; it follows from who was studied. It is what the women reported afterwards on a scale, not something anyone watched. And the link to later depression and post-traumatic stress is an association across a group, not a forecast for any one person. If you have been through this and that last finding frightens you, it is the reason the authors say the reaction matters for the care that follows, and the lines at the top of this lesson are there for exactly this. Mental Fitness lesson 7 covers what reactions after a frightening event usually look like over time.

Why freezing is not consent

Put two definitions side by side and this settles itself. Neither source puts them together; that step is this course's.

This is general information, not legal advice. The law differs by state, and between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The first definition is Möller's: tonic immobility is involuntary.² The second is the law's. In England and Wales, section 74 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, read on the live legislation site on 25 September 2026, says: "For the purposes of this Part, a person consents if he agrees by choice, and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice."⁵ It speaks of "a person", so it covers everyone; the "he" is only the statute's wording.

Consent, on that definition, is agreeing by choice. A state your body goes into without your choice can't be an agreement by choice. So the stillness that so many people feel as their own failure is, in the law's terms, simply not consent. The prosecutors' guidance reaches the same place in its own words, as the next section shows.

What the law says in England and Wales

This is general information, not legal advice. The law differs by state, and between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) prosecutes crime in England and Wales. Its legal guidance on rape has an annex written for its own lawyers, Tackling Rape Myths and Stereotypes, which lists beliefs that come up in rape cases, marks each as false, and tells prosecutors how to answer them. This course read it on the CPS site on 25 September 2026, in the version dated 24 June 2026.⁴

What the prosecutors call myths

Two entries on its list are this lesson's subject: "A real rape victim would never freeze when attacked, they would fight back" and "If the victim didn't scream, fight, or get injured then it could not have been rape".⁴ The annex gives its reasons, in an earlier section on how victims respond and again beside those entries. "When under threat, the brain will implement instinctual survival responses that the victim will not necessarily have any control over", and those responses are "not just fight or flight, but flop, freeze or befriend".⁴ It adds that people who are raped often become unable to move or fight from terror or shock, and that some co-operate with the person raping them because they are afraid of being killed or seriously hurt.⁴

So the CPS and the Stockholm study, one from law and one from medicine, describe the same thing: a response the person does not choose and may not be able to control. Notice the word "befriend" in the CPS list; beside the freezing myth the annex spells it out as befriending the attacker.⁴ Lesson 10 met a similar word in Taylor's "tend-and-befriend", taught there as a proposal rather than a finding. On this course's reading, the CPS uses "befriend" to describe what victims do, for prosecutors answering a myth, not to settle the science.

The annex's list goes well beyond freezing. It marks as false, among others, that rape most often happens between strangers in dark alleys, that you can't be raped by a husband or partner, that a real victim reports straight away, that a real victim can always give a clear and coherent account, and that if you do not say "no" it is not rape.⁴ And its section on perpetrators says that only the perpetrator is responsible for rape.⁴

Consent and submission

The annex has a short sentence that carries a great deal: "Consent and submission are different."⁴ It cites a 1998 case, Malone, which it summarises as "No requirement that absence of consent has to be demonstrated or communicated to the accused."⁴ In plain words, on the CPS's account, a person need not have said no, pushed away or shown refusal for there to be no consent. The annex also cites an older case, Olugboja, which on the CPS's summary held that a jury should be told that every consent involves submitting, but that submitting does not by itself mean consenting.⁴

That doesn't make every reluctant yes a crime, and the guidance says so too. It records that a jury may need help telling a reluctant but free choice apart from giving in out of fear of something worse, especially but not only in a long-term loving relationship, and that context decides which it was.⁴ It sets the other half beside it: prosecutors should consider what impact a relationship had on someone's freedom to consent, including domestic abuse and controlling or coercive behaviour, and a case it cites held that submission obtained by a high level of psychological coercion, in any existing relationship, may not be free agreement.⁴ On the guidance's account, a reluctant but free choice can be consent, and giving in is not the same thing as consenting. Where a particular case falls is for a jury, on its facts.

So when a court in England and Wales hears a rape case, the consent questions aren't "did she fight?" or "was the victim injured?". On the statute and the guidance, they are these:

• Did the person agree by choice?⁵
• Did they have the freedom to choose? This is where the guidance's points on relationships, abuse and coercion, above, come in.⁴⁵
• Did they have the capacity to choose? The guidance's chapter on consent says a person does not consent if they are incapacitated through drink.⁴⁵
• Did the accused reasonably believe the person was consenting? This question is the guidance's, not section 74's. It says the prosecution must prove that the accused did not, and that prosecutors should ask how the accused knew the other person consented and went on consenting.⁴

This lesson can't tell you whether a particular person would be found guilty, and no page can. That is a court's job, on evidence nobody outside it has.

What this course didn't read

This course read the prosecutors' guidance and the statute for England and Wales. It did not read the law on consent and resistance in Scotland, in Northern Ireland, or in any US state, and it says nothing about them. Don't assume that the rules for England and Wales apply there.

What the resistance studies found

Everything in this section is evidence about what tends to happen, on average, across many incidents. None of it is a standard anyone was supposed to meet. If you froze, or went along with it to stay alive, these studies count you at most as a number, and nothing in them says what was possible for you. And if you fought back and were raped anyway, or were hurt after resisting, nothing here says you resisted wrongly or not enough. The figures are averages, and the only cause of what happened is the person who did it.

Ullman reviewed the field in Criminal Justice and Behavior in 1997. This course read its abstract. Its summary of the studies then published: "Consistent evidence suggests the effectiveness of forceful resistance strategies for avoiding rape; however, few studies have analyzed resistance within the social and situational contexts of rape".⁶ Among the things the review said the field needed was data "on the sequential ordering of offender attack and victim resistance": which came first.⁶ That request is the key to the next study.

Reading one abstract, sentence by sentence

Tark and Kleck published "Resisting Rape" in Violence Against Women in 2014. This course read the abstract only, and it is short enough to read closely. This is the skill lesson 2 started: say what was measured, on whom, and what the numbers can carry.⁷

Sentence one says what they did. They examined the effect of victim resistance on two outcomes, whether the rape was completed and whether the victim was injured, using sexual assault incidents from the US National Crime Victimization Survey for 1992 to 2002, "taking into account whether harm to the victim followed or preceded self-protection (SP) actions."⁷ "Self-protection" is their term for what a victim did to resist. The part to notice is the order. It is what Ullman asked for, and it is what lesson 10 showed changes the robbery evidence: an injury that came before someone fought back cannot have been caused by their fighting back.

Sentence two is the one people misread most easily: "Additional injuries besides rape, particularly serious injuries, following victim resistance are rare."⁷ Read it word by word. "Additional" and "besides rape" say the rape itself is the harm, and the question is whether resisting added more. "Following" matters because, as sentence one said, they took account of whether each injury came before or after the resistance, so that injuries that came first were not blamed on it.

The third sentence is yours.

What the abstract does not tell us is as useful as what it does. It does not say how many incidents there were, which actions counted as self-protection, or how large the reduction was. It does not say whether the result differed when the attacker was a partner or someone else the victim knew, which matters because, as a later section shows, most rapes in England and Wales are by someone known to the victim. It does not say whether any of the victims were men. And nothing in it is about freezing. For any of that you'd need the full paper, which this course didn't read.

The survey itself has a limit too. Lesson 3 quoted a national panel's judgement that "it is likely that the NCVS is undercounting rape and sexual assault victimization", and lesson 2 its warning that the survey measures rape imprecisely.¹⁰ So the incidents Tark and Kleck could study are the ones people told a survey interviewer about, and they may not be a fair picture of all rapes; that is this course's reading, not something the abstract says.

What training changed, in women's own accounts

Brecklin and Ullman, in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence in 2005, looked at 1,623 women's responses to rape attacks and compared women who had taken self-defence or assertiveness training before the attack with women who had not. This course read the abstract. Women with training "were more likely to say that their resistance stopped the offender or made him less aggressive", and "were angrier and less scared during the incident".⁸

Two things keep that in proportion. It's what the women said, not what anyone observed, and the abstract does not describe a trial. And one more finding in the same abstract points somewhere painful: women who had taken training rated their own non-consent or resistance lower than untrained women did, and the authors suggest this may be because they held themselves to a higher standard.⁸ If that suggestion is right, then on this course's reading training may leave some people judging themselves more harshly afterwards, which is exactly what the responsibility sentence at the top of this lesson is there to answer.

Randomised trials of programmes that teach resistance do exist, and the one whose authors are quoted at the top of this lesson was about assault by men the women knew, not strangers. Lesson 12, "Resistance training, and choosing a class", teaches them, their limits and the argument about them, so this lesson leaves them there.

What these designs can and cannot show

Lesson 10 found a flaw shared by both sides of the robbery argument, and the rape research inherits most of it. Nobody can be randomly assigned to resist or not. And a finding that resisting goes with fewer completed rapes can be read in more than one way. Logic and Argument lesson 5, "Inductive strength", gave four readings of any correlation: A causes B, B causes A, something else causes both, or chance.

Put the resistance finding through them. What follows is this course's reasoning from the sources, not a claim any of the authors made.

• Resisting lowers the chance of completion. This is the reading the authors take, and Ullman's "consistent evidence" supports it.⁶⁷
• The course of the attack shapes the resisting. An attack that was already faltering may leave more room to resist. Tark and Kleck's attention to order deals with this for injury, since they took account of whether each injury came before or after the resistance.⁷ Whether their method did the same for completion, the abstract does not say.
• Something else drives both. This is where the freeze comes back, and it is this course's inference, not a finding. Kozlowska places tonic immobility among the "responses of last resort to inescapable threat, when active defense responses have failed".³ If the attacks in which people's bodies shut down differ from the ones in which they could resist, for instance in how inescapable they felt, then resisters and non-resisters would differ in the attacks they faced as well as in what they did, and that difference could also bear on whether the rape was completed. On Kozlowska's account the freeze can come after active defence has failed, so some people may resist first and freeze after, and the two groups may not even be separate. No study read here measures any of this. Möller's study also found the freeze associated with the woman's own history, earlier trauma among it, not only with the attack.² So none of it makes a freeze a measure of how bad an attack was: it is the body's response to the threat as the person met it.
• Chance. Tark and Kleck's abstract calls their sample large, which makes chance a less likely explanation, though the abstract gives no numbers.⁷

In short, Ullman called the evidence that forceful resistance helps avoid rape consistent, and Tark and Kleck, careful about order, found that most resistance went with fewer completed rapes and that further injury after it was rare.⁶⁷ None is a trial, and none can say what would have happened in one person's case, whether they froze or fought. That is where lesson 10 ended up for robbery, and it is why this course gives no rule for the moment itself.

Who, and where

Lessons 3 and 6 gave the ONS figures on who commits rape and where, for England and Wales. Here they are once more, with some the earlier lessons did not use, because they change where prevention matters.⁹

For victims of rape or assault by penetration since the age of 16, pooling the survey years ending March 2020 and March 2025, the ONS article found that "around 4 in 10 (43.2%) were victimised by their partner or ex-partner (44.5% of females and 20.2% of males) and 16.3% were victimised by a stranger (15.0% of females and 37.5% of males)". The next largest group, 37.8%, was someone else the victim knew, including dates (11.3%) and friends (10.7%). And "over one-third (38.2%) were victimised in their own home and 8.0% were victimised on the street, in a car park, park, or another open public space". The perpetrator's home came second, at 28.5%.⁹ The same article says 98.0% of victims described the perpetrator as male.⁹

Put those figures together and they point somewhere the street advice of lesson 6 doesn't reach. Most rapes were by someone the victim knew, and most happened in a home, the victim's or the perpetrator's. So on this course's reading, prevention aimed at strangers outdoors misses most of the harm. Lesson 12 takes up programmes built around acquaintances, and the argument over whether prevention should rest on potential victims at all. Harm from partners and ex-partners is a different subject: "Domestic abuse and stalking" describes the services' help. For men the picture differs: over a third of male victims (37.5%) were attacked by a stranger, and a partner or ex-partner in 20.2% of cases, against 44.5% for women.⁹ None of this moves responsibility an inch. A figure says where harm fell; it says nothing about what anyone should have done.

When a friend tells you

This is the case the lesson has been building to. It starts from now, with what happens next.

Hana is a friend you've known for years, and she lives in England. Over coffee she tells you that in the spring, a man she had been seeing for a few weeks assaulted her at his flat. She says she just froze. She did not push him away and did not say anything. So, she says, maybe it wasn't really assault. She hasn't told anyone else.

What she needs from you first. Rape Crisis England & Wales, on its page for people supporting a survivor, says the most important thing is to listen and to believe what the person is telling you, and then let them say what they need.¹¹ It puts all of the blame and responsibility on the perpetrator, and it tells supporters not to ask a survivor why they did not run or fight back, explaining that being unable to move or speak is one of the body's automatic responses to fear and does not mean the person consented.¹¹ In this course's labels, that is practitioner opinion: guidance from a service's long experience, not a finding from a trial.

What the sources say to her worry. This is general information, not legal advice. The law differs by state, and between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Her worry is the first myth this lesson quoted from the CPS, that a real victim fights back.⁴ You don't need to be a lawyer to tell her what the sources say in general. In the one study that counted it, 70% of women described significant tonic immobility, and the study calls it involuntary.² Rape Crisis says it is very common for people to find they cannot move or speak.¹¹ In England and Wales, consent means agreeing by choice, and the prosecutors' guidance says consent and submission are different and that nobody has to have shown refusal.⁴⁵ Whether a court would call it rape is a court's question, and it isn't yours to answer. What you can say is that freezing does not make it her fault, and does not mean she agreed.

What you might say. Something like: "I believe you, and I'm glad you told me. Freezing is something bodies do on their own when they're terrified, and it isn't agreeing to anything. Whatever you want to do next, or not do, I'll back you." Three sentences, in your own words. The middle one is Rape Crisis's own point, that freezing is an automatic response to fear and not consent.¹¹ Nothing in the three tells her what a court would decide, and nothing asks her to explain herself.

What stays with her. Rape Crisis tells supporters not to take over or make decisions for the person unless they ask, and not to tell anyone else without their permission.¹¹ Whether she calls a line, sees a doctor, tells anyone else or goes to the police is hers to decide, in her own time. The Rape Crisis Support Line is also open to friends and family supporting someone, so you can call it yourself.¹¹

And you. Rape Crisis also says that supporting someone can be hard on the supporter, and that it is fine to take time for yourself.¹¹ Hearing this from someone you love is its own shock.

"Does any of this apply to me?"

A short third case. Tomasz lives in Wales. Last year a man he knew through friends assaulted him after a party at Tomasz's flat. He's read this far and wonders whether any of it is about him, since almost everything in it is about women.

Some of it is about him and some is not. Here is which is which.

• The law is general. This is general information, not legal advice. The law differs by state, and between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Section 74 speaks of "a person", and the CPS annex records that the legal definition of rape in England and Wales was widened in 1994 to include men as victims. It lists the belief that only gay men rape other men among the myths.⁴⁵
• The freezing figure isn't his. Möller's 70% is from women.² This course has no figure for how often men freeze, so it cannot give him one. What it can say is that the law's question is the same for him: did he agree by choice?⁵
• The ONS figures include him. An estimated 0.7% of men in England and Wales had experienced rape or assault by penetration since 16, and more than a third of male victims (37.5%) were attacked by a stranger, against 15.0% of female victims.⁹
• The lines serve him. Rape Crisis England & Wales says on its page for men and boys that male survivors aged 16 and over can use its 24-hour line, and the page lists specialist services for men.[12] In Wales, Live Fear Free takes calls from anyone experiencing sexual violence, and Victim Support is there whether or not he reports.[14]

What this course can't give him is a resistance study or a training trial about men. That gap is real: this course found almost no research on men, and lesson 12 says so again.

What people get wrong

Where these touch the law, this is general information, not legal advice. The law differs by state, and between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

"A real victim fights back." The CPS lists it as a myth.⁴ In the one study that counted it, most of the women had frozen to a significant degree, and the study calls the state involuntary.²

"If there's no injury, it wasn't rape." The CPS lists "If the victim didn't scream, fight, or get injured then it could not have been rape" as false.⁴ Separately, on force rather than injury, just over half of victims in the ONS survey did not describe physical force such as being held down.⁹

"If she froze, she consented." In England and Wales, consent means agreeing by choice with the freedom and capacity to choose, and "Consent and submission are different."⁴⁵ An involuntary state is not a choice.²

"Resisting just makes it worse." In Tark and Kleck's abstract, injuries after resistance were rare and most resistance made no significant difference to further injury.⁷ That does not make resisting a duty, or a guarantee, and it says nothing about anyone who could not.

"Most rapes are by strangers, outdoors." In England and Wales, 16.3% of victims since 16 were attacked by a stranger, and 8.0% were assaulted in a street, car park, park or open space.⁹

"Men can't be raped." An estimated 0.7% of men in England and Wales have experienced rape or assault by penetration, including attempts, since the age of 16, and the CPS annex records that the law there has covered men as victims of rape since 1994.⁴⁹

Practice

Connections

Back. Lesson 10, "What fear does to you, and the robbery decision", gave the defence cascade; this lesson took one of its last-resort responses, tonic immobility, to the one study that counted it, and applied lesson 10's shared flaw to the rape research. Lessons 3 and 6 gave the ONS figures on who and where; the lesson "Domestic abuse and stalking" covers harm from partners, the largest single group here. Lesson 2's warning about how imprecisely the US survey measures rape is a limit on Tark and Kleck. Logic and Argument lesson 5 supplied the four readings of a correlation, and Writing Clearly lesson 3 the tool for putting responsibility where it belongs in a sentence.

Forward. Lesson 12, "Resistance training, and choosing a class", teaches the randomised trials of resistance programmes, the argument about whether prevention should rest there, and the gap for men. Lesson 16, "Afterwards", covers reporting, support whether or not you report, and what happens next. Anything medical after an assault belongs to First Aid and CPR, and Mental Fitness lesson 7 covers what reactions after a frightening event usually look like.

Go deeper

• The CPS annex, Tackling Rape Myths and Stereotypes, England and Wales, the version dated 24 June 2026. Read in full for this lesson. The fullest list this course found of the beliefs that come up in rape cases, with the prosecutors' answers.
• Rape Crisis England & Wales, "Supporting a survivor". Read in full for this lesson. Short, practical and plainly written: what to say, what not to ask, and how to look after yourself.
• ONS, Nature of sexual assault by rape or penetration, England and Wales: year ending March 2025. The main points and the prevalence, perpetrator and location sections read for this course. The figures behind "Who, and where", for women and men.
• Möller, Söndergaard and Helström, "Tonic immobility during sexual assault",
  2017. This course read the abstract only. One page, and the clearest short account this course found of how common freezing was in one group of women.

Sources

1. Senn and colleagues, "Secondary and 2-Year Outcomes of a Sexual Assault Resistance Program for University Women", Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2017. Read: in full. Only the two lines on responsibility are used here; the trial is taught in lesson 12.
2. Möller, Söndergaard and Helström, "Tonic immobility during sexual assault: a common reaction predicting post-traumatic stress disorder and severe depression", Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica 96(8), 2017, pp. 932 to 938. Read: abstract only.
3. Kozlowska, Walker, McLean and Carrive, "Fear and the Defense Cascade: Clinical Implications and Management", Harvard Review of Psychiatry 23(4), 2015. Read: abstract only.
4. Crown Prosecution Service, Rape and Sexual Offences Prosecution Guidance, Annex A: Tackling Rape Myths and Stereotypes, full-page version, legal guidance for England and Wales, dated 24 June 2026 and updated 29 and 30 June 2026. Read: Annex A in full, and the lines quoted from the consent chapter, on the live CPS site, 25 September 2026. The annex's old standalone address returns "not found"; a 2021 version saved by the Internet Archive (capture 20260421173121) was read at drafting and is superseded. Cases are given only as the CPS summarises them.
5. Sexual Offences Act 2003, section 74, "Consent", legislation.gov.uk, extent England and Wales. Read: the live page, 25 September 2026, marked up to date with changes in force on or before that day.
6. Ullman, "Review and Critique of Empirical Studies of Rape Avoidance", Criminal Justice and Behavior 24(2), 1997, pp. 177 to 204. Read: abstract only.
7. Tark and Kleck, "Resisting Rape: The Effects of Victim Self-Protection on Rape Completion and Injury", Violence Against Women 20(3), 2014, pp. 270 to 292. Read: abstract only.
8. Brecklin and Ullman, "Self-defense or assertiveness training and women's responses to sexual attacks", Journal of Interpersonal Violence 20(6), 2005, pp. 738 to 762. Read: abstract.
9. Office for National Statistics, Nature of sexual assault by rape or penetration, England and Wales: year ending March 2025, 4 November 2025. Read: the main points and the perpetrator and location sections, and for this lesson the prevalence section. Crime Survey for England and Wales; victims since age 16; the relationship, location and force figures pool the survey years ending March 2020 and March 2025; the 8.2% and 0.7% are for the year ending March 2025 alone, from half the sample.
10. National Research Council, Estimating the Incidence of Rape and Sexual Assault,
    2014. Summary chapter read in full.
11. Rape Crisis England & Wales, "Supporting a survivor". Read: in full, 25 September 2026.
12. Rape Crisis England & Wales, "Support for men and boys". Read: in full, 25 September 2026.
13. RAINN, home page. Read: the home page, in a browser, 25 September 2026; the advice page it summarises was not opened.
14. Support lines in the content note, each read on its service's own page on 25 September 2026: Rape Crisis England & Wales, Victim Support (its number) and its "About us" page (support whether or not you report), Live Fear Free, Rape Crisis Scotland, Victim Support Scotland, the Domestic and Sexual Abuse Helpline, Rape Crisis Northern Ireland, Victim Support NI (its hubs) and its home page (support whether or not a crime has been reported), RAINN (in a browser) and VictimConnect. Read: each page in full, re-read 25 September 2026.