Is Justice for Sexual Assault Victims Less Likely for Singles?

Even before the #MeToo era, women had been making some progress in getting their experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault taken seriously. Inaccurate and insulting explanations were getting delegitimized and debunked; for example, that women were just “asking for it” because of the way they were dressed.

One other baseless prejudice, though, may still be very much in play. I was alerted to it by Chanel Miller’s powerful memoir, Know My Name. Maybe you first learned of Miller by a different name, Emily Doe. That’s the name she used when she first described being sexually assaulted by the Stanford student Brock Turner.

In her memoir, Miller said that in one of many interviews conducted by a detective at a police station, she was asked a whole series of questions about her boyfriend. They included, among many others, “Where he was from. How we met. How often we communicated. When I had last seen him before the assault. If I’d seen him since. What my feelings were for him.”

She thought the detective was appropriately apologetic about asking so many questions about her life, but she wondered about the relevance of her boyfriend:

“…it bothered me that having a boyfriend and being assaulted should be related, as if I, alone, was not enough…. It should have been enough to say, I did not want a stranger touching my body. It felt strange to say, I have a boyfriend, which is why I did not want Brock touching my body. What if you’re assaulted and you didn’t already belong to a male?”

I don’t know of any research that directly tests the idea that female survivors of sexual assault are judged more sympathetically if they have a boyfriend. I don’t know if they are more likely to win their cases. It would be a travesty if they were.

But sadly, it would not be surprising. The mere fact of being coupled seems to protect people from much of the prejudice, discrimination, and danger that many single people face. As Joan DelFattore has shown in her important work, oncologists sometimes recommend less aggressive treatments for their patients who are single, thinking that they “don’t have anyone” or they lack the will to live. Belief in the disparaging stereotypes of single people may also help explain the bias to see married people as more deserving of life-saving organ transplants.

There is evidence to suggest that men respect single women’s bodies and their dignity less than married women’s. In the workplace, for example, both single and married women experience sexual harassment, but single women experience it more. In a 2017 Suffolk University survey, 42 percent of women who had always been single said that a co-worker had made unwanted sexual advances, compared to 30 percent of married women.

In everyday life, it is annoying and offensive when people who are single get stereotyped while people who are coupled get celebrated. But the implications go way beyond mere hurt feelings or undeserved respect. Safety and survival are also at stake.