President Donald Trump's recent criticism of Christine Blasey Ford's failure to report an alleged 1980s sexual assault against his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, has inspired a powerful social campaign from survivors of assault.
The #WhyIDidntReport hashtag sprung up in response to the president's questioning Ford's failure to report the incident decades earlier.
“I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!”
“The radical left lawyers want the FBI to get involved NOW,” he added. “Why didn’t someone call the FBI 36 years ago?”
April White, the activist behind #OscarsSoWhite, helped advance the hashtag on Twitter, but "this isn't about me," she said in response to a tweet from the Hollywood Reporter. "Focus on the survivors, not the platform that amplified their stories."
According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, for every 1,000 rapes reported, just six perpetrators are incarcerated. As a result, many survivors of sexual assault don't believe their accusations will be taken seriously — or believed at all.
Here’s why many survivors said they didn’t report their assaults:
Others shared why even reporting their assaults failed them.