Why Does Every Woman Know One?

On sexual trauma, disbelief, and what healing actually requires

I started my career in a women's intensive outpatient program. In the six years I was there, ninety-five percent of the women I sat with, if not all of them, carried a history of sexual trauma, whether it happened in childhood or in adulthood. I heard hundreds of stories. Hundreds. That number still stops me when I say it out loud.

From there I moved to an agency that specialized in sexual trauma. Treating those cases was a different kind of hard for me. There is a distance between an adult recalling something from long ago and a child who is living it, or just lived it. That distance is where the weight of this work lives. And being there, across another nearly 6 years, I again, consumed hundreds of stories.

Then I went into private practice, and the stories kept coming. College-aged women assaulted by frat boys. Women assaulted by men they'd agreed to date, or the more subtle, pressure that continues, even after saying no multiple times. It genuinely started to feel like every woman I met had a version of this story somewhere in her body. Side bar: men experience sexual assault as well, and I have held those stories too; however, both the numbers and my experience show that it’s most often women.

Then the #MeToo movement happened, and it named something I hadn't fully let myself sit with: harassment belonged in the same conversation. I remember telling a friend that I thought it was ridiculous — that women were comparing being harassed to being raped. She set me straight on the spot.

“But why is any of it just something we have to accept?”

I've thought about that sentence more times than I can count. She was right. The point was never to flatten every experience into the same thing. The point was to stop treating any of it as the cost of being a woman.

And then came the Epstein files — a rabbit hole that is still unfolding as I write this. It is dark in a way that is hard to put into words. Worse than almost anything I've heard in twenty years of doing this work, and given my background, that says a great deal. The craziest part, to me, is that people — largely men — are still insisting none of it is true. I keep asking the same question: how many women have to say the same thing before you believe them?

The three things I keep coming back to

One: Sexual assault is far more common than we admit. I'm not even buying the “one in four” number anymore — and, as it turns out, neither is the data.

Two: Women have been suppressed, oppressed, taken advantage of, silenced, blamed, and mistreated for thousands of years — and many people still refuse to believe it.

Three: There is a deep undercurrent of sexual dysfunction running through this country, and almost certainly the world. We treat the symptoms and rarely name the current itself.

The numbers I stopped believing — and what the data actually says

Here's what's striking: when I stopped trusting the tidy “one in four” figure, the newest research had already moved past it too. In its 2023/2024 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey — the first update in nearly a decade — the CDC found that more than one in four women in the U.S. (about 27%) have experienced a completed or attempted rape in their lifetime. Nearly half of all women have experienced some form of unwanted sexual contact. In a single recent year, roughly 9.5 million women reported sexual violence.

And these are the conservative numbers. The CDC says so directly: because so much sexual violence is never disclosed, its estimates are almost certainly undercounts of what's really happening. So when my gut told me the real figure was higher than we say, that wasn't cynicism. It was pattern recognition from hundreds of case files.

Two more findings sit heavily with me. Nearly half of the women who are raped were first raped before they turned eighteen — this so often begins in childhood. And around one in three women report being sexually harassed at work or in public. My friend's question, it turns out, was pointing at a continuum the research describes plainly: harassment, coercion, and assault aren't separate universes. They're points along the same line, feeding the same message that a woman's “no” is negotiable.

The question that won't leave me

The Epstein files aren't an aberration hiding at the edges of society; they're the machinery of silence made visible. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law in late 2025, forced the release of millions of pages of records through early 2026. And even in the disclosure, the old pattern held. A group of survivors pointed out that the releases exposed their names and identifying details while the men who abused them stayed shielded. Meaningful accountability, so far, has been scarce.

That is the machine in miniature: expose the woman, protect the man, and then ask her to prove it happened. It's the same dynamic I've watched play out in a therapy room, in a college dorm, in a family. Just with more money and more lawyers.

Not long ago I saw a post that reorganized something in my mind. It asked:

“Why does every woman know another woman who's been sexually assaulted, and no man knows another man who's offended?”

Sit with that. The math doesn't work unless the offenders are among us, unnamed, and unbelieved. That gap — between how many women carry this and how few men will ever be held to it — is the whole problem stated in a single sentence.

Another post I saw said, “Somehow a woman must predict which man is dangerous, avoid him, escape him, report him perfectly, prove what happened, heal gracefully, and never become angry. But asking men not to harm women is apparently unrealistic.” And don’t get me started on women’s clothing taking the blame for assaults; that’s a whole other article!

What healing actually looks like

If I only wrote about the scale of the harm, I'd be doing survivors a disservice. So let me be just as clear about this: sexual trauma is treatable, and people recover. Not “get over it.” Recover — reclaim their sleep, their bodies, their relationships, their sense of safety in the world. I have watched it happen more times than I've watched the alternative.

The good news is that we're not guessing at what works. Several trauma-focused therapies have decades of solid research behind them, and they're considered first-line treatment for PTSD:

Prolonged Exposure (PE). Gradual, supported approach to the memories and situations trauma has taught a survivor to avoid, so the nervous system can finally learn the danger has passed. It has some of the strongest evidence of any trauma treatment.

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT). Structured work on the beliefs trauma leaves behind — the guilt, the shame, the “I should have known.” I reach for this one often with survivors of sexual assault precisely because self-blame is so central to how this wound is carried.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Helps the brain reprocess stuck traumatic memories so they lose their charge. The research places it alongside PE and CPT in effectiveness.

Trauma-Focused CBT (TF-CBT). The most established approach for children and teens, and it brings caregivers into the healing rather than leaving a child to carry it alone.

Because sexual trauma lives in the body and not just the story, I've also seen tremendous value in pairing these with somatic and nervous-system-based work — approaches that help a survivor feel safe inside their own skin again. Talk therapy and body-based work aren't rivals here; they're partners.

What I want every survivor reading this to know is that being believed is not a favor someone grants you. It is the starting line of healing, and you're allowed to start there — with a therapist, a friend, a hotline — without first assembling evidence for a jury that was never entitled to it.

Where we go from here

I don't have a neat bow for this. The current I named runs deep, and it won't be talked away in one blog post. But I keep returning to my friend's question, because it's really the only place to begin: why is any of it something we're supposed to accept?

We stop accepting it by believing women the first time. By understanding that harassment and assault grow from the same root. By refusing to let the powerful launder their behavior through our doubt. And by making sure every survivor knows that what happened to them has a name, that the research is on their side, and that recovery is real.

How many women have to say the same thing before we believe them? My answer is simple. One.

If this is close to home

If you're a survivor and any of this stirred something up, you don't have to sit with it alone. The National Sexual Assault Hotline is free, confidential, and available 24/7 at 800-656-HOPE (4673), with online chat at hotline.rainn.org