Alcohol And Sexual Assault: Study Debunks Harmful Myth That Casts Doubt On Victims' Accounts

Consuming moderate amounts of alcohol doesn't actually impair women's memory of a sexual assault, a new study has found. This finding sheds light on a crucial factor that often becomes a stumbling block for victims of assault.

For the study, published in Frontiers in Psychology - Forensic and Legal Psychology, a team of researchers conducted a randomized study wherein a total of 90 females participated in an "interactive hypothetical dating scenario." The idea, they said, was to test just how accurately they would remember consensual and non-consensual sexual activity.

Fueling the study is the fact that 1.6 million adults between the ages of 16 and 74 experienced rape or attempted rape in the U.K. from 2019 to 2021. In the U.S., it is estimated that there are 463,634 victims of rape aged 12 and above each year, with another American getting sexually assaulted every 68 seconds.

But these statistics, grim as they may be, may not even show the entire scope of the problem as rape statistics are said to be "notoriously difficult" to obtain. This is because many victims end up opting not to report the assault at all. Whether it's embarrassment, a country's laws, or fear of retaliation from the perpetrator, there are many issues that make rape an underreported crime in many places all over the world.

One such stumbling block is the evidence for the crime. Typically, it is the victim's testimony that is the primary evidence to support the claim, the researchers noted. However, there is one particular factor that ends up tainting the victim's credibility: intoxication.

"We know that sexual assault frequently coincides with alcohol intoxication," Professor Heather Flowe of the University of Birmingham said in the university news release. "This means that, during trials, victims' and witnesses' accounts will often be contested, which is one of the reasons why so few cases lead to conviction for defendants and this needs to change."

Intoxication, it appears, raises doubts about the accuracy of the victims' accounts of the incidents. And with sexual assaults tending to be intertwined with intoxication, this leads to a rather grim statistic against the victims — even among the experts.

"(U)p to 80% of victims reported to have been alcohol intoxicated when the attack occurred," the authors wrote. "Indeed, a prominent survey found that 96% of psychology and law experts believe that witnesses' memories are less accurate if they were alcohol intoxicated during the crime."

As the researchers noted, this sadly may be one of the key factors as to why only a meager number of perpetrators are ever brought to justice. In the U.S., this number is as low as 9%. And with only 3% spending time in prison, this means that more than 90% of rapists end up walking free.

But how true is it that intoxication impairs the memory of women? In the U.S., women represent 90% of rape victims, so getting to the bottom of this could help shed light on this long-standing belief.

To find out, the researchers asked 90 women to participate in the hypothetical rape scenario under four conditions, according to the University of Birmingham. Half of them were given an alcoholic drink and the other half was given tonic water, but within the groups, some were told that they were given the other beverage.

In total, 48 participants were given tonic water, 26 of whom were expecting to be given alcohol. On the other hand, 42 were assigned to the alcohol condition, of whom 20 expected to be given the tonic.

About 30 minutes after the participants had the last drink, the participants read and listened to a scenario of an encounter between a man and a woman. They were told to imagine that they were the ones in the encounter, and see how they would actually feel if that had happened to them.

Quite like the games wherein the player gets to choose what the next step in the story would be, the participants got to make choices about what would happen next — would she stay or would she leave?

Staying throughout the entire scenario would lead to a consensual sexual intercourse scenario. But for those who opted to leave at any point in the scenario, the scene would still be continued, but with a rape scenario.

Seven days after the activity, the participants received a survey that tested how good their memories of the incident were. This included questions such as "What did Michael say would happen if you struggled?" and "How did Michael hold you down?" There were a few multiple choice questions, with one of the options being that the noted item did not happen in the scenario.

The researchers found that the women who consumed alcohol remembered consensual and non-consensual sexual activities just as accurately. There was also no evidence that someone who "participated" in consensual sex remembered it later on as non-consensual, noted the University of Birmingham.

Interestingly, they also found that those who expected to drink alcohol were more accurate about their descriptions of the non-consensual sex, and that's regardless of whether they were actually given alcohol or not. This, the researchers said, suggests a sense of "hypervigilance" in a scenario wherein they believe that they are under the influence of alcohol and thus may be more vulnerable.

"Alcohol intoxication affects charging and sentencing in real world cases, with cases involving alcohol being less likely to be prosecuted owing in part to concerns about the credibility and memory accuracy of complainants who were alcohol intoxicated during the offence," the researchers wrote. "These concerns are not borne out by the data of this experiment, at least at the level of intoxication we studied."

The results actually challenge the "myth" that often gets used to dismiss victims' accounts in such cases, study co-author, Laura Stevens of the University of Birmingham, said in the university release.

Further study, the researchers said, would be needed to look into the memory of sexual violence in real-world settings. They're also planning further research to test different levels of intoxication.

"We hope this work will lead to changes in the way courts and expert witnesses manage testimony from alleged victims of rape and sexual assault," Stevens said.