Sexual assault victims’ acknowledgment status and revictimization risk

How a victim of rape characterizes her assault has potential implications for her postassault experiences and revictim-ization risk. Prior research has identified several potential benefits to not conceptualizing one’s experience as a form of victimization. The current study sought to identify whether there are costs to not acknowledging rape as well, specifi-cally whether unacknowledged victims are at elevated risk of revictimization. The revictimization risk behaviors of 334 acknowledged and unacknowledged female college rape victims were compared. Unacknowledged victims reported more hazardous alcohol use and were more likely to report that they continued a relationship with the assailant after the assault. A subsample of 105 victims completed a 6-month follow-up survey regarding sexual victimization during the follow-up period. Unacknowledged victims were nearly twice as likely to report having experienced an attempted rape during the 6-month follow-up period. Implications of the results for future work evaluating rape acknowledgment, rape recovery, and revictimization are discussed. The experience of rape, defined as unwanted sex obtained by force, threat, or the assault of a victim incapable of consenting, remains a major public health problem affect-ing women. Recent surveys of college women, for exam-ple, have found that between 15 and 20 % have experi-enced rape by a man or men during their adolescence o