Author Jen Percy researches passive defenses, involuntary responses to fear and assault

If a strange man with a knife were to break into your home, how would you react? Would you hide, scream, run, or freeze? When Jen Percy found a stranger in her home with a knife, she did none of those things. She greeted him with a polite smile, and said, “Hi.” (He left, and she was unharmed.)

Percy became interested in such surprising responses to experiences of fear or assault. She researched the neurobiology of trauma for her book, Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation. Drawing on original reporting and science-based research, years of conversations with survivors, and her own life story, Percy writes about responses to sexual violence. She reaches for history, law, literature, and science to understand the expectations of trauma survivors and their actual experiences. Percy recently spoke with the Clayman Institute’s Writer in Residence Moira Donegan as part of the Feminism in Theory and Practice Series.

In the natural world, Percy learned, animals may freeze or play dead as a survival mechanism when confronted with a predator. Scientists consider these passive defenses to be involuntary rather than a conscious choice. One phenomenon is termed tonic passivity – it results in total body paralysis, an inability to move or scream. For a victim, the brain’s defense circuitry takes control, with behaviors controlled by reflexes and driven by perpetrator actions.

To bring such a response into the perspective of an assault survivor, Percy considered the victim statement of Jessica Mann, who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. In her statement, Mann said, “So many women, myself included, have only been able to find words such as, ‘I gave up’ or ‘I lost control’ and like myself, ‘I froze.’ The majority of the public has not understood that these responses were not something we consciously choose under the duress.” Percy said these counterintuitive responses, poorly understood, are often used against women who report their assaults, and their accounts are questioned or doubted.

Other important survival responses include dissociation, which can cause a victim to be zoned out or spaced out, reverting to autopilot behaviors; and collapsed immobility, in which the body goes limp and the person becomes dizzy or passes out. Sometimes these occur in combination, for example with dissociation providing a protective benefit for the brain when the body has become immobilized. Percy remarked that while survivors can use any language they wish to describe their experiences, a shared vocabulary could help them better communicate with law enforcement when reporting an assault.