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When news broke about the Cornell 7 case, author Jennifer Percy looked first at the text messages between Jane Doe and one of the men she accused of raping her. “I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night,” he wrote. “At the end of the day non [sic] of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly I really liked being with u,” Doe replied. Some commentators have pointed to these messages as evidence that the encounter was consensual. Percy’s research offers another explanation: Survivors do not always immediately recognize what happened to them as assault, and their responses can confound public expectations of how a victim should behave. Percy’s latest book Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation describes a number of ways survivors can respond, both during an assault and afterward. These include phenomena like “tonic immobility,” when—similar to animals playing dead to ward off their predator—survivors freeze or even become paralyzed upon being assaulted. Survivors also frequently “friend” (as opposed to fight or flight) their attackers in an effort to placate them. “I made him chicken soup [after],” one woman recounted to Percy. Why is it that we can understand why a hostage victim may try to befriend their kidnapper in an effort to survive, or someone being robbed would give up all of their belongings, yet, when it comes to rape, we question what the victim could have done to stop it?