UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Beyond its utility as a diagnostic category, the medical model of trauma has emerged as a powerful rhetorical and political tool. Trauma diagnoses have provided individuals with medical recognition and helped to catalyze social movements around issues such as armed conflict and sexual violence. Although originally thought to stem from an objective set of characteristics of an event, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is now seen as a combination of an exposure to a traumatic stressor and a personal, individualized reaction to that exposure. This shift from objective to subjective perception has challenged two assumptions underpinning early definitions of trauma. First, the departure from event-based to experientially-based definitions of trauma challenged the presumption that certain events are inherently more traumatic than others. Second, perceptions shifted from the belief that trauma is a fated outcome to an understanding that post-traumatic stress may or may not result, depending on individual factors. This paper traces the evolution of medical and social understandings of trauma and discusses the ways in which the treatment of sexual violence against women has failed to keep pace with this evolution. Rape continues to be regarded as an innately traumatic experience for women that will forever brand them as victims. The “one-size-fits-all” trauma narrative deployed to combat sexual violence against women has served to draw vital political, social, and medical attention to a previously neglected harm. While the medicalization of rape trauma has provided women with a common identity to draw attention to the prevalence of violence against women, it has also undermined efforts to construct a strong, rational image of women as political actors. I call into question presumptions about an objective form of rape trauma, arguing that such presumptions risk essentializing rape victims, leaving little room for agency and heterogeneity.