The Passive Voice in Sexual Violence
A note on language: throughout this piece, I use the words "survivor" and "victim" interchangeably. We are not all the same, and each person feels comfortable identifying with different terms. There is no single "correct" word for what someone has lived through.
It is not uncommon to see how accounts of sexual abuse are framed as "something that happened" to someone. A girl groomed online, a woman harassed in her workplace, a teacher abducted and raped.
Verbal language
Syntax is the way we structure words to communicate meaning in verbal language. It's the foundation of sentence construction and helps us convey our messages clearly. We know that the basic parts of a sentence are the subject, the verb, and the object.
When constructing a sentence, we can choose between two grammatical voices: active and passive. The active voice is used when a subject performs an action on the object, while the passive voice is used when the object receives the action. The passive voice draws attention to the object and the action performed upon it.
To see the difference more clearly, consider some simple examples:
Active: The teacher corrected the essay.
Passive: The essay was corrected by the teacher.
In the active sentence, the focus is on who performed the action. In the passive sentence, the attention shifts to the object and what happened to it. This subtle change in focus may seem minor in everyday grammar, but it can carry significant weight when applied to real-world situations.
Using the passive voice to describe sexual violence
When we use the passive voice to describe abuse, rape or assault, we actively remove the perpetrator from the narrative. This has several consequences. First, the focus shifts entirely to the victim, while the responsibility of the offender is obscured or erased.
For instance:
Active: He raped her.
Passive: She was raped.
Second, when the perpetrator is removed from the narrative, all problem-solving efforts tend to focus on protecting potential victims, rather than addressing accountability. This often involves extensive research into factors that might contribute to sexual assault, such as victim behaviours, attitudes, background, or even the way they present themselves.
I remember when I was thirteen, in school we received a lecture on what perpetrators supposedly look for in a victim. Afterward, we were given advice like avoiding wearing a ponytail, or not appearing distracted by our phones. Essentially, we were taught to constantly monitor ourselves to avoid becoming a target. The message was clear: the responsibility for prevention was placed on us, the potential victims, rather than on those committing the acts.
Victim blaming does not need to be stated outright. It happens subtly when we question a victim's clothing, whether they were alone, if it was nighttime, or whether they had been drinking. Even questions like, "Did you do anything to make him feel you were interested?" reflect an alarming mindset that shifts responsibility away from the offender.
Terms like "provocative" to describe clothing or behaviour, or advice about how a victim "should" act, shift focus away from the perpetrator and onto the victim. It's as if clothing or attitudes were active agents capable of causing the assault. This framing shifts responsibility away from the offender and risks implying that rape can somehow be justified.
What are the consequences of this?
First, victims or survivors find themselves endlessly analysing every potential risk factor: what they wore, when and where they went out, who they were with, even how they spoke to others. This constant self-scrutiny is exhausting and draining. The truth is often overlooked: they were not assaulted because of their choices. They were assaulted because someone chose to assault them. They were raped because someone raped them.
Second, it shapes how victims and survivors see themselves, feeling guilty, carrying that shame for years. Society implicitly suggests they were assaulted because of their choices. By focusing on the victim and removing the perpetrator from the story, we not only perpetuate victim-blaming, but we also avoid questioning or challenging the abuser. Research by Henley, Miller, and Beazley (1995) showed that using the passive voice in descriptions of sexual assault reduces the visibility of the perpetrator's agency and shifts attention away from the person who committed the act.
This is problematic in therapy settings. We might end up treating it as a personal issue, when, in fact, it's rooted in broader systemic and structural issues.
So, what can we do?
Education is a shared responsibility that needs to happen on all fronts - not just within academic settings, but also on personal and social levels. It requires our own initiative. This means educating our gaze, our attitudes, and the language we use. And for that, we must first take accountability.
Part of this education means resisting the romanticising of stalking or of kissing someone who is asleep. Behaviours often glamorised in classic stories, like Disney's Sleeping Beauty, where the "prince's kiss" is portrayed as heroic and romantic, despite Aurora's lack of consent or sexual desire. On a broader scale, education should challenge societal norms that normalize unwanted sexual contact or teach girls that if a boy is mean, it means he likes them.
By normalising these behaviours, we are indoctrinating children into patterns of interaction that will be internalised and carry through into adulthood. This is psychosexual education in practice: guiding children to relate to one another from a place of equality and horizontality, not through power or violence. By critically examining cultural narratives and the values they promote, we can help society at large understand that sexual activity must always be not only consensual, but also mutually desired.
What is the goal?
We need to advocate for horizontal sexual relationships, based on equality, respect, and curiosity for the other person's desires, rather than power, coercion, or entitlement. Change begins with how we understand we should interact in the world, and that is at the heart of education. How do we start grasping concepts, social constructs, and acquiring the power to express ourselves? Through language, and we must use it wisely. Language shapes our perception of the world and social behaviour (Everett, 2013).
By consciously naming the abuse and placing responsibility on the abuser, we challenge victim-blaming and shift accountability where it belongs. As Arcus (2019) argues, naming the perpetrator directly - saying "he raped me" rather than "I was raped" -helps construct a fuller, more truthful account of what happened. To achieve this, we must actively alter the language we use, giving survivors the tools not only to express themselves but also to understand what someone did to them.
This is, ultimately, the work I try to do alongside the people I support: helping them find language that names what happened, challenging the shame that society has often reinforced on us.
References
Arcus, D. (2019, January 28). The passive voice has no place in conversations about rape. WBUR Cognoscenti. https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2019/01/28/the-language-of-sexual-violence-doreen-arcus
Everett, C. (2013). Linguistic relativity: Evidence across languages and cognitive domains. De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110308143
Henley, N. M., Miller, M. D., & Beazley, J. A. (1995). Syntax, semantics, and sexual violence: Agency and the passive voice. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 14(1–2), 60–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X95141004
