Rape statistics are notoriously depressing, and the general takeaway is always the same: too many women attacked, too little done about it. How, for example, is it possible that 98% of rapists will never go to jail? What is the broken part of our process that allows a number like that to exist?

As it turns out, everything is broken. Because no matter what a rape victim does after being attacked – whether she (rape victims are 90% female) reports or decides against it, whether she pursues charges or drops them – the end result is not likely to fall in her favor.

If a victim forgoes going to a hospital to get examined, for example, she won’t have some of the evidence necessary for catching the attacker – and she might be looked upon skeptically, to boot. If she does undergo an invasive rape kit, however, there’s a pretty decent chance it just ends up sitting on a shelf, untested.

If a woman chooses not to report her attack to the police – a choice that most victims make for all sorts of reasons – she might be less likely to be believed. A common refrain among apologists for Bill Cosby’s alleged actions, for example, is that if the alleged victims’ stories were true they would have come forward sooner.

But when victims do report to the police, many suffer horrendous treatment by officers who are either untrained in how to handle sexual assault cases or outright blame the victim. After Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz filed a police report about being raped, she says a police officer told a friend who had accompanied her that “Of all these cases, 90% are bullshit, so I don’t believe your friend for a second.”

After 19-year-old Lara McLeod reported her rape, she was arrested because an officer didn’t believe her. And when Michele Beaulieux reported a rape that had happened years earlier, she later found the report contained multiple errors – including the spelling of her name and where she was raped.

There’s a similar catch-22 when it comes to bringing criminal charges or testifying against an attacker. If women choose not to testify or don’t want to participate in a case, they’re accused of having lied to begin with. It’s a common misconception that rape victims who pull charges made “false accusations”; often they just don’t want to put themselves through the horror of a trial.

Because when they do go forward through the courts, what often happens is that the victim’s reputation is trashed or the rapist is treated with kid gloves. A few years ago in Nebraska, a judge banned the word ‘rape’... from a rape trial. When the victim in Steubenville went forward with her case, the school rallied behind the two attackers – who were eventually found guilty – while the young victim was called a whore by peers and insinuated to be one by defense attorneys.

And even if victims do all the “right” things – seek medical treatment, file a police report, bring the case to court – there’s a very decent chance that their attacker won’t be punished because of the social bias and stigma against sexual assault victims.

Last month, a police officer in Florida was found not guilty of raping a 20-year-old woman who did everything she was supposed to – she got help and reported the crime immediately – after Stephen Maiorino allegedly threatened to arrest her for underage drinking if she did not perform oral sex and then raped her vaginally at gunpoint.

The defense used a picture the woman took in high school mock-posing bent over a police car with her hands behind her back to argue that the woman clearly had a fantasy about being with a cop. As the not-guilty verdict was read, the woman started to wail, “No, no!” and “Why?”

The truth is that there are no correct choices for a rape victim, no one line of action that makes her more likely to get justice. Rape victims largely know this is true. Even worse: so do rapists.