She did not come forward right away.

Last fall, a woman named Leigh Corfman helped upend a Senate race in Alabama when she said that the Republican candidate, Roy S. Moore, sexually assaulted her when she was 14, nearly four decades ago. She said she worried for years that going public would affect her children, and that her history of divorce and financial mistakes would undermine her account. After being approached by a Washington Post reporter, she agreed to tell her story, and later said, “If anything, this has cost me.”

But negative consequences are not the only thing to keep victims from coming forward. Experts point to a more fundamental issue: When the perpetrator is someone they trusted, it can take years for victims even to identify what happened to them as a violation.

Reah Bravo, one of several women who say that the broadcast journalist Charlie Rose made unwanted sexual advances while they were working for him, told The Washington Post, “It has taken 10 years and a fierce moment of cultural reckoning for me to understand these moments for what they were.”

Scott Berkowitz, the president of RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, said confusion and self-blame are common: “A lot of people who call the national hotline, one of the first questions they ask is, ‘Was I raped?’”

Offenders encourage confusion and shame and exploit people’s reluctance to identify themselves as victims. Veronique Valliere, a psychologist who counsels sexual assault perpetrators and victims and consults with the military and law enforcement, said the offenders she treats list two main tactics used to obscure assaults: They camouflage the act as horseplay or humor, or they act as though nothing happened.

“If they do this enough, the victim can get really confused, like they’re really the bad one for thinking badly about the offender,” she said.

The victim doesn’t act like one.

A young woman said she was raped in a police van by two New York City officers, Eddie Martins and Richard Hall, in September. Their lawyers have accused the woman, who is 18, of posting “provocative” selfies and bragging about news media attention and the millions of dollars she expects to win in a civil case.