For decades, many law enforcement officers believed victims were supposed to be able to recall all the details of their assault. If they didn’t — or couldn’t — their allegations must not be credible, the thinking went.

There is now the growing realization among police officers and others who encountered victims of sexual assault that they have long misread and mishandled those cases. The process was so common that experts have given it a name — “secondary victimization.”

What officers previously didn’t understand is the science of trauma — and how humans are wired to act in ways that are at odds with traditional police training, said Tom Tremblay, a former police chief in Burlington, Vermont.

Behaviors and reactions to trauma that police are now learning to accommodate include fragmented memories, dissociation and a kind of involuntary paralysis known as “tonic immobility.”

“There are no higher false report rates for sexual assault than any other crime.” Tom Tremblay, a former Burlington, Vermont, police chief

Tremblay, who now teaches “trauma-informed training” to law enforcement and military personnel, is part of a growing movement using what scientists understand about how traumatic events impact the brain and body to transform the way authorities understand and investigate sexual assault.

They're also seeking to keep police from believing what Tremblay described as the “disturbing” myths highlighted in President Donald Trump’s recent comments about Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Pointing to Trump’s assertion that it is “a very scary time for young men in America,” Tremblay said the president was implying that the “false report narrative — that myth — is real.”

“It is not,” he said. “There are no higher false report rates for sexual assault than any other crime.”

Julie Valentine, a professor of nursing at Brigham Young University. Courtesy Brigham Young University

In his trainings, Tremblay said he often hears the same refrain from veteran officers: “‘Why didn’t we have this 10 years ago? I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career.’”

There’s evidence this new approach is working. In a study published this month by the Utah Journal of Criminal Law, researchers found that prosecution rate of sexual assaults in Salt Lake County nearly quadrupled for a local police department after its officers were trained, rising from an abysmally low 6 percent to 22 percent.

One of the study’s authors, Julie Valentine, a professor of nursing at Brigham Young University, said it appears that victims feel more supported with the new style of training, allowing police to conduct better investigations and collect stronger evidence. Valentine cautioned in an interview that the study’s sample size of 64 people was small, but, she added: “To go from 6 percent to 22 percent is incredibly promising.”

Why trauma impacts memory

Richard Alan Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical School, said victims may provide choppy accounts of their assaults for evolutionary reasons: to avoid becoming prey, human brains adapted to learn best during emotionally heightened experiences.

“Things that are dangerous or scary are perfectly encoded” — or turned from an event into a memory, he said. “Things that are not emotional are not attended to.”

A victim may have a clear memory of an assault, but might not recall where the assault took place, he said. Such peripheral details might not become memories at all.