ON WOMEN’S DAY Trust the Body That Saved You

by Myat Moe Khaing

‘WHY didn’t you just move his hand away?’ my friend asks. I stare, my mind blank. I want to answer, but I can’t. Seriously, why didn’t I just move it? Or shout? As I search for the reason, a lump rises in my throat. I hear the care in my friend’s voice, but my mind drifts to the moment I froze. I am reliving the violation, the humiliation! 

For a long time I felt betrayed by my own body. How could it abandon me during a very vulnerable moment? My body, which I had always relied on, seemed to have its own will. And in the face of violation, it chose stillness. Maybe if I practise being more assertive, saying a loud no, I can prevent an unwanted touch next time. 

Or maybe the question isn’t about courage or assertiveness at all. Maybe it’s about understanding what happened inside my body.

The American Psychological Association defines the freeze response as a form of passive avoidance, in which a person remains motionless and makes no effort to run or hide. It is most often observed as a severe reaction to a threatening situation. Research published in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry describes it as part of a defence cascade — a sequence in which our nervous system decides, without consulting our conscious mind, that the safest move is to pause, observe, and gather information. In that moment, the brain focuses on safety, not communication. Words can fail, energy drops, and reality may feel foggy. Emotions numb, and the body may feel disconnected, as if watching the event rather than truly living it.

Functional freeze is an adaptive coping mechanism, allowing someone to remain operational even while the nervous system is overwhelmed. To an outside observer, the person may appear relatively normal. On the other hand, tonic immobility, a more severe form of freezing, is often discussed in sexual assault literature as a temporary state of motor inhibition triggered by extreme fear, during which a person cannot move or vocalise despite being fully conscious.

As Bessel van der Kolk explains in The Body Keeps the Score, our bodies remember what our conscious minds sometimes cannot. Because the freeze response is automatic and rooted in the nervous system, many people do not realise that immobility or indecision in the face of threat is a natural reaction to stress.

Thus, society often misinterprets it as passivity, compliance, or even consent. The justice system expects every assault to involve screaming and visible struggle. Courts have rejected freeze responses as credible evidence because they do not match society’s narrow image of a ‘proper’ reaction to violence.

Society further weaponises this lack of acknowledgement. By twisting the survivor’s physiological response into evidence of consent, perpetrators, in most cases men, weaponise the very mechanism that kept the victim alive. ‘I didn’t know she didn’t want it because she didn’t resist,’ they say. ‘I was totally in the dark.’ The lack of a 'no' conveniently becomes a 'yes'. Or worse, they say Ek hate tali baje na (It takes two to make something happen), implying the survivor must have ‘enjoyed’ it or is now accusing out of vengeance.

In reality, abusers test boundaries or choose settings where the survivor feels socially constrained, where fear of embarrassment or retaliation for resistance is real. They later label the interaction as ‘mixed signals’. They accuse survivors of overreacting and reinterpret freeze as shyness.

But to think of it, whose burden is it, really? Is it that difficult to recognise when someone does not consent? From ‘Did I make sure there was clear, voluntary agreement?’ to ‘Did they clearly stop me?’, should the responsibility really fall on the person who is already frozen with fear? If someone truly respected you, would they push forward when it’s obvious the other person has gone passive? The responsibility lies with the one taking action, not with the body that is fighting to survive.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights defines consent as the free and voluntary agreement to engage in a specific act, made without coercion, manipulation, or fear, and grounded in respect for autonomy, freedom, and human dignity. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women emphasises that sexual violence laws should be based on the absence of freely given consent, not on proof of physical resistance.

The connection between consent and the freeze response therefore lies in the requirement of voluntariness. Consent presupposes the capacity to exercise free will and communicate agreement. A person experiencing a freeze response may appear passive or silent, yet that passivity does not reflect agreement. It rather reflects an inability to act. Assessments must consider the totality of circumstances, including power dynamics, coercion, and the subjective experience of threat. The key principle remains that consent cannot be inferred from immobility where fear has compromised a person’s capacity to choose freely.

High-profile survivors have spoken openly about freezing during assault. American actress Brooke Shields described how during her rape she ‘absolutely froze', while model Natassia Malthe said her body felt like ‘a dead person’, recounting the rape by Harvey Weinstein. Singer Lady Gaga has also shared that she ‘froze’ when she was sexually assaulted at 19. 

Yet courts have not always recognised this. In 2020, a man was acquitted of molesting another passenger on a Singapore Airlines flight. The woman reported that she 'froze', but the judge questioned why she had not alerted a crew member or freed herself from the assault. 

Legal systems around the world have historically failed to account for the freeze response in their definitions of consent. Until recently, French criminal law defined rape as a penetrative or oral sex act committed using ‘violence, coercion, threat, or surprise' without explicitly addressing consent. Prosecutors had to prove intent to rape to secure a conviction. In late 2025, following the high-profile Pelicot case, where a woman was repeatedly drugged and assaulted by her husband, France overhauled its rape law. The new law explicitly states that consent must be ‘freely given, informed, specific, and revocable’ and cannot be inferred from silence or lack of resistance. 

England and Wales have similarly updated judicial guidance to recognise that victims may respond to sexual assault in unexpected ways; there is no ‘normal’ reaction to rape. Consent-based rape laws already exist in countries including Sweden, Germany, Spain, and Britain, and the rise of the #MeToo movement since 2017 has prompted legislative reform in several jurisdictions.

While there is growing research and recognition of this issue, there is a lack of clear implementation of these insights in statutes and judicial practice. When systems designed to protect us instead scrutinise our bodies for the right kind of resistance, we internalise that scrutiny. We ask ourselves the same questions courts ask: Why didn’t I move faster? Why didn’t I scream? Did I somehow allow it?

For years, I didn’t allow myself this understanding. In a society that prizes decisiveness and visible courage, the freeze response can feel like shame. But acknowledging it changes everything. It is the beginning of self-compassion, the moment we remove stigma from our bodies’ natural survival instincts. 

You may learn how to help your nervous system move back to safety. But the public debate was never about healing. It is about victim blaming and power play. 

So if you have ever been asked the same question I was, know this: your body was not failing you. To my sisters, be kind to yourself. Trust your body. Your reaction, whatever it was, was survival. The fact that you are still standing, breathing, here means your body did exactly what it was designed to do: keep you alive. The solution is not to override this deeply protective mechanism but to educate society, the justice system, and ourselves. And on this Women’s Day, that truth deserves to be recognised.

Myat Moe Khaing is a graduate student of social work in Australia.