To See and Be Seen: Sexual Assault Survivors' Experiences Seeing Their Perpetrators in Court During Criminal Prosecution

The Emotional Impact of Sexual Assault Prosecution on Survivors

Studying how sexual assault prosecution impacts survivors is challenging because, as noted previously, this is an infrequent event in the criminal legal system. Qualitative observational studies of sexual assault trials have been a common method in this uncommon literature because they are public events that can be sampled and documented. A consistent finding across such studies is that sexual assault survivors are asked difficult, and often embarrassing and humiliating, questions by both the prosecutors and the defense attorneys. The prosecution must establish the elements of the crime, so they must ask victims to describe the specific sexual acts that occurred in detail (Konradi, 1996a, 1996b, 1999; Matoesian, 1993, 2001; Smith & Skinner, 2012, 2017; Temkin et al., 2018). Defense attorneys evoke common rape myths, which are “prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists” (Burt, 1980 p. 217; see also Edwards et al., 2011; Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994), in their questioning to attack victims' personal character, credibility, and culpability. For example, defense attorneys try to establish that victims are untruthful about small events surrounding the assault (e.g., the exact time events happened) as a tactic to suggest they are also lying about the rape itself (Smith & Skinner, 2012, 2017; Temkin et al., 2018). Similarly, defense counsels assert that assaults by spouses, dating partners, or other people known to the victim are not really rape, but are instead consensual acts that were mutually enjoyed (Konradi, 1996a, 1996b, 1999; Matoesian, 1993, 2001; Smith & Skinner, 2012, 2017; Temkin et al., 2018). Taken together, these observational studies suggest that sexual assault trials are likely to be emotionally upsetting experiences for survivors.

To date, few studies have captured survivors' internal experiences (i.e., their feelings, thoughts, and interpretations) of testifying in court. In a landmark exception, Konradi (1996a, 1996b, 1999, 2007) conducted qualitative interviews with 32 sexual assault survivors, 90% of whom were White women and 59% were sexually assaulted by a stranger, about their experiences testifying in court. Consistent with the findings of court observational studies, Konradi's thematic analysis revealed that survivors found it emotionally difficult to describe what happened in the assault in such detail and to respond to attacks by defense attorneys (Konradi, 1999). In addition, they described how “simply” seeing the perpetrator in court was a significant source of distress (Konradi, 1999). Survivors tried to suppress these feelings of distress by focusing intently on the questions asked of them and shifting their gaze to avoid looking at the perpetrator (Konradi, 1999). For some survivors, seeing their offenders upset them so deeply, it drew their attention and concentration away from the questions they were being asked, and they struggled with their testimony. Konradi's work is unique in this small literature for its insights as to why court is distressing and how victims become agentic strategists in mediating that process.

The Shifting Landscape in Sexual Assault Prosecution Practices

In the years since Konradi's research on sexual assault prosecution, the landscape has shifted with respect to US policies on the criminal prosecution of sexual assault. In 2014, the US White House Council on Women and Girls denounced the under-prosecution of sexual assault and highlighted multiple problems that must be addressed, including the national “rape kit backlog”:

Rape kits – which collect forensic evidence of a rape or sexual assault, including the perpetrator's DNA – can be vital to successful prosecutions. Once tested, an offender's DNA can be matched with other offender samples in the FBI's national database [CODIS], thus identifying assailants and linking crimes together. Unfortunately, however, many rape kits are still sitting on the shelves, either ignored or waiting to be tested. (p. 2)

In the early-to-mid 2000s, multiple investigative reporting projects and research studies revealed that police were not routinely submitting rape kits/SAKs for forensic DNA testing (Campbell & Feeney, 2023). It has been standard practice since the 1980s to tell victims that if they want they want to report to police and pursue prosecution, then they should go to a hospital emergency department to have a SAK collected. These lengthy, invasive medical exams include: plucking head and pubic hairs; obtaining fingernail scrapings in the event the assailant was scratched during the attack; swabbing the genitals, anus, mouth, breasts, and/or other body areas to collect semen, blood, or saliva; and photographing injuries (Corrigan, 2013; Yu et al., 2022). Law enforcement personnel are supposed to submit the completed kits to a forensic crime laboratory for DNA analysis, which can identify offenders in stranger-perpetrated assaults, confirm identify in known-offender assaults, and discover suspected serial rapists through DNA matches across cases (Campbell & Feeney, 2023; Lovell & Langhinrichsen-Rohling, 2023). However, for decades, police have not been submitting rape kits for testing, and instead have been putting them in storage, creating a national backlog of approximately 300,000–400,000 untested SAKs (Strom et al., 2021). Stockpiles of untested SAKs from both stranger- and nonstranger-perpetrated sexual assault have been discovered in large metropolitan areas, as well as suburban communities, small cities, and rural counties (Campbell & Feeney, 2023). Many of the largest backlogs (e.g., 10,000 or more kits in a single site) have been in cities with higher proportions of Black and/or Latinx residents, many of whom are economically disenfranchised (Lovell et al., 2023).

Given the potential value of DNA evidence in both stranger- and nonstranger-perpetrated sexual assaults, the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) created the national Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) program in 2015 to fund testing backlogged SAKs and re-opening and adjudicating these cold cases (BJA, 2015). To date, this program has allocated $250 million dollars for testing, staffing, training, and technical assistance, distributed across 75 grantees in 40 states and Washington, DC (DOJ, 2022b; Nadolny et al., 2024). Research with some of the first jurisdictions to receive these funds revealed that testing backlogged kits yields high rates of forensic DNA matches and high rates of serial sexual offending by both stranger and nonstranger offenders (Campbell & Feeney, 2023; Lovell & Langhinrichsen-Rohling, 2023). Based on these testing results, prosecutors in these jurisdictions are beginning to re-open cold cases that have been dormant for years (Lovell & Langhinrichsen-Rohling, 2023). Preliminary studies of these cold case prosecutions have found that survivors were unaware that their kits were never tested, but most were willing to participate in prosecution to try once again to protect others from being harmed by their perpetrators (Campbell & Feeney, 2023). A critical next step in this literature is to understand survivors' focal concerns about testifying in these cases, both to advance research on sexual assault prosecution and to inform policy and practice as more SAKI communities progress past the stage of testing backlogged kits.

The Current Study

The growing practice of reopening cold cases based on DNA testing results raises complex questions for sexual assault survivors and their participation in criminal legal system. Because it is almost always necessary for survivors to testify if a case advances to prosecution, victims will have to see their offenders in court, and perpetrators in the USA have a legal right to see and confront their accusers (Harris, 2024). This fundamental dynamic is understood, accepted, and routinized by legal practitioners, but for survivors, seeing their perpetrators in court is anything but routine—it is a traumatic reminder of a traumatic event they endured (Konradi, 1999). This routine practice between victims and perpetrators is distressing, but in instances of cold case prosecutions, survivors must see their perpetrators in court after significant delays caused by the very system that now requires them to face their offenders.

Therefore, as part of a long-term community-based participatory action research project, we had the opportunity to explore survivors' experiences of seeing their perpetrators in court. This project took place in a large midwestern city that discovered a backlog of approximately 11,000 untested rape kits in 2009. This city is distinctive in the USA as most of its residents are Black/African American (79%), and there have been long-standing and continuing tensions between the city police and residents due to decades of over-policing and excessive use of force (Campbell et al., 2015, 2022). Our research team has been collaborating with this jurisdiction since its untested kits were found to document how they are resolving those cases and changing their practices (Campbell et al., 2015). We have studied their process of testing backlogged kits and then re-opening cases based on DNA results (Campbell et al., 2015). In this phase of the project, we had the opportunity to interview 32 survivors in the first cohort of cold cases that advanced to prosecution, most of whom were Black women. As survivors described this journey, many singled out how difficult it was to see their perpetrators in court. These reflections were distinct from their descriptions of their interactions with legal personnel (i.e., prosecutors and defense attorneys). Moreover, these reflections were largely distinct from how they felt about giving testimony in preliminary hearings, trials, and sentencing hearings. In other words, for these survivors, their experiences of “simply” seeing the perpetrators in court were salient, significant, and noteworthy. Therefore, our aim in this specific study was to identify themes within these narratives and describe how seeing and being seen by the perpetrators affected these survivors.

Research Design

We used a qualitative transcendental phenomenological research design that seeks to identify common features of a shared lived experience (Creswell & Poth, 2025), which in this study was the survivors' experience of participating in a “cold case” sexual assault prosecution that was re-opened based on DNA testing results. Consistent with that approach, our aim was to develop descriptive depictions of this experience from the participants' point of view (Creswell & Poth, 2025). All members of our research team have extensive experience working with sexual assault survivors from community volunteer experiences, consultation projects, and/or prior research projects. Our research team has worked closely with this community and its victim advocacy agency, prosecutor’s office, police department, forensic science laboratory, and survivor activist groups since the discovery of its untested SAKs in 2009 (Campbell et al., 2015). Over these 15 years, we have developed deep knowledge about this city and its approach to resolving untested SAKs and cold case investigations and prosecution. However, our positionality as middle- and upper middle-class, highly educated women (of different races, ethnicities, and gender and sexual identities) is markedly different than our research participants, most of whom were economically disenfranchised Black women. Throughout the project, our research team explicitly discussed these power dynamics, and we individually and collectively wrote reflexive memos to interrogate our positionalities and how they shaped our work (see Campbell et al., 2023a our collective positionality statement). Specific to the issues explored in this study, we challenged each other to consider how survivors might express their power and agency throughout the prosecution process given that most did not have privileged social identities, as did many of our team members. Therefore, we discussed how we should be particularly attentive to how the survivors themselves defined and enacted their power.

Sample

We defined the target population for this study as sexual assault survivors who (1) were 18 years or older at the time this study was conducted; (2) had been sexually assaulted in Detroit, MI; (3) had reported the assault to the police and had a SAK collected, but the police did not submit the kit for DNA testing at the time the crime was reported; (4) were notified that their SAK had been found in the city's backlog and sent for forensic testing, and that testing produced a DNA hit and actionable leads to re-open their case; (5) participated in the re-investigation of their case; and (6) participated in the criminal prosecution of their case by testifying in court proceedings. Over 20 months of recruitment, 112 survivors met these eligibility criteria.

Per our local institution's IRB, recruitment of eligible survivors could not take place until after their cases were adjudicated so as not to interfere with open criminal proceedings. Per the confidentiality policies of the prosecutor's office and the city's sexual assault victim service agency, the names and contact information of the 112 eligible survivors could not be shared with the research team (i.e., we could not contact eligible participants directly). Therefore, the victim service agency advocates agreed to reach out to survivors to explain the study and request their participation after all phases of their court cases were completed (see Campbell et al., 2022 for recruitment protocol). The advocates cautioned that it may be difficult to reconnect with survivors, as many had multiple changes to their addresses and phone numbers throughout the prosecution of their cases, and some may have changed this information again after their cases were closed.

The victim advocates attempted to contact all 112 eligible survivors and successfully connected with 44 survivors (39% of eligible survivors): 33 whose cases ended in guilty pleas, nine in trial convictions, and two in trial acquittals. The advocates were unable to reach 68 survivors due to changed/unavailable contact information or no returned calls (61% of eligible survivors): 35 whose cases ended guilty pleas, 19 in trial convictions, and 14 in trial acquittals. The advocates were significantly less likely to be able to reach survivors whose legal cases ended in a trial acquittal relative to those whose cases ended in guilty plea or trial conviction: c² [2, N = 112] = 7.85, p < .05 (power = .82 for medium effect size; power = .99 for large effect size). Of the 44 survivors who could be reached, N = 32 agreed to be interviewed (73% of eligible and reachable participants; 29% of all eligible cases). In the final sample of N = 32 survivors, n = 23 participants (72% of the interviewed sample) had their case adjudicated by a guilty plea, n = 8 (25%) by trial conviction, and n = 1 (3%) by trial acquittal. There were no differences between those who agreed and declined to be interviewed based on their legal case outcome: c ² [2, N = 44] = 1.86, ns (power = .41 for medium effect size; power = .85 for large effect size).

All N = 32 participants identified as women and, consistent with the demographics of this city, most identified as Black/African American (n = 28; 87.5%), three as White (9.1%), and one as multiracial (3.1%). The participants’ current average age was 41.55 years old (SD = 8.74; median = 41; range  = 25–60 years old) and their average age at the time of the assault was 23.06 years old (SD = 7.05, median = 21; range  = 13–45 years old). The participants had been sexually assaulted on average 18.50 years ago (SD = 6.36, median = 20 years, range  = 6–28 years ago), which is consistent with prior research on rape kit backlogs (Lovell et al., 2018). All survivors experienced penetrative criminal sexual conduct, which would commonly be referred to as “rape,” though in the research interviews, survivors used the terms “rape” and “sexual assault” interchangeably. Most women were sexually assaulted by a stranger (n = 23 of N = 32; 72% of the total sample), and n = 9 were sexually assaulted by someone known to them (e.g., a friend or current/past intimate partner; 28% of the total sample). There were no significant associations between the victim-offender relationship (i.e., stranger- vs. nonstranger-perpetrated assaults) and victim demographics, other assault features, or case outcomes.

Procedures

The interviews were conducted in-person at the sexual assault victim service agency or by phone, based on survivors’ preferences (see Campbell et al., 2022 for details regarding our trauma-informed interviewer training methods and interview protocol). The interviews lasted on average 80 minutes (SD = 29 minutes), with a range of 36‒171 minutes, and all participants consented to audio recording. Victim advocates were available to support participants if they became distressed during or after an interview, but none of the survivors requested this assistance. Participants were compensated $50 for their time and offered the agency’s community resources brochure. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and checked for accuracy. All procedures were approved by the IRB of Michigan State University.

Per the requirements of this study's funder, all data collection instruments, consent forms, de-identified data, codebook, and a secondary user's guide were archived in the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, maintained by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Details regarding how the data were prepared for archiving and how our research team adapted open science practices for sensitive qualitative research can be found in Campbell et al. (2023a, 2023b).

Interview Guide

We wrote a semi-structured qualitative interview to guide the discussion with participants about the assault they experienced and their court experience (see Campbell et al., 2022 for protocol). Because these were cold cases prosecutions and the assaults occurred many years ago, we drew upon the Fisher's cognitive interview methods (Fisher et al., 1989), which emphasizes the importance of communication, social dynamics, and context reinstatement to create a safe space for participants to mentally recreate the original event. The interviews began with conversation prompts to establish trust between the interviewer and participant, and to provide survivors with an opportunity to ask questions about the project. Then, the interviewers asked survivors to describe the assault itself (i.e., context reinstatement). These narratives were vivid and highly detailed, which may be due to the fact that these survivors had discussed their assaults multiple times throughout pre-trial preparations and court hearings.

To capture participants' experiences during court hearings, we began that section of the interview with a context reinstatement question, “What happened in the prosecution of your case?” and participants were encouraged to “walk through” each step in the process. Interviewers then asked follow-up questions to elicit survivors' thoughts, feelings, statements, and behaviors (e.g., “what were you thinking and feeling when you walked to the witness stand to testify,” “what were you feeling when the assailant looked at you while you were testifying?”). After this narrative section, all participants were asked four questions: (1) What was the outcome of your case? (2) What was it like for you to participate in the prosecution of your case? (3) How were you treated during the prosecution of your case? (4) Is there anything you wish had happened differently during the prosecution of your case?

Data Analysis

We selected Braun and Clarke's (2006, 2022) reflexive approach to thematic analysis as our qualitative analytic method because it is well suited for identifying content themes and developing rich descriptions of those themes. Braun and Clarke (2006, 2022) outlined several core issues to be explicated prior to and throughout thematic analysis. First, regarding the scope of this analysis, the broader “data corpus” included all interview excerpts in which the survivors described their experiences participating in the prosecution of their cases (e.g., their pre-hearing preparation meetings as well as their testimony in preliminary hearings, trials, sentencing hearings), and the “data set” for this analysis was the subset of narratives in which survivors described seeing their perpetrators in court. Second, regarding our guiding epistemological framework, we adopted a pragmatic, realist approach in which participants' words were assumed to reflect their meaning and experiences. Third, regarding our analytic approach, we chose inductive, bottom-up coding to identify content themes that described common as well as novel experiences across participants.

With these foundational decisions established, we then followed Braun and Clarke's (2006, 2022) six phases of thematic analysis. We familiarized ourselves with the data throughout interviewing as we used a team process to debrief and review transcripts on a rolling basis. In addition, we pulled all interview excerpts in which survivors described “seeing” their perpetrators in court and read those segments multiple times. We generated initial codes inductively by assigning short descriptive codes to text segments (e.g., “court was first time saw offender and learned identity,” “seeing offender triggered fear”). We then searched for themes by sorting and condensing the codes into higher-order themes. For example, we grouped all initial codes in which survivors discussed fear and terror when seeing the perpetrator (e.g., statements regarding feeling afraid and scared, statements regarding physical symptoms such as shaking or hyperventilating) into the higher order theme, “To See is to Re-Experience.” Next, we reviewed and evaluated the adequacy of the themes by assembling illustrative quote excerpts for each theme, and then re-reviewing the data set as a whole to assess whether the themes captured the full data set. During this step, we noticed that all three emergent themes had both “presence of” and “resistance to” examples, in which some survivors described the theme as applying to them and others described ways the theme did not apply or how they did not engage in the behaviors described by that theme. We decided to retain a three-theme organization (rather than create additional themes that reflected the “resistance” narratives) because these counter-narratives provided richness and depth to the concepts identified in each theme. With this organization of the findings settled, we defined and named the themes and finalized the selection of quote excerpts to ensure diverse representation of survivors. Finally, we wrote this textual report of our findings, which included bringing some details about the survivors' assault experiences into the narrative for context.

Theme 1: To See Is to Identify

Most survivors who described how seeing the perpetrator in court impacted them discussed the concept of identification (n = 24). Identification had different meanings depending on whether they were assaulted by someone they knew (i.e., a nonstranger-perpetrated sexual assault) or whether they were attacked by someone previously unknown (i.e., a stranger-perpetrated sexual assault). As shown in Table 1, all n = 6 survivors of nonstranger rape discussed the concept of identification. Seeing their assailants in court did not reveal their identities (which they already knew) but instead court was a significant turning point whereby they could publicly name and identify these individuals as rapists. In all six cases, these perpetrators had been friends of the survivors, who unexpectedly and violently betrayed their trust and “flipped on them” (Participant S3) by drugging them, luring them, abducting them, and/or breaking into their homes to sexually assault them.

These survivors described how seeing their former friends in court brought up feelings of dread and avoidance. For example, one survivor who had been raped 10 years prior by a friend who lured her into an abandoned building under the pretense of helping her look for a new place to rent said, “honestly, I had to face the person who did that to me again, so that was a little stressful” (Participant S3). Likewise, another woman who was assaulted 22 years ago by a friend who knocked her out and dragged her into his garage to rape her said: “It was scary and I had to look at him. … And it was a real emotional thing” (Participant S12). What they had to face was acknowledging that: “[he was] not a good person” (Participant S6), “[he was a] monstrous creature” (Participant S3), and “[he was] a sociopath… when that mask come off… he’s animalistic and you looking like, ‘this is the same person?’” (Participant S11). These survivors felt they were exposing their perpetrators for who they truly were, and everyone else in the courtroom was also finally seeing them as rapists.

Many survivors of stranger-perpetrated sexual assaults (n = 18) described how seeing their perpetrators in court was literally an act of identification. Some victims did get a clear, memorable look at their offenders during the assault, but they did not know their names or identities. Eventually, their cases were solved by DNA evidence, and criminal prosecution provided an opportunity to link a name with the memory of the face they had been carrying for years. As one survivor who was abducted and raped at gunpoint by a stranger 10 years prior explained:

That was my first time seeing him again when I went back to court … and to know his name. And I know he was probably like he probably don't even remember it. But he remembers my face because he was looking at me. And I looked dead at him. And he was shocked to see me in the courtroom. (Participant S8)

Other survivors of stranger rape we interviewed did not get a good look at their assailants during the assault, and thus court provided their first opportunity to see the person who had harmed them. One survivor who had been abducted and raped 22 years ago noted: “I didn't even know his name until we start coming to the court. I didn't even remember how this man looked” (Participant S27). Another survivor described how court was the first time she saw her rapist because he had been masked when he pulled a gun on her 22 years ago and dragged her from her car to rape her:

Seeing him for the very first time, yeah, seeing the face because I never knew what this man looked like. I didn't know of his build, stature, none of that. I finally seen him for the first time. That was like, oh wow. I said, he's younger than me, I think. (Participant S31)

Whereas this survivor did not have choice in whether she would see and identify the offender, some stranger rape survivors we interviewed decided not to look at their perpetrators in court. These survivors made a conscious decision not to learn the identity of their offenders, and this act of resistance was a way of protecting themselves. For example, one survivor who had been abducted and raped at gun point 10 years ago described how she deliberately averted her gaze throughout court so she would not have to see the perpetrator, “I tried not to look at him, even when his attorney was talking. I only tried to look at my attorney and the judge … I didn’t need to see him … for my own protection” (Participant S5). Similarly, another survivor who had been abducted and raped at gun point 24 years prior explained how she was angry that the prosecution of her case tried to force upon her his face and identity, and why she resisted looking at the offender:

I hated it. I absolutely hated it. I really wish they could have done it without me. I didn't look at him in the courtroom, not once. I still can't actually tell you what he looks like, I didn't look at him. I didn't want to remember that face. I just looked at the prosecutor the whole time. I told her how I felt before I went in, and she said, just keep your eyes on me, and that's what I did. (Participant S18)

Theme 2: To See Is to Re-Experience

Of the n = 27 survivors in this focal analysis, n = 10 discussed how they re-experienced terror and fear upon seeing the perpetrator in court. In these narratives, survivors clearly differentiated between the distress they felt testifying about rape on the stand, and the emotions and bodily reactions they experienced by “simply” seeing their perpetrators in court. Thus, this second theme is specific to that latter experience, and there were no substantive differences within this theme depending on whether the survivors were assaulted by a stranger (n = 6) or by a nonstranger (n = 4; see Table 1).

For example, one survivor we interviewed was raped by a friend 22 years ago. He had ingratiated himself with the victim’s family, who saw him as a polite young man and potential boyfriend, and thus, they encouraged her to spend time with him. One night he broke into her home and raped her in what was apparently a pre-planned and well-executed attack that shocked the survivor and her family. Decades later, seeing this person in court caused the survivor intense fear and nausea: “When I first saw him I just felt fear from my toes all the way up. As he was talking I got nauseous. I felt nauseous” (Participant S22). Likewise, a survivor of a stranger-perpetrated rape that happened 20 years ago described how she was frightened by seeing the perpetrator and having to walk near him to take the stand to testify: “I had to walk past him when I came off the witness [stand] … and I almost peed on myself when I walked past him” (Participant S4). Another survivor we interviewed who was robbed, abducted, and raped 24 years ago by a stranger described at length how seeing the rapist in court tore through her body:

I was just shaking. I didn't mean to be, but my teeth were chattering, and it's like going into shock. My knees are knocking or I'm grating my teeth, I'm getting a headache because I'm grating my teeth so hard. Like I just got to get out of here and get away from this. That was when I first manifested, I thought, “Oh, this can manifest itself in a physical way” …having to sit there and look at him like I want to throw up now…I felt…really shaky, like, am I going into shock, like, what's going on? Like I had a physical reaction to it. (Participant S25)

However, some survivors we interviewed described how they sought to mitigate the negative impacts of seeing their perpetrators in court. In these instances, survivors noted that they did indeed feel fear when seeing their rapists, but they consciously resisted re-traumatization by hiding or managing that distress. One survivor we interviewed, who was abducted by a stranger when she was a teenager 26 years ago, described how seeing the perpetrator in court made her feel:

Participant S28: It was us going to court and me seeing him, that was… awful. I mean, because the hate… the hatred that I felt coming off of that man was probably one of the worst feelings I've ever had.

Theme 3: To See Is to Intimidate

Most survivors we interviewed noted that they did not look at the offenders for very long (or at all) because doing so was upsetting, and most also recounted that their perpetrators looked at them only briefly as well. However, a small number of survivors (n = 5 total; n = 3 survivors of stranger rape, n = 2 survivors of nonstranger rape, see Table 1) described how their perpetrators stared at them intensely and purposely for prolonged periods of time in ways that they felt were intimidating and threatening. Although this was a less common than the experiences captured in Themes 1 and 2, it was distinctive in some survivors' interviews and merited exploration.

Two of the survivors who were raped by former friends described how their offenders tried to intimidate them in court. For example, the “polite” young man who tried to persuade a victim and her family that he was good boyfriend material (Participant S22 quoted above) tried to intimate the survivor in court years later when he was prosecuted for sexually assaulting her:

His body language was like he was trying to intimidate me. He tried to intimidate me during the preliminary hearing …[the court guard] positioned herself with her gun because he was up there and …it seem liked he was coming closer [to the survivor]. (Participant S22)

However, two survivors described how they used their own gaze as a means of asserting their power. Both examples occurred during the sentencing phase of these victims' cases, after the perpetrators had already plead guilty, and thus it felt safer for survivors to assert their power. For example, the nonstranger rape survivor quoted above (Participant S22) who described how the offender tried to intimidate her during the preliminary hearing, noted that he tried to do so again during his sentencing hearing. She was allowed to give a victim impact statement at that hearing, and that was when she used her gaze to reclaim her power, which she described as such:

And then with the victim impact statement he stared me down. He tried to stare into my soul. And I just stared right back into his eyes and stared back in his soul. “What you going to do now? What you going to do?”. (Participant S22)