April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Or is it? It sounds responsible and serious. But it also sidesteps the truth. Because much of what we’re talking about—is actually rape. But society and the media don’t call it that, especially in headlines. They default to broader, safer language, as if the problem is the word and not the crime. I’ve talked to a number of people about this, and most wondered if it really matters. Spoiler alert: It does. Because this is the real issue in using the terms of rape vs sexual assault: “Rape” is exact, you know exactly what happened and can’t look away. “Sexual assault” is fuzzier, more vague, easier to say out loud in polite company. public.

But the word we should be building awareness around is left out of awareness campaigns and media coverage. This isn’t by accident—it’s by design.

Rape vs Sexual Assault: The Defense the Press Hides Behind

I’ve been asking a number of people about this, and the responses boil down to a carefully reasoned answer: “Sexual assault” is the legally accurate term. It reflects the actual charges filed. It avoids prejudging a case before conviction. It’s precision, not squeamishness.

And like most frustrating situations, there’s a kernel of truth buried in the bullshit. “Sexual assault” is a broader statutory category. Rape falls under it. In a strict legal sense, reporting the charge as filed is defensible journalism.

But that “defense” collapses under the slightest pressure.

When a woman is held at knifepoint and raped, and every detail of that event has been reported and confirmed, the headline of “sexual assault” in the headline isn’t precision. It is a choice. And choices have beneficiaries. Legal clarity belongs in the body of an article, where nuance lives. It isn’t a justification for blunting a headline when the facts are not in dispute.

So, here’s the tell: the media has no equivalent squeamishness about the word “murder.” Journalists use it before conviction. They use “robbery,” “kidnapping,” “assault,” “stabbing” — all legally imprecise at the charge stage, every single one used in headlines. No editor rewrites Man Stabbed at Bus Stop to Man Experienced Unlawful Bodily Contact at Transit Location.

Only this word gets watered down. Only this act gets its name taken away.

Rape: The “Violent” Word – So Offensive

The Pelicot trial in France made the stakes of the word choice of rape impossible to ignore. Gisèle Pelicot — who had been drugged and videotaped by her husband as dozens of men raped her over nearly a decade — sat in an Avignon courtroom while the presiding judge ruled that the videos of her assaults could not be described as rape. To use that word, he argued, would violate the defendants’ presumption of innocence. He ruled that footage should be called “sex scenes” instead.

The defendants and lawyers heard the tacit permission in that phrase and ran with it. One said he had entered “an agreed-upon scenario.” Another called it a “fantasy.” A third insisted he was not a rapist — just a man who had sex with a woman without her consent — as if those were different things. The wife of one defendant insisted that her husband could not be a rapist. When asked by the prosecution whether the word “rape” bothered her, replied: “It’s the word that is violent.”

Not the fact that her husband had raped an unconscious woman: the word itself offended her.

Pelicot sat in the courtroom, forced to listen silently to all of this. When it was finally her turn to speak, she left no room for interpretation. “Don’t talk to me about sex scenes,” she told the court. “These are rape scenes.” And when the broader pattern of denial threatened to swallow the whole proceeding, she said the thing that apparently needed saying out loud in a court of law: “Rape is rape.”

“Don’t talk to me about ‘sex scenes’. These are rape scenes.
Rape is rape.”

-Gisèle Pelicot

Who Runs the Rooms

The defendant’s wife wasn’t wrong; rape is a violent word. A violent word for a violent act. And men especially are disturbed by it (unless they too are a survivor, and then they’ll come right out and say it – I’ve never heard a male survivor say that they were ‘sexually assaulted.)

And men hold the majority of top editorial positions at major U.S. newspapers and media outlets. This has been documented repeatedly by journalism research organizations and newsroom diversity reports. The Authority Gap — Mary Ann Sieghart’s term for the persistent gap in how seriously women and men are taken in institutions — doesn’t disappear at the editorial desk. It shapes how everything is framed.

The word “rape” makes many people (like the rape defendant’s wife) uncomfortable in a way “sexual assault” does not. “Rape” names the act. It requires you to acknowledge exactly what was done. “Sexual assault” keeps it procedural — so clinical, so distant. It’s the difference between a word that lands in the body and a word that lands in the prefrontal cortex.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It doesn’t require a room full of editors who consciously want to protect perpetrators. It requires something much more banal: a room full of people whose discomfort with a word is never named, never examined, and therefore never overridden. Culture doesn’t need to be deliberate to be effective. It just needs to be unchallenged.

You Can’t Raise Awareness of What You Can’t Name

The Pelicot courtroom showed us exactly how this works in real time. The judge who banned the word “rape” was not trying to help the defendants escape justice. In his own mind, he was being procedurally correct. But procedural correctness in service of male comfort produced the same result that it always does: women’s experience was subordinated to men’s feelings about it. Every single one of the fifty-one defendants in that courtroom were ultimately convicted of rape. As it turned out, the word was not the problem. The reluctance to use it was. For more information, read our article: What is the Cost of Rebranding Rape?

When men who find the word “rape” uncomfortable are the ones making headline decisions, the word disappears from headlines. It isn’t complicated. It’s just not discussed. By refusing to name it, we may be robbing many people of recognizing exactly what has happened them, especially if it’s by someone they know. Because you can’t raise awareness of what you can’t name.

Rape vs Sexual Assault: Language Isn’t Neutral

Language is not neutral. Words are tools, and every tool serves someone.

The word “rape” produces a physiological and moral response in most people. Horror. Clarity. As it should. A visceral understanding that something serious and irreversible was done to another human being. That response matters. It’s appropriate. And it’s the foundation of accountability.

“Sexual assault” produces something different: analysis. Distance. A cognitive management of the event that allows a reader to process it without fully feeling it. That distance is not harmless. It is the same distance that allows a jury to acquit. It’s the same distance that allows society to ask what she was wearing.

Gisèle Pelicot understood this with precision. In her memoir A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, she writes of watching defendant after defendant deny what they had done despite overwhelming video evidence: “There were old men, bald men, men with paunches, men who were young and athletic… But they did share one thing: a sense of entitlement. An attitude of complete indifference to whatever anyone said or thought, because power had always been on their side.” That entitlement does not begin in the courtroom. It is installed long before — by a culture that has spent decades training everyone, including survivors, to reach for the easier, softer word.

Call It by Its Name

Giselele Pelicot knows what happened to her. She knows the word for it. She has lived with that word — the real one — in her body every day since. As does every survivor.

The question was never whether the paper’s lawyers could defend “sexual assault” as a technically accurate term. The question is whose comfort was the priority when that word was used, and whose experience was made smaller in the service of it.

Gisèle Pelicot chose to waive her anonymity and open her trial to the public because she understood that language shapes reality. She wanted the world to see, without euphemism, what had been done to her. She said it in the courtroom and in her memoir: the way we talk about rape, and the way men talk about women, matters.

And she also said what should not have needed saying: Rape is rape.

This is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Which means even the month set aside to confront this crime is named with the word we’re apparently more comfortable with.

The word “rape” isn’t sensationalist, nor inflammatory – it is specific. And precision is not pedantic – it’s protective. Because the right word is one of the few things that the press — and all of us — can offer a survivor that doesn’t cost a thing but can actually result in real-world action.

Call it by its name: Rape Awareness Month.