Sexual Assault Awareness Month (#SAAM) is closing out. But before it does, it’s worth asking the harder question: language matters in sexual violence—so why do we keep avoiding the words that describe it? Because the words we use don’t just describe the crime. They shape how we understand it.

Public discussions are formed primarily by men in positions of power. Editors, judges and politicians have largely replaced the term “rape” in newspapers, courtrooms and headlines with the banal, insipid moniker of “sexual assault.” And although the substitution may feel neutral, more clinical, it is far, far from the same.

In conversations about sexual violence, language matters more than we admit. “Sexual assault” is a legal umbrella with several levels of severity, covering everything from a grabbed wrist (must be proven to have sexual intent) to penetrative rape. And treating those as interchangeable is frankly, absurd. And does grave disservice to survivors. It allows the listener or reader to minimize the event in their mind, essentially to look away — a gift to the perpetrator. Two stories from the last several months show what that gift looks like in real life.

The Pelicot Trial: Rape is Rape

The Pelicot trial shows exactly why language matters in sexual violence. The horror of the trial in France has been widely publicized. For nearly a decade, Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife Gisèle (now 73) into unconsciousness and recruited strangers from an online forum called à son insu — “without her knowledge” — to come to their home and rape her unconscious body while he filmed. By the time of the trial, fifty other men sat in the dock alongside him. Gisèle was raped at least 92 times by 72 different men (but “only” the 51 could by positively identified in the videos. Catalogued by Dominique himself, the videos were shown in court for hours.

During one of the most heinous rape trials in history, the judge repeatedly referred to the videos as “sex scenes.” When she finally got on the stand herself, Gisèle corrected him. These were not sex scenes. A sex scene can imply consent. These were rape scenes of an unconscious woman who had no idea what was happening, let alone being able to consent – which she certainly would not have done.

As she noted in her memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Must Change Sides, she was adamant, as we all should be: “Rape is rape.”

That was not a trivial moment. An officer of the court — the authority in the room, the institution charged with naming the crime — leaned into the more innocuous phrase. It took the victim in the witness chair, the grandmother whose unconscious body had been raped hundreds of times by 72 men on video, to call the court to reality.

The defense teams were even worse. Defense attorneys argued that their clients were not rapists because they hadn’t intended to commit rape. One of them, Guillaume de Palma, told reporters: “you don’t need to have obtained the victim’s consent necessarily to ensure that it’s not rape.” Several defendants framed what they did as a “sexual game” — Dominique had told them his wife liked to pretend to be asleep. One defendant, looking at video footage of himself raping an unconscious woman, said: “It’s not me in the video. It’s my body, but not my brain.”

The defense for some of the accused tried to blur the line—suggesting ambiguity, consent-by-proxy, or lack of intent. These are not edge cases. These were the working theories of the defense — of a crime that is rarely caught on camera, but in this case was filmed, catalogued, and watched on a courtroom screen — can still not be rape if the man performing it didn’t consciously label it that way in his mind.

But Gisèle herself named it anyway. She waived her anonymity, she opened the trial to the public, and on a daily basis, refused to allow the court to use the diluted terms. Her insistence on the actual word — over and over and over again, against an entire legal system that wanted the easier, softer way — is much of why the case became what it became. Why should the victim have to fight so hard after the fact to ensure that the terminology is accurate?

Important postscript: this is not a feminist cause – because anyone can be raped. Just ask any man who’s terrified of going to prison.

The “Online Rape Academy”

In March, CNN published a months-long investigation into a porn-hosting site called Motherless.com and associated communities. The reporting was credited in part to German investigative journalists Isabell Beer and Isabel Ströh, whose earlier work first surfaced the network.

CNN found that Motherless hosts more than 20,000 videos tagged as “sleep content” — women filmed unconscious, often by partners, often after being drugged. The tags include #passedout and #eyecheck — the latter referring to men lifting the closed eyelids of sedated women on camera to confirm they are fully out before assaulting them. From that ecosystem, the CNN team traced their way into a now-defunct Telegram group called “Zzz” — roughly 1,000 men actively coaching each other on which sedatives to use, how to dose, how to evade toxicology windows, how to film, how to sell footage. Another Telegram network the German journalists documented had up to 73,000 members.

Some men sold “sleeping liquids” — shipped worldwide, $175 a bottle — with the assurance “your wife won’t feel anything and won’t remember anything.” Others livestreamed assaults of their own wives for $20 a viewer, taking instructions from paying members in real time on how to proceed for themselves.

Online headlines claimed that 62 million men “attended” an online rape academy, completely muddying the waters of the real crimes. That figure was inflated — 62 million was the total February traffic to the entire porn site, not the count of men in the coaching community. Fact-checkers corrected it. But the discussion then pivoted to debating the inflated number vs actual attendees – and that became the story.

The pivot is the same move as the courtroom. The story stops being men coaching each other on how to rape their wives and becomes a debate about a statistic. We’re off and running in a different direction. As the result, the crime gets harder to see. The word gets harder to say.

So, it wasn’t 62 million. But it was still more than zero. So what number is the acceptable number?

Language Matters in Sexual Violence – The Architecture

In the work that we do surrounding coercive control and personal safety; language is not just the wrapper around the crime — it’s one of the tools used to commit it. Messaging, reframing one thing as another is a means to confuse and obfuscate — we know that words matter…a lot.

Men who reframe drugging their wives as a “sexual game” don’t just lie about what they did. They build a private vocabulary inside their own minds that sanitizes it and enables them to keep doing it. A defense attorney who argues a man cannot be a rapist if he didn’t think of himself as one is offering a public version of the same vocabulary, sanctioned by the court. A newspaper that describes a forced penetrative act as “sexual assault” — alongside grabbed wrists and unwanted kisses, all under one umbrella term — completes the laundering. The act stays the same. The word gets more banal. The listener relaxes. And the next man does it more easily.

All of this is not accidental, and it’s not a translation problem. It is the same mechanism inside the home, inside the courtroom, and inside the headline. Blur the line, reframe the act, and the act itself becomes harder to recognize, harder to charge and ultimately, harder to convict,

Closing out #SAAM

When the crime is rape, say rape. When one person kills another, we don’t cloud the issue by diluting the word murder. It is unambiguous and unable to be defined any other way.

Rape isn’t “non-consensual sex.” It isn’t “sexual misconduct.” Nor “an incident.” And it’s definitely not the catchall “sexual assault” that slides a violent penetrative crime into the same kitchen junk drawer as everything else. The Motherless web site was so horrific that CNN finally had to call it exactly what it is: an Online Rape Academy (presumably because Online Sexual Assault Academy doesn’t quite have the same effect – see how that works?).

The women in the CNN investigation — the ones whose husbands drugged their nightly tea for years — described, almost uniformly, how hard it was for they themselves to use the word rape about what had happened in their own beds. The shame embedded in this particular form of abuse made them feel they should have known. That they should have caught it. And that not noticing was a kind of failure on their part.

That is what insipid language costs: It costs the survivors the actual term for what happened to them, it waters down the prosecution and it allows the world to yet again, look away.

Gisèle Pelicot used the word anyway. The Telegram networks did as well —in their own coded vocabulary — they knew exactly what they were teaching. The only people for whom the word seems to remain unspeakable are the ones who shape the public discourse and claim to be standing on the side of the women.

Sexual Assault Awareness Month is closing. But the crime it points to never stops – for men, for women, and for everyone.

Say the word.