Your belief in this is based on what exactly? Your uneducated supposition that it seems that way to you? Women know the lay of the land, and that it is pretty likely that not only will they not be believed, but that they will then be attacked, inappropriately questioned, asked how they brought this upon themselves, what they were wearing, how drunk were they, etc.
"A couple of days ago a reporter for The Washington Post published an article she’d been researching and writing for three years. It’s a story about what happened 12 years ago to Amber Wyatt, a girl she’d gone to high school with who had been raped and who immediately reported it to fellow party-goers and the police. Her physical exam showed trauma consistent to rape and she had the semen of one of her attackers in her body. But despite all of that, her community, from law enforcement to fellow students and parents, actually turned on her, rather than bringing her attackers to justice. For a more detailed account of why that might be, read the article.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/?utm_term=.e823da746053
When interviewed for the Amber Wyatt story, former Fort Worth Police Department sergeant, Cheryl Johnson, said it was common practice to not pursue cases or for grand juries not to indict, despite strong evidence of a crime.“We had cases where there were photographs and confessions from the suspects that were no-billed,” Johnson told me in 2015 in the tidy living room of her Fort Worth home. One case in particular stuck with her: A man admitted to giving a woman drugs that would render her unconscious — and then raping her after she had passed out and photographing the act. The victim was sent the photographs of her own rape, which she turned over to police. Still, the grand jury decided not to indict.
Yes, women (and others) often feel humiliated and want to try to banish the experience from their lives by denying even to themselves that it ever happened, but knowing how people and women in particular who come forward get treated is also a huge factor. In the past couple of years in the US there were several high profile cases where a man pled guilty to rape and was given no jail time at all, just probation.
https://today.tamu.edu/2019/11/19/what-were-you-wearing-exhibit-explores-sexual-violence-myth/
The "What Were You Wearing" project at Texas A&M seeks to debunk the persistent myth that rape is related to women wearing provocative clothing. It shows the real outfits that many victims had on at the time of their rape, which mostly consist of t-shirts, shorts, sweat pants, and other totally unrevealing or sexy outfits. It illustrates just how deeply victim blaming goes. The persistent cultural narrative is that women bring rape upon themselves.
If not, why do we have the major social media hashtag campaign #BelieveWomen, indicating that women reporting sexual violence ought to be treated like anyone else reporting a crime - believed until such time that further investigation indicates that we shouldn't. It wouldn't be necessary if it weren't addressing a cultural issue.
