Reality revealed : an interpretive phenomenological approach exploring the lived experiences of the costs of sexual victimization, disclosure, and navigating through the judicial process

Abstract

Individuals who have been sexually assaulted live with the financial, physical, psychological, and social costs of victimization long after the assault happens. This study utilizes a snowball sample to explore and detail the lived experiences of three (n=3) individuals who have experienced the phenomena of sexual victimization, disclosure and navigating the judicial system, through participant self-narrations from a first person lived experience perspective using survivor-centric language. The powerful and transformative qualitative research method of interpretive phenomenology was used to develop a deeper understanding that these costs affect all areas of a survivor’s life and endure indefinitely. Humanizing the phenomena and bringing the humane into the process has the potential to shift societal beliefs and attitudes that sexual assault is not a personal problem, rather a societal phenomenon of systemic oppression perpetuated against individuals, which are felt personally, but happen throughout multiple systems including the judicial, educational, and religious and cultural.