Understanding Victim Behaviour through the Lens of Forensic Psychology

Understanding Victim Behavior through the Lens of Forensic Psychology

She remembers the shoelaces. Faded blue. Frayed at one edge. A tiny white mark near the knot. She remembers the ceiling fan. The smell of damp concrete. A voice. But when they ask what time it happened, she cannot say. When they ask what happened first, she pauses. When they ask what came next, she whispers, “I don’t know.” A lawyer writes something down. Someone looks up. The question comes again, almost clinically: “How can you remember the colour of a shoelace but not the order of what happened?” And suddenly, her memory is being tested against an invisible standard: the belief that a truthful memory should arrive as a clean sequence, complete with dates, order and certainty. But what if the mind does not preserve catastrophe that way? What if the detail that survives is not the detail the courtroom expects? This is the uncomfortable territory where trauma, memory and testimony meet. The central problem is not whether memory can be imperfect. It can. The deeper problem is what we conclude from that imperfection.

WHEN COHERENCE BECOMES CREDIBILITY

We trust stories that make sense. A beginning. A middle. An end. A clear sequence. Consistent details. No uncomfortable pauses. In a courtroom, that preference can become a dangerous cognitive shortcut: a coherent narrative feels credible, while gaps, altered details or uncertainty can feel like fabrication. This tendency can be described as coherence bias—the tendency to mistake narrative smoothness for truthfulness. Traumatic memory complicates that expectation. Memory is reconstructive, not reproductive. Under extreme stress, different aspects of an experience may not be equally accessible. Brewin, Dalgleish and Joseph’s dual representation theory offers one influential account: traumatic experiences may be represented both in a verbally accessible form and in a more automatically accessible form linked to situational and sensory cues. A person may therefore experience a memory as an image, sound, sensation or fragment without being able to immediately translate it into a neat chronological narrative. This is not a licence to treat every inconsistency as evidence of trauma. Nor does fragmented recall prove that an account is true. Memory science is not a truth detector. Its value is more modest—and more important. It tells us that imperfect recall is not synonymous with invented recall. A survivor may remember a smell more vividly than a date. A sound more clearly than a sequence. One terrifying moment with extraordinary precision while being unable to explain what happened immediately before it. The danger begins when fragmentation is mistaken for fabrication. A story can be rehearsed into order. A traumatic memory may not be.

WHEN THE LAW UNDERSTANDS WHAT WE FORGET

This problem is not invisible to Indian law. Indian courts have, over decades, cautioned against judging sexual-assault survivors through simplistic expectations of how a “real” victim should behave. Judicial reasoning has recognised that delayed disclosure, minor discrepancies, fear, shame, social stigma and reluctance to report can have understandable explanations, and that an account should not be discarded merely because it does not conform to an imagined script of victimhood. That matters because it reveals something larger than a legal rule: The law has, at important moments, recognised that behaviour has a psychology.

The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 carries this insight into procedure. Sections 24–26 establish safeguards for recording a child’s statement, including recording in a place where the child feels safe, avoiding direct contact with the accused, using child-sensitive procedures and providing for the presence of a parent or trusted person in the circumstances specified by the Act. Section 25 also requires the Magistrate to record the child’s statement as spoken. The wider Act contains further protections concerning the child’s testimony in court. These provisions are usually described as safeguards for children. They are also, indirectly, safeguards for testimony. They acknowledge a simple truth: the conditions in which a vulnerable person remembers and speaks matter. Yet outside such safeguards, a survivor may encounter a chain of retellings—initial disclosure, police questioning, medical examination, judicial statement and cross-examination. Every repetition can become another opportunity to search for inconsistency. And here is the irony: We ask a traumatised person to remember repeatedly, then scrutinise the differences that repeated remembering can expose. The statute has begun absorbing psychological insight. The question is whether courtroom culture has absorbed it deeply enough.

THE BODY THAT SAYS “FREEZE”

We understand fight. We understand flight. But there is another response that remains dangerously misunderstood: Freeze. Tonic immobility is an involuntary defensive response involving temporary motor inhibition under extreme threat. It is not conscious cooperation. It is not consent. It is not a measurement of how much a person “really” resisted. And yet one of the most instinctive questions after sexual assault is: “Why didn’t you fight?” Research makes that question less simple than it sounds. In a study of 298 women who sought care after sexual assault, 70% reported significant tonic immobility and 48% reported extreme tonic immobility during the assault. The study also found associations between tonic immobility and later PTSD and severe depression. Think about the contradiction. The body freezes. The courtroom asks why the person did not run. The voice disappears. The courtroom asks why the person did not scream. The nervous system responds to overwhelming danger. The observer interprets the absence of resistance as a behavioural choice. This is precisely where forensic psychology becomes essential. It does not tell a court what verdict to reach. It tells us that human responses to extreme threat do not always resemble the responses spectators expect. There is no single choreography of survival. And the absence of an expected response cannot, by itself, become evidence that violence did not occur.

THE PRICE OF THE PERFECT STORY

Perhaps the most disturbing consequence of coherence bias appears after the first telling. A survivor learns, directly or indirectly, what a “credible” victim is supposed to sound like. So, the next time the story is told, uncertainty may disappear. “I don’t remember” becomes “I think it happened this way.” A confusing sequence becomes a neat chronology. A blank space becomes a guessed detail. This does not necessarily mean the survivor has decided to lie. Human beings naturally try to impose order on confusing experiences—especially when they discover that uncertainty may be treated as dishonesty. That creates a terrible paradox: In demanding a perfectly coherent story, we may encourage people to make imperfect memories sound perfect. That is why the method of obtaining testimony matters. Research behind the NICHD investigative interview approach places strong emphasis on open-ended prompts, free recall and explicitly allowing children to say that they do not know or do not remember, and to correct an interviewer. Such methods are designed to reduce the pressure created by leading or recognition-based questioning and to improve the quality of information obtained.

The principle reaches beyond childhood cases: Do not force memory into the shape of the question. Let the witness describe what the memory actually contains. Trauma-informed training for investigators and judges, careful preservation of early accounts, reduction of unnecessary repetition and appropriate use of recorded testimony can all move the system in that direction. The goal is not to abandon scrutiny. Justice requires scrutiny. The goal is to replace intuitive suspicion with informed evaluation. A courtroom should be rigorous enough to question testimony without demanding that trauma first make itself aesthetically coherent.

THE SHOELACES

Return to the witness. The shoelaces are still blue. The white mark is still near the knot. She still cannot tell us what time it happened. At the beginning, that missing time looked like a flaw. Now it should look like a question. Not: “Why can’t she remember?” But: “What does psychology tell us about how people remember under extreme threat?” That distinction matters. A vivid detail is not automatically proof. A missing detail is not automatically deception. Tears are not proof. The absence of tears is not proof. Immediate reporting is not proof. Delayed reporting is not proof. Stillness is not consent. And inconsistency is not, by itself, a lie detector. Forensic psychology does not ask us to believe every fragmented memory. It asks something harder: to understand before we infer. Because a courtroom may demand chronology from a witness. A nervous system may have preserved something else. Perhaps the deepest problem is not that trauma can break memory into pieces. Perhaps it is that we sometimes look at those pieces and ask why the survivor could not have brought us the whole thing. She remembers the shoelaces. She does not remember the time. Maybe that is not the failure we should be most afraid of. Maybe the greater failure is expecting a traumatised mind to remember like a courtroom.

Chetansi Bhardwaj

University of Delhi