In this post, you’ll learn about the fawn response to sexual harassment or assault.
When someone experiences sexual harassment or sexual assault, their body often doesn’t react the way they expect. Instead of fighting or running, they might experience the freeze, appease or fawn response—smiling, complying, or going still, even when they feel terrified inside.
If you’ve ever blamed yourself for how you reacted during sexual harassment or sexual assault, please know: it wasn’t your fault. Your body was trying to keep you alive.
In this post, we’ll explore the freeze and fawn response—sometimes called the freeze-appease response—and how these instinctive reactions are the body’s way of trying to stay safe during sexual violence or threat. You’ll learn what happens in the nervous system during a fawn response, why people can’t “just say no,” and how understanding this can help survivors release shame and start to heal.
This is essential education for survivors, loved ones, and anyone who wants to understand trauma responses with compassion and science.
The Freeze and Fawn Response in Sexual Assault
Sexual assault might seem like a heavy topic, but I’m honestly excited about it because it has the information millions of people need to free themselves from shame and blame.
What would you do in this situation? Let’s say you’re in a job interview, and the interviewer starts asking you inappropriate questions: “Do you wear bras to work?” “Do you consider yourself sexually desirable?” What would you do?
Most people say “I would tell them to stop, I would leave, I would report it!!”
But here’s the fascinating thing.
In 2001 there was a study with college-aged women. Half of them were interviewed and asked what they’d do if they faced sexual harassment, and 100% of those women said they’d resist it.
Great, they know what they should do. But as part of the study, the other half of the women attended a job interview–-and were asked those inappropriate questions. What percentage of them do you think told the interviewer to stop? Zero.
Instead, the researchers saw a startling response in the video recordings of these interactions: the women sat patiently and answered the questions while smiling!
We see a similar thing with sexual violence.
The vast majority of victims can’t speak, or they go limp—or they might comply, or even compliment the abuser. Then they blame themselves for what happened.
It turns out there’s a reason buried in our primal brains that victims respond in such unexpected, and even shocking, ways. In this video I’ll explain the science of the freeze, appease, and fawn response that shows compliant behavior is not your fault, but there is something you can do about it.
Freeze & Comply: A Common Reaction to Sexual Harassment
The fawn response, also known as freeze or appease response, can be triggered in response to situations ranging from sexual harassment to sexual assault. To illustrate the point, I’m going to tell a story that I don’t believe will be too triggering, so stick with me.
I have this friend, and she’s a new lawyer. Very intelligent, hardcoresy, outdoorsy. She did some legal work for a couple, and they offered to take her to lunch as a thank you. She pulls up at the restaurant and was surprised to see that the wife wasn’t there. Then as they’re walking in he takes hold of her hand. She’s not a fan of this, but assumes that it’s because the ground is a little uneven. Oh, did I mention this guy is like 85 years old!
Anyways, he holds her hand as they walk in, and then she kind of shakes him off. He makes sure they get a booth seat. She asks where his wife is and he goes into a little spiel about how he just wants to be there for her, and he scoots closer to her, and he asks her if she wants to be his girlfriend. She says no, he explains how he’s got a bunch of girlfriends (as if that’s a turn on) and she is truly stuck in this place of trying to not be rude, not make a scene, and also completely disgusted. She feels trapped. They order lunch. He continues to proposition her. She finally asks for her salad to go and gets up to leave and he says “Why did you come to lunch if you didn’t want to be with me?” (Bleh!)
Here’s the text message I got from my friend about the encounter:
It was horrible. I should’ve left the moment I got a bad vibe, but I didn’t. I just froze. I did learn that it might, or at least I think it might, be helpful to talk to [my kids] about those kinds of situations, and give them the tools to maybe not freeze and get out sooner. Is that possible? Or do we all just freeze?
As an observer it’s so easy to say “Why didn’t you just get up and leave? Why didn’t you shout no into his face?!” But it’s so easy to freeze up. And I’d guess that many of you would say “I’ve been there.”
Most of us, at some time, have been coerced into something we didn’t actually want, and often our response has been one of compliance. And this can run the spectrum of being polite when someone’s hitting on you, to smiling at sexual harassment, to being compliant during sexual violence. Every single survivor of sexual assault that I have met with in therapy froze during the assault and most submitted—and most felt shame.
Heck, one time when I was 16 some guy on the street grabbed my butt and I was so shocked that I actually apologized to him!
So what’s going on here? Why on earth would we freeze up in the face of sexual harassment or violence?
It’s a deeply rooted survival reflex, much deeper than thinking. And it’s just your nervous system trying to keep you alive.
Fight, Flight, Freeze… and the Fawn Response
Fight
We all start out feeling safe, but when faced with a threat that we believe that we can defeat, our first response is to fight it off, to defend ourselves.
So let’s say that a 10-year-old kid comes up to me and starts talking trash. I might laugh him off, call him dumb, threaten to tell his mom or call the cops.
Flight
But if there’s a guy who approaches me on a motorcycle on the street, I’m more likely to run inside a building. I believe I can escape, so the flight response kicks in.
Fawn/Appease
Now let’s move into a situation where I have less power and control, let’s say I’m a single mom who needs a job to feed my kids. I believe I have little power and control in the big financial world, I really need this job. So, when faced with harassment at work, I might be more likely to slip into the fawn response, also known as the appease response.
Freeze
Or when faced with sexual violence, your body may trigger an even more extreme reaction: the Freeze or Shut Down response. But before we go there, let’s spend a little more time on this Fawn or Appease response.
Freeze Appease Isn’t Consent — It’s Protection
This is a deeply rooted protective reflex that many people, but especially women, engage in when faced with harassment or assault. We protect ourselves through complying, being polite, and doing anything we can to deescalate a situation (like when I apologized to the guy who grabbed my butt). This is not a conscious decision. The survival centers of my brain made the decision to apologize before I even knew what had happened.
With the Fawn or Appease response it’s common to laugh, smile, or “befriend” the attacker in order to avoid worse violence. Victims might also plead or cry. Research shows that crying limits the aggressive hormones and behaviors in men.
And people, especially women, are trained by society to be “nice” and easy going. We’re taught that we should be sweet and not fight. But people-pleasing isn’t just a learned behavior, it’s a state of the nervous system.
This can be very confusing, because from the outside it may look like consent. But the main thing I want you to understand is that Fawning isn’t a choice—it’s an automatic survival strategy shaped by fear.
Why Tonic Immobility Happens During Sexual Assault
As our perception of the threat increases, our nervous system triggers an even stronger defense mechanism: the “Freeze” response. You may shift from trying to talk your way out of it to freezing, going completely still, or moving toward numbness and dissociation. Your nervous system may trigger a physiological response called “tonic immobility”.
Tonic immobility is a temporary, involuntary state of paralysis that can happen when someone is faced with extreme fear or threat. They may be physically unable to move or speak. Breathing may become shallow, the body stiffens or goes limp, and there can be a sense of detachment or numbness. Some survivors described it this way:
“When I tried to scream, nothing came out. It was like the words just froze in my throat.”
“I was trying to fight mentally — inside myself I was screaming ‘stop’ — but my body would not move.”
Almost every animal when faced with an overwhelming, unescapable threat has this freeze survival response. And studies have found that 70% of rape survivors reported significant immobility during the assault, even when they wanted to move or scream. In addition to feeling paralyzed, people also reported feeling numb, dead inside. They described “just waiting for it to be over”.
One survivor said:
“I could never bring myself to literally say the word ‘no’ or fight back. My voice always just seemed to shrink away as my body went limp. Worse yet, sometimes I found myself smiling, hoping that by encouraging these behaviors in the moment I could cooperate myself out of the situation. ‘Just play along until you can escape,’ I thought.”
Not fighting back, not saying no is not a form of consent or participation in a sexual act. It’s actually your brain’s most desperate attempt at survival. It’s a reflex, it’s not something you choose to do.
This is the nervous system prioritizing survival: conserving energy, reducing pain perception, and sometimes preventing further aggression from the attacker.
So why does sexual violence elicit such a dramatic nervous system response? Sexual violence has been a tool of war for thousands of years. A woman being attacked by a violent soldier has little hope of escaping. She is much more likely to survive if her resistant impulses are deadened. Submitting and cooperating were her best hopes of survival, and our anciently evolved brain knows that better than we can realize.
Freezing is one of the most common reactions to assault worldwide. And it affects long-term recovery. The survivors who experienced tonic immobility were much more likely to have PTSD symptoms later. Not only is that fear response trapped in the body, but the freeze response also seems to impair memory encoding, which leads to missing or confusing memories after the event.
What triggers tonic immobility?
Your nervous system relies on social learning and reflexes to trigger the fight, flight, fawn, or freeze response. When a threat arises, your nervous system subconsciously takes into account the severity of the threat. This can include:
- Size (bigger, stronger)
- Status (position, wealth)
- Position (boss, supervisor, teacher, gang leader, religious leader)
- Gender (male)
- Weapons
- Risk of recrimination (loss of position, physical punishment, mocking and name calling)
- Social rules like “You should always be polite” or “It’s always the woman’s fault” or “Men can’t control their sexual drives”
There’s another big factor at play. If you’ve been abused in the past, you are much more likely to experience tonic immobility when faced with a new assault.
All of these factors inform your brain’s reflexive decision about whether to fight back, freeze or fawn.
5 Things You Can Do about Freeze Appease with Sexual Assault
OK, so tonic immobility is a reflexive response, 70% of people who are sexually assaulted experience it, and it fuels PTSD. So- what do we do about it?
1. People shouldn’t assault people
Period. The end. The responsibility for this is on the abusers, not the victims. Over 90% of sexual violence is perpetrated by men. Boys and men need to be taught to respect people, get consent, and should be corrected/punished/locked up if they don’t.
AND… realistically, people who are sexually assaulting people probably aren’t reading this post, so I could shout about that all day long, but it won’t be as effective as teaching you some practical ways to take action.
2. Forgive yourself for the past
Survivors often blame themselves for “not fighting back.” Society sometimes blames them too. Blaming victims for a survival strategy is not helpful, it just adds shame and pain to the trauma.
Your freeze response was trying to keep you safe, keep you alive.
It’s not your fault. AND there is something you can do about it in the future. Forgive yourself for the past and let’s explore some actions to keep yourself safe in the future.
You aren’t powerless.
3. TRAIN yourself to take different actions in the future
You can’t just “think” your way out of a survival reflex, you have to train a new response.
Let me give an example. When I was training to be a Wilderness First Responder, one day in class someone ran in with their arm on fire. I froze. I had no idea what to do.
Turns out, the teacher had asked the student to do this (it was a relatively safe alcohol fire), but I froze. So what did we do about it? We trained and trained, for every situation: broken bones, heart attacks, open chest wounds, spine injuries. We practiced with stressful scenarios, sometimes out in the winter snow of Idaho. And by the end of the course, students would jump up in class with their arms on fire, or having a staged heart attack, or we’d be walking to class and come upon “avalanche victims” in the snow. And we would jump into action. We had our acronyms and protocols and we knew what to do. We’d stabilize the spine or start compressions or take whatever action was needed.
My confidence grew and I no longer froze up. I knew what to do, and I had the muscle memory to do it.
And I was able to use these skills in real life too. A few months later when I was mountain biking with friends, one of my friends broke her neck, and I knew exactly what to do. My new reflexive response was to stabilize the spine, check peripherals, call for help, monitor vitals, and she’s fine now.
You can’t just think your way out of a freeze-fawn response, but you can train yourself to respond in a safer way.
4. Learn to use your voice
And, interestingly enough, the first thing you’re going to learn in self-defense is to use your voice. This includes practicing assertiveness out loud. “Please don’t talk to me that way. If you continue I will report you.” And if they are aggressive, “STOP! No! I don’t like that! Back off!!”
I practiced this in RAD training–and in multiple self-defense classes. And you can too.
With practice, you can teach your brain how to respond differently and keep yourself safer. I told you about the time I was in a foreign country and a man grabbed my butt? Well, 5 years later I went back to live in that country. It happened that another guy started harassing my friend, and instead of freezing I just hit him, hard enough to knock him over, and he left us alone. My new reflex was to fight instead of freeze!
Even better, as we practice our empowered responses, we heal from old trauma by releasing that pent-up freeze response.
5. Build your resources
Let me mention one more thing. The more resources you have, the safer you feel. When I fought back against that guy, I was older, stronger, I’d had a couple more years’ experience in foreign countries, I had more training, more practice handling stressful situations, AND I was in a group of 3 people, I wasn’t alone. Each of these resources helped my nervous system perceive that this threat was something I could overcome, and I went into fight mode instead of freeze mode. If we want to help our nervous system feel safer, we can do that by building up our resources.
Having resources protects our nervous system from getting stuck in freeze.
What empowers people to feel safe?
- Economic freedom (education and the ability to get a different job)
- People who will back you up
- Internal resources (confidence, experience, mental health)
- Assertiveness Practice
- Self-defense training
So we should all work together to make our streets, schools, homes, workplaces and communities safe places. Let’s all be advocates for safety. Let’s teach our men to respect women and let’s all speak out against sexual violence and support surviors.
Thanks for reading. The work you’re doing, whether it’s internal or external, matters.
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