The disclosure of AOC’s sexual assault is not the story.

On Monday night, MP Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spent an hour and a half talking on Instagram Live about a deeply personal traumatic experience she recently had. The subject of her lecture was the January 6 attack on the nation’s Capitol, but the headlines about her comments had a different focus: “Ocasio-Cortez says she is a sexual assault survivor,” reported the New York Times. “In reporting the riots on Capitol Hill, Ocasio-Cortez reveals that she is a survivor of sexual assault,” CBS News said. The headline of New York magazine was “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: ‘I am a survivor of sexual assault.’ CNN: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she is a survivor of sexual assault when describing the trauma of the Capitol insurrection. “

The report mentioned above does not provide much more information than headlines about Ocasio-Cortez’s experience with sexual assault, because she did not provide them. The reference to the experience was a comparatively miniscule part of his monologue – a minute or two of almost 90 minutes in the air. She was explicit that she was sharing this fact because she wanted to talk about the trauma of what had happened to her most recently, and she understands that the trauma is cumulative. She also made a compelling comparison between the way abusers treat their victims and the way their Republican colleagues responded to the January 6 events. “These people are just trying to tell us, ‘It’s not a big deal’ and they ‘are trying to say,’ You are giving it a lot of importance, ‘” said Ocasio-Cortez of his Republican colleagues who tried to downplay what happened. “These are the tactics of abusers, or rather, these are the tactics that abusers use. So when I see it happen, how I feel and how I feel, it was not again. “

But anyone who watched the full Instagram Live could say that the purpose of the event was not for AOC to explore their personal history of sexual trauma. It was up to her to share her own story of the insurrection, explain why she felt her life was threatened several times throughout the day and articulate how her previous life experience informed her response to that event. So why did so many news organizations frame their stories around Ocasio-Cortez’s admission that she had been sexually abused?

One possible reason is that Twitter can often appear to be the nominating editor for large-scale journalists, and the after-hours social media response to Ocasio-Cortez’s live broadcast was in fact focused on the sexual assault commentary. This makes sense for Twitter; Ocasio-Cortez is an incredibly popular and charismatic policy, so it’s not difficult to see why his confession about the attack, delivered with a clear refusal to be ashamed of it, has inspired support.

But the job of the media is not to get a ride on the sentiment of Twitter – it is to report the news. Even so, many of them opted for a framework that seems strange and even reductive, considering the urgency and national importance of the story that she really intended to share. Ocasio-Cortez was clearly aware that sharing details about his sexual assault story would be made public, just as the designated editors might have been aware that framing their stories around it would receive clicks. But this disproportionate focus reveals a tendency to define women, people of color, and particularly women of color by their personal experiences and particularly their personal traumas, rather than by their beliefs and opinions. This trend generates another assumption – that their beliefs and opinions are likely to be openly informed by these traumas, which makes them easier to dismiss as providers of pure emotion rather than informed thinking. The Times’ story on Instagram Live by Ocasio-Cortez even quoted his earlier postures about famous allegations of political sexual abuse (against Brett Kavanaugh and Joe Biden) as if suggesting that perhaps we should view these postures differently now that we know Ocasio- Cortez herself is a survivor of aggression.

What Ocasio-Cortez was trying to do on Instagram Live on Monday night was to explain that she was not doing well after the attack on the United States government. And that not being well is a totally appropriate and rational response to the experiences she has had. If we want to understand what is happening and has happened to our government, if we want to understand what our lawmakers are being asked to do after January 6, we need to understand the role that trauma plays in our brains as we try to process these events. That’s why Ocasio-Cortez shared that she is a survivor of sexual assault on Monday night. She was realizing that she understands the trauma and understands the cycle of abuse, and it is this understanding that is pushing her to take the steps she is taking now – from spreading what happened to her even when it is clearly painful, to telling Senator Ted Cruz that she does not want to collaborate with him after his refusal to apologize for his role in inciting. Ocasio-Cortez’s admission about his experience of sexual assault is the context for his story about the violence perpetrated by the GOP. It shouldn’t have been the title.