While formal gender equality is advancing globally, gender-based violence, and sexual violence more particularly, remain an important epidemic. Research on rape perceptions indicates that victims have a hard time detecting the violence they experience, especially under particular conditions like who the aggressor is or the use of force. We expand the knowledge in the field in two ways: one, we examine victims’ capacity to detect sexual violence generally, and not just rape, but we also distinguish between several forms of rape that have not been explored by previous literature. Second, we provide a novel argument and empirical data to show there is an important yet overlooked variable: partisanship. We argue that feeling closer to political parties that deny the existence of gender-based violence hinders the identification that this is the case. Our findings show that this is the case: partisanship has the largest effect over identifying oneself as a victim, reducing this probability by 25%. Sexual violence type, the aggressor and frequency also play an important role too. Overall, our findings have important implications to the study of sexual violence, victim identification and speak to the recent debates over feminist awakening and gender backlash.