According to the US Justice Department, sexual assault includes “any type of sexual contact,’’ lacking “explicit consent.’’ Collapsing a continuum of sexual encounters — from forced penetration to fondling — into a single category can elide important distinctions among them, but it’s a necessary corrective to tradition. It ensures that women don’t have to suffer extra-violent attacks by strangers to be recognized as victims of sex crimes.

But recognition has come at a cost, as controversies over alleged campus sexual assaults suggest. When students are encouraged to consider any unwanted sexual touch a serious assault, we lose perspective on the difference between a clumsy or confused grope and intentional sexual violence. We encourage young women to feel equally traumatized by arguable misdemeanors and obvious felonies.

Consider the current controversy over the alleged assault of Phillips Exeter student Michaella Henry. She reported being aggressively groped by a male athlete over her explicit objections, describing a nasty, infuriating act of sexual aggression. As a result, she suffered sleepless nights and panic attacks, apparently exacerbated by the school’s failure to take her complaint seriously.

Like many women, I suspect, I found her account highly plausible and quite familiar and considered the school’s initial response to her complaint — regular bread deliveries to her by her alleged attacker — bizarrely stupid. A punishment like suspension and perhaps counseling would have been much more appropriate for an acknowledged offense like this.

But I was also struck by Henry’s response, by the depth of her distress. Many older women endured similar encounters over the years, often starting in adolescence, and many of us emerged unscathed. We were angered, offended, and sometimes scared by the more aggressive gropers. We recognized the affront to our dignity and autonomy. But we didn’t grieve or lose sleep over it or regard ourselves as victims of rape culture. We didn’t know we were supposed to be traumatized. Looking back, all I can say is . . . lucky us.

Our gropers were lucky too. They weren’t branded as sex offenders. Contemporary assumptions about the trauma of sexual assaults (broadly defined) encourage the over-criminalization of sexual misconduct. That’s particularly troublesome at a time when conviction for a sex offense often entails inclusion on a sex offender registry and indefinite deprivation of an ex-offender’s rights to live and work freely. The abuses of sex offender registration laws are increasingly clear, as is the scourge of mass incarceration. Criminally prosecuting an adolescent groper is often neither necessary nor just.

Michaella Henry’s alleged assailant has been charged with a misdemeanor sex assault, which appears to expose him to sex offender registration under New Hampshire law. She reportedly called police after school authorities failed to discipline him or acknowledge her concerns and after viewing “The Hunting Ground,’’ a controversial film of questionable accuracy, decrying rape culture on campus.

This is a sadly familiar story: A young woman suffers a relatively minor assault or a difficult, confused sexual encounter and is treated insensitively by school authorities. Experiencing emotional distress, she is encouraged by rape culture activism to consider herself a survivor of trauma and her assailant or partner in sexual confusion a criminal.

I’m not judging Henry and her peers and don’t believe there is a correct way for a woman to respond to unwelcome sexual contact. On the contrary. Different women will respond differently, depending on the circumstances of the encounter, their histories, personalities, states of mind, and moral codes. Rape culture memes ignore these differences, teaching or preaching to young women that if they’re not traumatized by every assault along the continuum, they’re in denial. This lesson matters. We’re susceptible to social expectations; they, too, help shape our responses to experiences.

We do a great disservice to young women by imposing on them expectations of trauma. Rape culture activists will not empower women by stigmatizing resilience and valorizing vulnerability. Is this feminism or a reversion to femininity?

Wendy Kaminer is a lawyer and author.