Are fear and concerns stemmed from being sexual assaulted generally understandable by grad schools? Would it be seen as a negative trait?
There are two parts of your question - how to get accommodations and whether you will be judged in some way.
Also, this answer assumes you are a current student, not a prospective student.
The first part of the question varies a bit from university to university. It sounds like you would like to figure out accommodations without making a formal report, which should be possible. You can start by visiting the website for the Title IX office at your specific school. You might need to click around a bit, but this website likely has quite a bit of information on resources for victims of assault. Some of these will be confidential (and labeled as such), including mental health services and often some sort of victim advocacy office. So you can start there to figure out how accommodations work at your school. Generally, accommodations are determined by trained administrators, not faculty.
For my institution (perhaps this is universal in the US, not sure), once the administration has decided on an accommodation for you, the faculty members affected simply get letters or emails explaining what they need to do. If I have any questions or concerns, I contact the accommodations office rather than putting the student in an awkward position of justifying themselves.
The second part of your question is about others’ judgement. The first point I’d like to make here is that very few people who actually matter to your student career need to know your personal business. In the information I gave above about how to get accommodations you note that no one in your department needs to find out anything until the administration has determined what accommodations you should get. Within your department, you could choose to be very vague about what is going on (&quot;personal situation&quot; or even &quot;traumatic incident&quot;) and generally people know not to pry. If you do decide to disclose, also know that no one in their right mind is going to correlate your emotions about handling a sexual assault with your skills as a student. Those are such different domains of life that I can’t imagine any connection.