Trigger Warning: mention of rape, sexual assault
On Sept. 2, after a mere three months spent behind bars, Brock Turner, a.k.a. the Stanford Rapist, walked out of the Santa Clara County Jail to return to his home state of Ohio—where he will begin his new life as a convicted rapist. Last June, the then 20-year-old Turner was given a mere six-month jail sentence by Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky for the 2015 rape of a now 23-year-old woman at his former school, Stanford University. Persky received a heavy amount of public and professional backlash as a result and the ruling sparked a heavy national outcry against the country’s continuous institutionalized support of rape culture.
So just how prevalent is sexual assault within colleges? According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, “One in five women and one in 16 men are sexually assaulted while in college.” In addition, “More than 90 percent of sexual assault victims on college campuses do not report the assault.” So to put that in perspective, the hundreds of thousands of women and men who will come forward to report a sexual assault on their college campuses this year (and unfortunately many more to come), represent a mere 10 percent of the total victim population.
This statistic is alarming in and of itself, but it is sadly of no surprise to those of us who are familiar with the gross mishandling of sexual assault cases by universities. But that’s an issue for another time. The point is, sexual assault is a serious and dangerously pervasive issue within our society. How we handle these cases, especially in a judicial sense, determines the social, political, and culture narrative that will ensue. By undermining the justice sought on behalf of the victim in favor of avoiding the social implications a fair and just indictment would have on the accused, we are failing each and every sexual assault survivor.
Never mind the fact that Turner sexually violated an unconscious woman who had no means of consenting, or even resisting his actions, and who will, no doubt, be left to deal with the emotional, physical, and mental scars that plague those who experience the trauma of sexual violence. All of that seemed inconsequential to Judge Persky, who believed that any sentence longer than six months would permanently damage the young hopeful Olympic; and to his father who felt that probation rather than jail time was a more appropriate punishment and that was such “a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action.” Twenty minutes that allowed for a heinous sex crime to transpire. Twenty minutes that would change a young woman forever.
But none of that really matters, right? I mean, this kid is from a nice Mid-Western suburban family and has no prior criminal record; surely he doesn’t deserve such a stringent punishment as years in jail after defiling a woman physically and psychologically? I think most of us know the answer to this; and yet, there still seems to be a few of us—such as the judge who handled this case—confused about the irrevocable nature of rape and its devastating aftermath for its victims.
Brock Turner is a glaring example of everything that is wrong with the social hierarchies in place within our country. As a blonde-haired, blued-eyed, white male athlete at a top tier university, Turner is the embodiment of privilege in action. Race, class, and sex played, with little doubt in my mind, an integral role in the trajectory of Turner’s hearing and subsequent sentence. At the intersection of this racism, classism, and sexism that has protected Turner from the clutches of honest judicial action, one can find the oppressive world of hegemonic white male power that, in cases like these, only become all too obvious as a systemic presence in our society. If Brock Turner had been, say, an African- American male from a poor background, devoid of any academic or athletic titles, I can say with almost full certainty that the case would have been handled quite differently. Equality has still yet to make a solid and consistent presence within the American justice system.
Yet for all the miscarriages of justice we have witnessed in this case, Turner has been forced to register as a sex offender in his home state of Ohio, a title he will carry for the rest of his life. To bear the scarlet A of his actions for the rest of his life is a small taste of the lifelong repercussions of the trauma felt by victims—only a very small taste. If any justice has been served in this case, it’s the widespread anger and indignation it has incited within people across the nation and even the globe. This angry has impelled a shifting narrative on rape and the mishandling of these sexual assault cases. The persistent granting of lenient sentences, sentences that while already brief in length are not always fully served, on the basis of “good behavior” (as in the case of Brock Turner), diminishes the severity of these crimes. When the scales of justice tip in favor of the accused rather than the victim, what are we communicating to people? Are we not prioritizing the experience of the offender rather than the victim? Are we not reinforcing the already disturbingly rampant rape culture by viewing these cases with gender-biased lenses that attribute violent sexual behavior as a normality for heterosexual college men? I believe that we have become so desensitized to sexual assault, because of just how much it occurs, that both subtle and overt trivializations of it have become a habitual response within the public and private sphere.
It’s time to radically shift our culture’s perception of rape. It’s time to view all sexual assault for what it is: a violation of one’s human rights, rather than the inevitable by-product of a drunken night out. It’s time to hold people accountable for their actions, regardless of their social standing and background. It’s time we set a standard of justice that promotes and protects the rights of the victims. It’s time for the Brock Turners of the world to receive their rightful punishment.