Recent events in the case against Brock Turner ignited a firestorm of public outrage that has spread even to the highest levels of government. As a survivor of sexual assault and as an advocate other survivors, I say it’s about time.
It’s about time we take a serious look at the messages we send to survivors, to perpetrators and to society at large when, with callous indifference, our legal system singles out certain perpetrators for preferential treatment. While some offenders are punished with appropriate severity, others are given barely a slap on the wrist. This disparity makes it nearly impossible to avoid questions like:
Are the victims of some rapists simply less valuable than those of other attackers?
Are some rapists entitled to be treated more gently just because they happen to have been born with the “right” attributes or into the “right” place in society?
How many more victims need to be re-traumatized by a legal system and by a culture that trivializes their experiences and blames them for their own victimization?
I’m sure that most rational and compassionate people would easily answer: NO, NO and NO MORE. So what happens? How is it that somewhere between the words of individuals and the actions of society, we manage to stray so completely off course?
I could tell you what the experts have said. I wrote my dissertation on how we attribute blame in sexual abuse cases and in doing so, I studied several theories that might shed light on this phenomenon. But I’m more interested in hearing your thoughts than in talking about theirs. Are we so afraid of the world’s dangers that we deny their effects in order to preserve our own feelings of safety? Are we so intolerant that we allow our punishments to be determined by the degree to which a rapist violates cultural norms? Are we so insecure in our own beliefs that we try to spread the blame around as a way of hedging our bets against being wrong? Or is it something else entirely?
There are certainly no easy answers to explain the discrepancies between our words and our actions but as a survivor and an advocate I am thankful that so many of us are now willing to discuss it. Of course as a male survivor and an advocate for other male survivors there is a somewhat painful irony to the fact that this long needed attention comes finally in a case where three men have behaved so badly. You see research shows that males who are raped receive the highest amount of victim blaming. Perpetrators like Dennis Hastert, who rape boys, typically get more lenient punishment than those like Jared Fogle who rape girls. And if the rapist is a woman the sentences are usually even lighter as in the case of Molly Shattuck, the former Baltimore Ravens’ cheerleader.
Irony aside however, the important thing is not how we got to this conversation but that we are finally having the conversation. Because of this, I am hopeful.
