Let’s Give Our Shared Outrage Over Lenient Sexual Assault Sentences a Purpose
“The real punch to the gut was the highly publicized concerns over his post-conviction quality of life.”
That’s one of the most insidious parts of rape culture. Sexual assault is seen as something inevitable for women, and there’s a collective shrug when the evidence of it appears—even in a court of law. There’s a reason why the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) found that only six out of 1,000 rapes result in the perpetrator serving jail time. While in theory, most people will admit that rape is a heinous crime that deserves punishment, when faced with the reality of its occurrence, we somehow feel compelled to focus on the humanity of the assailant and lament when he has to face consequences.
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What About the “Severe Impact” on the Victim?
The sad part is that, in one way, Turner’s victim beat the odds: Her assailant actually faces time in jail for his actions. But Judge Aaron Persky’s refusal to give Turner the maximum sentence because “a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him” (as if time in prison were supposed to have any other affect…) underlies an unfortunate reality: When push comes to shove, many people do not actually want to punish rapists. As Judith Lewis Herman, M.D., author of Trauma and Recovery, wrote, “The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim.”
The “severe impact” of Turner’s sentence has a definite end date; the impact that his victim bears will last forever. Surviving a sexual assault can have a variety of consequences that serve as punishment long after the assault is finished. The Joyful Heart Foundation lists depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, isolation, and decreased physical health as common effects for victims of sexual assault.
As a rape survivor, myself, I have struggled with many of these, but one of the most difficult consequences for me is that I no longer have the ability to feel safe. Anywhere I go, I am at risk of suddenly being plunged into memories from the worst period of my life, which is precisely what happened last week. I will admit that I was not able to finish reading the impact statement of Turner’s victim. The pain of her past, present, and future is so palpable through the words that feelings from my own trauma rose within me. The near-constant barrage of information about this painful case is a reminder that survivors cannot ever truly escape what happened to them through no fault of their own.
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The Dangers of the “Outrage Machine”
While the victim’s impact statement went viral after being shared on BuzzFeed—and rightly so—I noticed the media coverage and conversation about the case still overwhelmingly continued to be driven by what I call the “outrage machine”: a phenomenon of sharing and repeating harmful statements because they’re so heinous. Public condemnation of statements that refer to rape as “20 minutes of action” can be good; as a survivor, I appreciate when people take the time to show that they do not agree with the minimization of such a serious act of violence. But there’s a downside that weighs heavy on myself and other survivors, too: Shared outrage, often with a link to the horrible statements, ends up being a virtual megaphone of rape-denying rhetoric.
“Anywhere I go, I am at risk of suddenly being plunged into memories from the worst period of my life.”
We should be uplifting the voices of survivors—not rapists and their enablers. That’s why I decided to start the #SurvivorPrivilege project (named in honor of the hashtag I created in 2014, as a response to George Will’s offensive column doubting the prevalence of campus sexual assault and claiming that the call to make campuses safer has made “victimhood” a “coveted status that confers privileges”). The project aims to share firsthand accounts from survivors about the price that they paid—literally, physically, emotionally, mentally, etc.—for living in a world that prioritizes the lives of rapists over those of survivors. Our society has made it very easy to comprehend what happens when a rapist is punished. Statements like Judge Aaron Persky’s are not rare: Just have a look at CNN’s Poppy Harlow mourning the Steubenville rapists’ “loss” of a “promising future.”
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It’s time for us to start focusing on the people who matter in these situations, the people who know firsthand the reality of our rape culture. When we finally take time to stop and listen, and to comprehend that living life as a rape victim is truly too steep a price, we will have a chance to finally understand what our society loses when we’re too busy ignoring survivors to protect the people who have harmed them.
Wagatwe Wanjuki is a writer, activist, and board member of Know Your IX.