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Brock Turner is a rapist.

He’s not a “gifted swimmer” or a “star athlete” or whatever embellished, evasive term the media pins on him, he’s a rapist and nothing more. That should be the title that he carries for the rest of his life. There seems to be a fear among the media that leads them to call him everything other than that. Instead of seeing his mugshot, we see his high school graduation pictures. Instead of hearing about the traumatized victim he raped behind a dumpster we hear that he was a “gifted swimmer.” It seems major media outlets are bending backwards to humanize this rapist. As heinous as his crime was, as disgusting and repugnant a person Brock Turner is, that’s not the primary issue here, his sentence is.

One of the “justifications” that Judge Aaron Persky gave for his weak sentencing for Brock Turner was that “a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him.” The impact of the rape that Turner’s victim is experiencing apparently matters less than Brock Turner suffering adequate consequences of a heinous crime. Turner’s sentencing is a disgusting spit in the face to the women of Stanford University. Persky’s sentencing was essentially a declaration of the lack of care the justice system has for women. Persky values the emotional wellbeing of a rapist more than his victim.”


Brock Turner is no longer in jail. After not even serving the complete length of his six month sentence, he’s out and is now required to register on the national sex offender registry. That’s the worst our justice system can seem to do for rapists, apparently. There’s no reason for Brock Turner to be out of jail; there’s no reason he should be able to walk the streets less than a year after raping a woman when there are non-violent drug offenders serving life sentences. This sentencing is an indicator for the affluent and male members of college society that there’s not a real punishment for rape. They can commit sexual violence with near impunity. This sentencing sends the message to women that the U.S Justice System will not protect you. Even when the evidence is clear and the crime heinous, judges care more about the social well being of a rapist more than the victim.

The controversy surrounding this case has brought to light a great deal of issues that many Americans believed to be long solved and buried. Even in this case, there are still those who blame the victim, or at the least attempt to shift blame to both parties. Brock Turner’s father, who has an understandable desire to protect his son, read a statement to the judge. One of the lines of that statement read that “his life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.” Brock Turner’s father boiled down the brutal violation of a young woman to “20 minutes of action.” There’s no empathy shown by any member of the defense for the victim of this crime. Many believe that because the victim was intoxicated, she should bear some amount of the blame as well. This idea falls under the much maligned and often mocked term: rape culture. The entirety of this trial falls under that term. Women Against Violence Against Women has this to say about rape culture: “Rape culture is a term that was coined by feminists in the United States in the 1970’s. It was designed to show the ways in which society blamed victims of sexual assault and normalized male sexual violence.”

To some Americans, a woman being intoxicated is an invitation to men to do what they please with their bodies. A woman’s body is no longer hers while intoxicated, it’s the property of whomever decides to violate her. That’s the crux of the issue in this case. Brock Turner felt he could do whatever he liked with his victim because she relinquished sovereignty of her own body once she became intoxicated. It was not only the defense, but also the presiding Judge that felt this way, considering the sentence. This sort of toxic thought needs to be expunged immediately from the collective American psyche. There should be no more Brock Turners or Judge Perskys in America. We’re better than that and we’re better than them.