Why Did Judge Aaron Persky’s Stanford Rape Decision Go Viral?
By going to court instead of just admitting guilt, Turner rolled the dice and lost, but the odds were in distinctly in his favor. College athletes are far less likely than their non-athletic peers to face charges for criminal behavior, but far more likely to engage in sexual and illegal violence. More than 50% of male collegiate athletes report coercing partners. Male athletes are responsible for up to 19% of reported sexual assaults and 37% of intimate partner violence on college campuses, despite being just more than 3% of college populations.
Victims of sexual assault have an acute sense of these institutional biases. The Center for Public Policy and the Department of Justice estimate that 95% of college sexual assaults are not reported because victims, regardless of sex, gender or sexuality, do not have confidence that they will be believed institutionally supported. Few schools expel rapists and they routinely don’t disclose the school records of people found guilty of sexual assaults if they transfer, in order to give them a second chance to start anew. Ridiculous punishments, such as book reports or “expulsion” after graduation, have, until recently, been common. Today, as the result of the work of Title IX student activists, more than 200 schools are actively under investigation for institutional failures to meet Title IX requirements.
While Persky’s decision wasn’t surprising, it was nonetheless an insult to the victim, essentially dismissing the life-altering effects of her assault. (In her devastating 12-page courtroom statement, she explained the impact of her assault, from swabs in her vagina and anus to a camera pointed between her legs to feelings of depression and post-traumatic stress, describing how she wanted to “take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.”) As Stanford University law professor Michele Dauber, who is leading a recall effort against Persky, explained this week, the judge’s decision “means that he has essentially taken campus rape out of the category of things you can go to prison for.”
It’s hard to imagine that if Turner wasn’t white he would have received such a lenient sentence. His trial came to an end only months after that of 19-year-old Vanderbilt athlete Cory Batey, who was found guilty of aggravated rape. But Batey, who is African American, faces 15 to 25 years in prison in Tennessee. This is not just a difference in state law. Disparities like this begin as early as kindergarten and never end. Black boys are suspended from school more than three times more frequently than their white male peers. Black girls are suspended six times more frequently than white girls, experience higher rates of suspension than most boys and their sexual abuse – which affects up to 60% of black girls before they reach the age of 18 – is a primary predictor of black girls’ entry into the criminal justice system.