Why Did Judge Aaron Persky’s Stanford Rape Decision Go Viral?
Earlier this month, after Stanford University freshman Brock Turner was found guilty of three felony counts of sexual assault, California judge Aaron Persky sentenced the swimmer to six months in jail, though he may be out in as few as three. “Absolutely shocked and appalled,” was the response of one anonymous juror who delivered a scathing letter to the judge, summing up the general attitude reflected in social media. More than fifteen million people have read and shared a devastating 12-page courtroom statement read by his victim, 23-year old Emily Doe. Yesterday, the letter, in which she relentlessly detailed the immediate and long-term impacts of her assault, was read on the floor of the House of Representatives by a bipartisan group of more than 40 more members of Congress.
The circumstances of the assault, though, are hardly rare. Just last year, the trials of four ex-Vanderbilt University football players, charged with multiple counts of sexual battery and aggravated rape of an unconscious woman, barely registered in the media. In the Vanderbilt case, elements of which were caught on dormitory cameras and cell phones, witnesses saw men carrying an inert woman into a room where she was sodomized and urinated on before being thrown out into a hallway. Like the Stanford victim, the woman had no memory of the events of the night.
So what happened in California to propel such widespread rage and action? A public whose consciousness has been raised by several years of intense social activism responded to a perfect storm of sexual entitlement and racial privilege – a graphic nexus between the Title IX and Black Lives Matter movements. Given that these social protests overlap in their core critiques of systemic white male privilege, the fact that it’s a rape case is not a coincidence but a critical inevitability. Rape, more than any other social phenomenon, clearly illustrates how intertwined racism and misogyny are in the United States.
As a perpetrator of sexual assault, Turner is unexceptional. Demographically, his is the profile of the teenager most likely to engage in sexual coercion or assault and to use alcohol to facilitate abuse. According to a study released in late 2013, one in 10 people between the ages of 14-21 report having already committed an act of sexual violence; 15% said they used alcohol as a facilitator. Eighty percent of victims were girls. Across race, ethnicity and class, the teenagers with the highest propensity to admit that they’d sexually coerced or assaulted a peer were white boys from higher-income families. In other words, rape is a perk of status.