Changing the Convictions for Rape
By: Lizett Gonzalez
Tags: Rape, Sexual Assault, Race, Brock Turner, Stanford

Brock Allen Turner, a former Stanford swimmer and white male, sexually assaulted an unconscious woman, and he was released from jail after only 3 months.

On January 18, 2015, Brock Allen Turner was found, after a party, sexually abusing an unconscious woman behind a fraternity house. Turner, at the time, was a 19-year-old freshman. The Stanford University student was supposed to serve a six month sentence in a county jail, of which he only served three months, and three years on probation.

He was found guilty on three counts of felony sexual assault in March of 2016, and planned to appeal his conviction. Brock Turner, a champion swimmer, lost his swimming scholarship and was forced to register as a sex offender in the state of Ohio.

Emily Doe has left a “legacy of raising the world’s awareness about sexual assault” mentioned Jeff Rosen. This Santa Clara County district attorney also mentioned that he believe Brock turner received a fair trial and conviction, but that is not what a vast majority of the people see it as.

After being released only three months later, many criticized that Turner’s sentence was lenient, and after reading Sharon Marcus’ reading, this situation only proves that white rapists have lower rates of conviction than intraracial rape cases because of their skin color. Judge Persky was not unfair to Brock Turner because instead, he was unfair to Emily Doe. At the time, Professor Dauber was collecting signatures for the June ballot, and so far she had 76,000 signatures of the 90,000 she needed.

The victim Emily Doe had no idea what had happened to her until she regained her conscious and was told that Turner had taken her behind a dumpster. She saw that from news reports that her attacker, Turner, was on top of her partly clothed body.

Turner’s father responded to the hate that his son was receiving by saying that his son does not deserve to have his life ruined for a mistake that happened in a span of “20 minutes”. But, this is not just any mistake. This is assault and it is not something that can happen on ‘accident’. The moment that you see a girl or boy is unconscious is the moment you realize that for one, she or he is not able to make rash decisions, and two, if you proceed to have any kind of sexual activity with him or her, it is automatically considered rape. There should be no exceptions.

Sharon Marcus wrote the reading, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention” in which he believes that it is important that the understanding of rape needs to be changed. Rape needs to be seen as a language and used to see women as neither “already raped nor inherently rapable”.

There needs to be many changes in the way that society goes about the situation of rape. One of these changes would be that we, as a society, need to focus on the rape situations themselves and rape prevention instead of just rape and its aftermath. Along with this new idea is the way that rapists are being convicted. There has been a number of times that white males are given ‘lenient’ sentences compared to the sentence an African American rapist would get. Feminists are workign to change these terms of rape in order to increase the penalties and render the terms of rape trial as less prejudicial to victims (Sharon Marcus’ reading).

In the Brock Turner case, Turner was given a more lenient sentence than what an African American would be given. Him being released after only three months only makes the victim feel like injustice is being served and it shows the rest of the world how messed up the system really is. Women are not ‘rapable’ nor do they want it, deserve it, or provoke it, and instead of wanting to change women, there needs to be a change in the perception of rapists and those who believe in such bizarre ideas.