I’ve been watching the social media fallout surrounding the trial of Brock Turner, the swimming champion from Stanford who received a six-month sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman in January of 2015. As with any other case that deals with violence against women, the reactions have been equal parts depressing and encouraging. Depressing because even now, the narrative persists that young white men convicted of rape are being unfairly denied their potential bright futures. Encouraging because every time this happens, it feels like we get a little closer to exposing the framework of rape minimization and acceptance that supports incidents like these. This case has made it clearer than ever that we as a society condone rape by privileging men’s feelings over victims’ trauma — and more people than ever have objected.

Most of the discussion has centered around two letters. The first is the impact statement written by the victim herself, which she read out loud in court on June 2 and which was subsequently published by Buzzfeed on June 3. The other is letter written by Turner’s father asking for leniency in his sentencing; Stanford law professor Michele Dauber brought this one to public notice when she tweeted a portion of it. The former letter is as gutting as the latter is tone-deaf. The woman that Turner attacked speaks of what it felt like to wake up in the hospital with pine needles and debris inside her vagina. Meanwhile, Turner’s father laments that his son no longer enjoys pretzels, and argues he has been forced to pay too high a price for “20 minutes of action.”

To read Turner’s father’s letter is to feel an immediate rush of pure fury. It’s tempting to just go full snark on it, because there is lot here to snark here: from Turner Senior’s lyrical description of Brock’s lost love for steak to his obstinate refusal to actually name his son’s crime, the letter reads like a bad parody of how someone might talk about a rapist. It’s much harder to read the letter earnestly; it feels almost impossible to comprehend that this man truly believes his son is the one deserving of pity. It’s more comfortable to mock — but we can’t just mock. We have to look at — really look at, unsparingly and in detail — all the ways in which Turner’s father’s letter exemplifies how rape culture works.

This case has made it clearer than ever that we as a society condone rape by privileging men’s feelings over victims’ trauma.
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Rape culture is the idea that sexual assault does not happen in a vacuum, but rather occurs because we are socialized in a way that normalizes and even celebrates sexual victimization of women. In my experience, most men have a twofold reaction to that definition: first they’ll ask how it can be true that rape is normalized if rape is also understood to be one of the worst crimes a person can commit, and second they’ll swear that they, personally, would never. When they say these things they will absolutely believe that they’re speaking the truth. And then a case like Brock Turner’s will come along and present some very uncomfortable challenges to those ideas.

Everyone can agree that rape is objectively wrong, but problems crop up when we try to parse exactly what rape is and under what circumstances it occurs. I’m willing to bet that more than a few men read the victim’s letter and had a pang of recognition — not of her experiences, but his. Because most men have done at least some of what Turner did. They’ve gone to parties with the intention of hooking up with someone; they’ve zeroed in on the vulnerable girls, the drunk girls, the girls who seem like they’d be easy to take home; they’ve assumed that silence or a lack of clear refusal is the same as consent. And when these men read the account of what Brock Turner did, even if they recognize it as awful, there’s a louder voice in their heads saying something like this could have been written about me.

And the brutal truth is, they’re right. A lot of men, a lot of self-professed good men, have done something like what Brock Turner did: maybe not after a frat party, maybe not on the ground behind a dumpster, maybe not with a girl so intoxicated that she was losing consciousness, but maybe not so far off. Perhaps in their case the girl was drunk, yes, but not so very much more drunk than they were, and she seemed to like it and the next morning they went out for breakfast. Perhaps the girl said yes to kissing and touching and even though she froze up when he tried to penetrate her she never actually said no. Perhaps he thought that every yes starts out as a no because someone told him so, or because every movie or TV show he’d seen showed a women having to be cajoled and worn down befor she agreed to sex. Whatever the circumstances, Brock Turner’s story forced them to look at their actions in a new light and what they saw didn’t jive with how they felt about themselves.

And it’s so much easier to say neither of us are rapists than it is to say both of us are rapists.

Rape culture is the idea that sexual assault does not happen in a vacuum.
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Most rapists aren’t monsters who lurk behind bushes and in dark alleyways waiting for unsuspecting women to walk by. In fact, statistics show that a woman is far more likely to be assaulted by someone she knows than by a stranger. Most rapists are men we know and like: our neighbors and our colleagues and sometimes even our friends. Men who might admit that things got a little bit out of hand, or that they didn’t mean to go that far but they got caught up in the heat of the moment. Men like my friend’s boyfriend, who once referred to beer as liquid panty remover only to declare minutes later that rapists deserve to be castrated. Men who think that consent is a one-time binary, yes or no, and not an ongoing process of checking in with their partners.

Men we think of as nice guys.

Men who look just like everybody else.

And the worst part is, this feels like a best case scenario. In fact, there’s a small part of me that is still somewhat shocked that a white man from a well-connected family was convicted at all.

But please, tell me again about how our society takes rape very seriously.

Brock Turner’s father might be right that he does not have a violent past. It might, in fact, be accurate to say that up until the events of January 17th, 2015, Brock Turner had led an exemplary life. It’s possible that at the time Turner did not consider what he was doing to be sexual assault. But it was. The fact that he’s not a violent monster doesn’t mean he isn’t a rapist. He’s a rapist because he committed a rape. If these nice men who kind of sort of identify with what he did committed rapes, they’re rapists too.

And this is what we need to talk about over and over: the fact that nice boys from nice families commit rape. The fact that assault can happen even when the rapist does not “feel like” he is committing rape, because someone told him that attacks like the one Brock Turner committed are just normal romance. The fact that Brock Turner’s feelings seem to have greatly trumped those of the woman he assaulted.

We need to talk about how so many reactions to stories like these center the mens’ feelings.

And then we need to talk about how we can drown out those voices with the voices of survivors.

Scratch that. I am so angry and full of despair that sometimes all I can do is cry.

Several Halloweens ago, during my time as a student at Tufts University, I was raped.

When my body isn’t reminding me of the weight of the trauma through panic attacks, depressive episodes, and comfort eating, my environment does the job. When you have around $100,000 in educational debt coupled with the inability to find and keep steady work, the daily panic from unpaid bills and no idea when your next paycheck will come in creates quite the dark cloud.

I’m on food stamps. I’m going to be on Medicaid (which my shrink or gyno don’t take, but I simply cannot pay $400 a month in premiums anymore). Both of my bank accounts are overdrafted. At first glance it might seem to be quite a jump to connect my campus rape and Tufts’ institutional apathy to my poverty, but low grades and poor economic health are documented consequences of sexual violence.

Meanwhile, my rapist graduated on time, went to law school, and likely will never face anything close to the financial devastation I face in my day-to-day life. It’s probably needless to say, but: The most meaningful form of justice after my rape looks like a big fat paycheck.

Yes, I reported the assault to the police. Yes, I reported it to my school. And, no, nothing came of it — except the administration kicking me out when my grades dropped in the wake of the attack due to mental health struggles.

My lack of recourse after reporting the attack is far from uncommon. The legal system’s pitiful record of holding rapists accountable made regular headlines this year — from Brock Turner’s three months served (out of a six-month sentence) to his University of Colorado counterpart serving two years of “work release,” allowing him to go to school during the day and return to the county jail at night. The resounding outrage in response to these articles was largely, “this is not enough; this is not justice.”

But the reality is that these men’s sentences are actually more severe than what an overwhelming number of rapists will ever see — and this fact seems to have been lost in the chatter. Out of the many points of injustice that serve as a target for outrage — including the fact that rape happened in the first place — the one attracting the most energy this year has been the time Turner has spent in jail. And while it’s great that our society is increasingly talking about the legal system’s shortfalls, just looking at individual failures won’t do anything until the energy and outrage spent on these injustices are used to protest rape culture as a whole.

It’s time to ask — and answer — what does justice after rape look like?

Unfortunately, this conversation about what justice would look like after rape has been largely absent in sexual assault coverage this year. This must change: The mainstream idea of “justice” after rape in our society is ridiculously limited. There’s a focus on securing it through the U.S. legal system, but not only does this fail to live up to its name of a so-called criminal justice system — especially when it comes to sexual assault, with 97% of rapists never seeing a day in prison — but it also doesn’t offer the justice that many survivors want, need, and deserve.

It’s Time To Expand Our Idea Of Justice — And Survivors Should Lead The Way

While campus sexual assault is getting more attention than ever, the reality of its continued prevalence is grim. With alarming statistics — including that 1 in 5 college women are survivors of sexual assault, and that over 200 federal investigations into academic institutions for mishandling sexual violence are ongoing — it’s time for us to go beyond the letter of the law and our focus on compliance. At the end of the day, legal recourse is only accessible for a small amount of people; the law was made to protect the interests (read: property) of old white dudes, after all.

That’s why Kamilah Willingham and I launched the #JustSaySorry campaign: As activists who have spoke with numerous other survivors on the ground, we all believe in the transformative power of a (sincere) apology. With new devastating stories like a student dying by suicide after William Paterson University didn’t investigate her rape and a University of Colorado rapist escaping jail time, a campaign like #JustSaySorry might appear to trivialize rape. After all, a demand to school administrators to apologize juxtaposed to even my personal and financial pain probably seems confusing. But our — still unanswered — demands to Tufts University, Harvard Law School, and all academic institutions to directly apologize to survivors and other members of their community for failing to properly address sexual assault does quite the opposite.

Apologies from powerful institutions can be a transformative tool that both helps survivors heal and sets the stage to prevent more sexual violence.

I will never hesitate to say an apology is not enough to undo the damage facilitated by Tufts University. But there’s really nothing else, at this juncture, that the university can do for me. I cannot sue the school in civil court (legal fees were too high for me to pursue it before the statute of limitations were up) and my Title IX complaint ended with a ruling in the school’s favor. On top of that, I already got my bachelor’s degree from another school; apologizing is the only form of justice from my former school that is available for me — and countless other survivors.

Most survivors do not report their assaults to the police, and sadly, the people who are at higher risk of being sexually assaulted — such as queer folk, trans people, and people of color — report at even lower rates. There are many reasons for this, but the limited options for justice is one of them: It’s been well-documented that pursuing justice after a sexual assault through the legal system is tough, often referred to as a “second rape.” If we all acknowledge that rape is a heinous crime, we need to work to create multiple avenues of justice for survivors that can facilitate their healing and promote accountability for assailants and their enablers.

This is where the apology comes in. In spite of increased visibility of the issue, rates of campus sexual victimization have remained largely unchanged over the past 40 years; researchers still have not found programming that shows a significant reduction in campus sexual violence. Compare this with a 74% decrease in national rates of sexual assault and rape, which is in line with a general decline in violence. Clearly the policies we have now for campus sexual violence aren’t enough to reduce rates.

It’s Time To Take The Unjust Burden Off Survivors And Put It Where It Belongs

Colleges could do something simple that could help reduce rates and give most survivors what they seek: publicly denounce rape and apologize for past wrongs committed against survivors and the community. In the 2015 edition of Trauma and Recovery, author and psychiatrist Judith Herman addresses just how powerful this could be (emphasis mine):

Demanding an apology from institutions places the post-rape focus and pressure where it belongs: on the people, procedures, and policies that allow it to happen and let rapists continue with impunity. Instead of shaming survivors to report to the police to end rape, we can demand institutions to apologize for allowing it to happen — and go inadequately punished — under their watch.

My attraction to an apology isn’t just about wanting to feel better about the injustice I endured. After years of research and activism, it’s clear that apologizing can set the stage to help everyone who ever steps on a school campus (the ones who don’t rape, anyway).

If school leaders choose to publicly acknowledge past institutional failures to address sexual violence, survivors will hear that validation and know that the burden of shame isn’t theirs to bear. That sentiment can reverberate and affect future survivors, who will remember the school’s apology, trust the institution more, and be more likely to report and/or seek needed resources for themselves.

Further, apologies can help other campus survivors who haven’t felt able to step forward feel supported and empowered to seek the resources they need. If it’s done properly, an apology can be a part of a trauma-informed approach, which means that the school has intentionally created institutional structures and practices that ensure that their sexual assault prevention and response shows that the school knows what trauma is, how it manifests, and what the best responses to trauma is. The school can educate other students through leading by example to stop victim blaming and promote empathy toward survivors.

The administrators at academic institutions cannot make a meaningful reduction in sexual violence until they proactively work to understand the dynamics of trauma and the reality of rape culture. If they don’t understand why students and advocates are so upset by their institutional failures in regards to sexual violence, they need to do the research into the reality of campus rape culture and the damage they cause when they deny its existence. When 20% of women are raped during their college career, learning the truth about rape culture is part of their job. College administrators need to stop dragging their feet in creating real change and expecting cookies for not-enough gestures like Stanford’s victim-blaming alcohol policy or Harvard’s canceling the men’s soccer season with a whopping two games left (while the team members and coach remain unpunished).

Creating safer campuses immediately is possible. And all it takes to start is an apology.