The case burst into the spotlight after the victim made public a powerful letter to the judge who sentenced her attacker — 20-year-old former Stanford University student Brock Turner — on Thursday last week to six months in jail on three felony convictions. Her harrowing 12-page account of the assault in January last year and its impact on her life — read in court before the sentencing — lit up the Internet within hours of being posted online, drawing a global chorus of outrage at the light sentence and prompting calls for the judge to be removed from the bench. “You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today,” she told her attacker in the statement read in court. “You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.”
A letter to the court by Turner’s father, stating that the former Stanford University swimmer did not deserve to be jailed for “20 minutes of action,” further stoked the debate about race and privilege. The furor even reached the nation’s capital, with US Vice President Joe Biden praising the young victim as a “warrior.” The case is emblematic of the way rape assaults are handled on US campuses, where observers say lax policies have created a climate of impunity and discouraged victims from speaking out. “In general, colleges and universities have done a really bad job at managing campus sexual assault, preventing it or responding to it when it occurs,” said Michele Dauber, a Stanford law professor spearheading a campaign to have the judge in the assault case recalled.
Dauber, who is a close friend of the 23-year-old California woman targeted in the assault, said the six-month sentence given to Turner — who is expected to serve only three months in county jail — downplays the seriousness of rape. “Here we have the ‘perfect’ victim who did everything ‘right,’ going to the police, making a formal charge and subjecting her body to the rape exam. She even had witnesses... and she still didn’t get justice,” Dauber said. “The message this case is sending is: ‘Don’t bother calling the police, you won’t get justice,’” Dauber added.
According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, about one in six women in the US are victims of sexual assault. A study last year by Brown University found that more than one in every six women are raped during their first year in college while too drunk or incapacitated to fend off their attacker. The majority of college-age victims — about 80 percent — knew their attacker, surveys show.
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