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Alleged Stanford Rapist Says He ‘Wasn’t Trying To Rape,’ Media Focuses On How Much His Victim Drank
Brock Allen Turner, the Stanford student who has been accused of raping an unconscious woman on campus says his “intentions were not to try and rape a girl without her consent.” Too bad that sentence makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. It’s also too bad the media is already vilifying his victim for drinking too much. This is rape culture, folks.
Rape culture has a subtle, pervasive way of permeating everything. If you are unfamiliar with the term, it speaks to the way in which society blames victims of sexual assault while normalizing male sexual violence. Its influence leads reporters to begin a story that is about five felony rape counts and an athlete who was essentially caught in the act of committing the alleged crimes like this, from the San Jose Mercury News:
Liquor flowed freely at the Stanford University fraternity party two weeks ago where prosecutors say a student athlete met a young woman who’d joined the revelry with friends and later raped her nearby, according to police reports released Thursday.
“Liquor flowed freely at the Stanford University fraternity party” where a student athlete met a young woman who’d “joined the revelry.” The second paragraph of the story is this:
He drank seven beers with swigs of whiskey. She added a couple shots of liquor to the four she drank before arriving, and then a beer.
You see, it’s important that we start the story this way. It’s important that we know exactly how much alcohol they consumed so we can later say things like, “he was too drunk to really know what he was doing” and “why did she get so drunk that she couldn’t protect herself?” Because rape culture makes sure victims always know it was somehow their fault. It makes sure society reads that narrative first – the narrative of two drunk people reveling at a party and a victim who was complicit because of the amount of drinks she had.
(Related: NYT ‘Anti-Rape Idea’ Is Actually A Horrible, Victim Blaming Load Of Nonsense)
We know the victim was unconscious. We know that, because police referred to her as “completely unresponsive.” We know that because the two cyclists that came to her rescue said what they saw “shocked their conscience.” I can’t think of a single reason we’d need to know an itemized list of the beverages she’s had to get her to that state.
