The response to the conviction of rapist Brock Turner has spread across the internet like wildfire, and I have to commend the media and blogosphere for their justifiable outrage on this miscarriage of justice.
I need to focus on a letter that was sent to the judge by one of Turner's friends, Leslie Rasmussen, on his behalf. There are two parts of it that every person should read, as they represent a larger indictment of American society than we realize.
First:
"I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn't right. But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn't always because people are rapists."
According to Rasmussen, "political correctness" is the perversion of honest language that causes people to believe that rape happens because of a rapist. Let that sink in for a second. According to this letter, when a person is raped, there is a victim, and there might be a rapist, but not always.
Thankfully, Rasmussen was kind enough to follow up this statement by explaining who the other half of a rape is when a "rapist" isn't part of the equation, which brings us to this excerpt:
"This is completely different from a woman getting kidnapped and raped as she is walking to her car in a parking lot. That is a rapist. These are not rapists. These are idiot boys and girls having too much to drink and not being aware of their surroundings and having clouded judgment."
Rasmussen didn't take the time to explain how, had an idiot boy had raped her, she would have forgiven him for his "clouded judgment", but we can assume from her words that she's well-versed in the difference between getting raped by a rapist, and getting clouded-judgment-assaulted.
The undertones of this second excerpt are the most important, however, as they apply to so many issues in society that Americans talk about with little to no understanding of the facts.
Rasmussen believes that crimes are committed by "strangers" or "outsiders", as is evidenced by her assertion that a rape only occurs when a stranger abducts a woman in a public space. But the facts say otherwise. According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), "82% of sexual assaults are perpetrated by a non-stranger" and "47% of rapists are a friend or acquaintance".
In Rasmussen's mind, the brute caricature of the savage, dark-skinned criminal lurking in the shadows is a rapist, and the wealthy, white, civilized socialite is the victim of society's attempt to be "politically correct" by making rape seem like an equal-opportunity crime. (For the record, white males are the assailants in 57% of rapes, compared to being 62% of the American demographic; hardly enough of a difference to merit much discussion.)
The image isn't limited to cases of sexual assault. Americans buy guns for self-defense under the guise that they will be safer from an intruder in their home. Yet data shows that a household with a gun is twelve times more likely to see a homicide or injury occur from that weapon than from an intruder, and members of the household are twice as likely to die from a homicide in the home than if there was no gun at all.
Kidnapping, a topic mentioned by Rasmussen in her letter, is also a problem that occurs primarily within families and communities. Less than 0.1% of kidnappings and abductions are perpetrated by a complete stranger, with family members and close friends accounting for 80% of abduction cases. This doesn't preclude the media from its Missing Pretty White Girl Syndrome, a fetish of journalism that only furthers the belief that the safest place for a vulnerable young woman is in her own community, which happens to be where over half of rape cases occur.
What's driving the flawed belief system? Why do Americans, Leslie Rasmussen among them, excuse violent crime that occurs by family and neighbors and continue to fear the masked stranger hiding in the shadows?
It's not a stretch to speculate that a history of community segregation in the United States has cemented the belief that "strangers" are your enemy, and that what defines a stranger is their race, and what community that anchors them to. Many American cities still show the effects of segregation practices such as red-lining, and modern practices like gentrification and suburbanization are only giving wealthy whites more excuses to gate themselves off from the "Strangers" who want to kidnap and rape them.
Anecdotally, my own neighborhood (I'm looking at you, Baltimore) is up in arms about the recent murder of Kim Leto, a middle-aged white woman, by a black youth who was tried and convicted. Yet there is no conversation about the murder/suicide that took place in the parking lot of our local shopping center last year; those people are no less dead than Leto, but they weren't killed by an 'intruder', a 'stranger', an 'outsider'.
We excuse the members of our community - the people who look like us, think like us, live like us - because they're just like us, but "troubled". We indict the outsiders because they're nothing like us, so their drive to commit violent acts must come from innate evil, something that only an outsider could possess.
And our unwillingness to cross these community lines and make these outsiders our neighbors is what allows us to convince ourselves of the difference between a "drunk idiot with clouded judgement" and "a rapist", or in the mind of Leslie Rasmussen, the difference between a white athlete unaware of his surroundings and a dark shadow hiding in a parking lot.
The crime is the same. The victim suffers the same - maybe more in cases where someone they knew violated their trust. But we either excuse the former or ignore them completely.
There are whole books to be written on the mishandling of the Stanford rape case, and I appreciate that so many people whose opinions I trust have shown the outrage and disgust over the violent act, the inadequate sentence, and the appalling response from friends and family of the perpetrator. Rape culture is real and people suffer from its prevalence. But the segregation of our communities allows us to condemn some aspects of this culture while excusing others, and we would be wise to analyze this case in that context as well.