We all know the all-too-horrible story of Brock Turner: Stanford student, collegiate swimmer, and rapist. His unforgivable crime, it’s highly-covered aftermath, and the widely-felt social impact that followed have made his name synonymous with “rapist”. When Hannah Kendall Shuman came across his mugshot in her Criminal Justice 101 textbook, the synonymity was only confirmed. The media subsequently devoured Turner’s appearance in this textbook, agreeing with Ms. Shuman that, yes, “Turner is the definition of rape”. However, this isn’t a good thing.
The main reason why designating Brock Turner’s case as the archetypical example of rape of today’s society is that, in doing so, we are eliminating less-outright situations where someone’s body is violated by another person that are just as valid as what happened at that frat party at Stanford in 2016. Being too intoxicated, passing out, and getting raped by a total stranger at a frat party behind a dumpster is, obviously, indisputable. But what if everything else in this situation was the same, except the rapist was your significant other? Things get a little messier, right?
To the average person, that could become ruled out because, when we do think of rape and other forms of violence (i.e. assault, date rape, domestic abuse, etc.), Brock Turner WILL become the standard, along with other easy-to-access sources such as TV shows like "Law & Order: SVU," which, more often than not, give inaccurate depictions of sexual violence and how it is handled in our criminal justice system. Therefore, the average person (which only would exclude those who either deal with crimes like this on a regular basis or are victims of sexual violence) has been dealt a narrow lens for viewing and understanding rape.
And this truly does work against the movement to enhance education on this subject matter which, ironically, is what this textbook set out to do but failed. Instead of broadening our understanding of violence, we are diminishing it. Subsequently, this becomes highly dangerous to everybody because the lines where consent should be crystal clear will blur, our knowledge of what does and doesn’t constitute rape and/or assault won’t exist, and assaulters will, like Turner, not be held accountable. That’s not a world I want to live in.
So, I beg of you: don’t make Brock Turner the textbook definition of rape. No two rape cases are the same, and we need to treat them as such. It’s time we stop sheltering ourselves and look beyond what the media shows us to further educate ourselves about sexual violence. To do so, we need to look beyond the surface, educate those who haven’t been enlightened, and take it upon ourselves to end sexual violence and understand that there is no standard when it comes to who can and can’t be a victim or an assaulter.
