‘Brock Turner' is one of the few names that have appeared in the headlines almost as often as the presidential candidates this year. Plenty of articles exist that will give you fluffed out details of Turner's case, but this isn't one of them. Here's what you need to know: Brock Turner raped a young woman behind a dumpster and attempted to leave her on the ground as she lays unconscious, assaulted, and scared. That's all there is to it. His age, her age, sobriety levels, athletic standings, his love of cooking…none of that matters.
In June, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to just six months in a county jail, a sentence far from the prosecution's request for six years. Judge Persky's decision sparked a rumbling of emotions across the country that grew much louder when Turner was released on September 2 because of good behavior, after serving only three months of his time. He got off with barely a slap on the wrist. Following Turner's release, I heard anger from my friends, members of my community, and the news, and saw outrage surrounding the event posted everywhere on social media.
When Turner's unbelievably short sentence was met with so much anger and shock from the national population, I breathed a sigh of relief. I felt that as I entered my own freshman year of college, maybe I wouldn't have to walk around in fear, aware that there was nothing that made me any less susceptible to rape than that young woman at Stanford. Maybe the self-defense class that I took this summer wouldn't be necessary after all; maybe I wouldn't fall into the '1 in 5' statistic. Maybe the '1 in 5' statistic would cease to exist altogether (yes, the statistic reporting that one in five women are sexually assaulted in college…one in five) now that my country was beginning to care. That could have been me leaned more towards but maybe it won't be me now that my body and my life were worth more than a six-month jail sentence. And that was because I really thought that surely, the powers determining the judicial fate of people like Brock Turner would have no choice but to give harder sentences as a result of so much national outrage. I was convinced that change was coming.
I heard America grieve and shout in anger at the release of a rapist after a measly three months in the Santa Clara County Jail, and it was enough to make me feel just a little bit safer. I was anticipating progress in sexual assault awareness, continuing passion for the justice of rape victims, and the unifying assumption among all that rape is rape and a punishable crime. I thought that the stories of Turner's victim and so many others would be the lasting effects of this enraging news story. Unfortunately, just a few weeks after Turner's release, I'm realizing that this may not be the case.
The first time that I saw a #ThingsLongerThanBrockTurnersRapeSentence post on Twitter, I dismissed it as an ignorant, immature, individual joke. Soon, however, Tweets bearing the hashtag began to show up more and more on my timeline, accompanied by phrases such as "my leg hair," "'so-and-so's time on [blank] TV show," "the 15 minutes it will take to save 15% or more on car insurance," and many, many more. The more I saw, the harder it was to ignore the fearful discomfort running through my brain. Finally, I forced myself to admit something that I never thought I would have to: The rape case against Brock Turner had been turned into a joke. Replies to these posts were filled with "lol" and "so funny" remarks. Perhaps even Turner himself saw the posts and got a few laughs out of them. Only a week ago, Turner's sentence was seen as a warning to America of future rape cases if progressive action is not taken soon. Now, it's a comic relief.
We are not at the point where it is okay to find humor in this situation and others like it. We will never be at that point. It is not okay to reduce rape or anything to do with rape to a joke. To the authors of those posts, I don't believe that you are advocates for rape, but I urge you to think about the effects of your absentmindedly-typed humor. We were in a place of progress. Rape awareness needs outrage and despair and urgency to move forward. When a case like this is turned into a joke, a joke can quickly become all that it is. The hashtag brings humor to a rape case, dehumanizes the victim, and turns her terror and heartbreak into a Twitter trend. Social media can work in powerful ways, and everything you post can and probably will have an effect on the way others perceive issues or events. Even a single sentence that is meant to be nothing more than a joke can have a massive impact on the seriousness of an issue. #ThingsLongerThanBrockTurnersRapeSentence has the potential to set all of society back a level in terms of the seriousness of rape cases. If your tweet sounds more like it would come out of the rapist's mouth rather than the victim's, it shouldn't exist. Rape is not a joke, and I'll say it one more time: nothing to do with rape is a joke, so please, don't turn it into one.
