Okay, readers, I’m going to challenge you to something today. Think of it as a game. Imagine you are a young girl, abandoned by your mother and you grew up in an abusive household. You have been repeatedly abused and then forced into prostitution. The terrible person who did this to you is named “Cut Throat”. Later a 43-year-old man buys you and takes you to his house, planning on using you for sex. You’re in his bedroom, you’ve been tirelessly trying to stop him, from hurting you and now it looks like he’s going to either reach for his gun or do something else to harm you. Fearing for your life, you shoot him, killing him. Classic self-defense, right?

Now imagine you're the same young girl, a 16-year-old kid, and you are sentenced to life in prison after being tried as an adult. You are convicted harshly of three felonies. Two of them being murder even though you only killed one person and it was out of self-defense. At this point, you have been in prison for over a decade and you are not eligible for parole until you are nearly 70. Hello? Aren’t you the victim here? What about this is fair? The answer is none of it.

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Now, I want you to imagine that you are a young lady with a full-time job, already graduated from college. One night you decide to go to a party with your younger sister. You drink, as almost everyone does at parties, and at some point, you get separated from your sister. Later, you wake up in a hospital. You have been assaulted, they tell you. Naked, assaulted, and virtually raped behind a dumpster while you were unconscious. As the night drags on in that hospital it all begins to initially sink in; you are a rape victim and everything hurts. You are there for hours. For a very long time afterwards, you don’t tell anyone until the news comes out. It is devastating.

But here is the only positive aspect at that moment, they know who did it. Brock Turner. Maybe this can be over quickly and you can both attempt to move on. This is not what happens. Over the whole year this takes, his attorneys and defense team do everything in their power to blame you and they do. All 12 jurors find your rapist 100% guilty of three felonies, just like in the case above. However, this monster is only sentenced to 6 months in jail. Anything longer would have had a “severe impact” on him, after all, he was a fantastic swimmer. But what about your life that he so ruthlessly destroyed? Does nobody care about yours?

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In the end, he was released after only 3 months on “good behavior”.

This is the letter Turner's victim wrote to him and about the incident, it is definitely worth the read:https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra?utm_term=.nmw4gnaOA#.ppd1VG6J3

In one of these cases the girl was forced into prostitution, was convicted of three felonies, got life in prison; she was 16 years old. She was the victim.

In the other case, Brock Turner is convicted of three felonies and had brutally raped an unconscious girl. He was 20 years old and got 6 months in jail. Turner was not the victim, the girl he did this to is.

Does anyone see the double standard here? This is what the priorities and mindset of our country look like. This is how a girl gets blamed for her sexual assault no matter what. How much did you drink? Notice how a guy's actions are excused when he is drunk, while the girl gets blamed for the exact same reason.

What were you wearing? You were asking for it. Instead of blaming the victim, why don't we blame the person that raped them? This is how nobody believes a woman when she comes forward, but nearly everyone will believe the accused man. This is what rape culture in America looks like. It’s time something changed.