France: 30 years. Guatemala: Eight years. Israel: 16 years. New Zealand: 20 years. Norway: 10 years. India: 14 years. Russia: Three years.
These are the maximum sentences handed down for the crime of rape in these countries. In order to get this punishment, you must have committed the worst of the worst sexual assaults, which usually means a rape that led to the death of the victim. Sentences like these are seen as harsh.
Yet here we are in America, sickened by the fact that a 20-year-old has not received a life sentence, which would amount to about 65 years, for a crime other than rape.
Brock Turner was not convicted of rape. The three charges he was convicted of are as follows: assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated person, and two counts of sexual penetration of an intoxicated person with a foreign object.
The two charges that would have carried the steeper punishment that many Americans are calling for were dropped. Originally, Brock Turner was also charged with rape of an intoxicated person and rape of an unconscious person. The DNA tests performed from the rape kit proved that no rape was committed. The charges were droppeed and Brock Turner was from that point forward deserving of not being associated with the term “rapist.”
What he did was horrible – without consent, no one should ever take sexual actions upon another. Nothing can excuse that. No one can change that it happened. But what we can do is save a life.
Undeniably, both Brock Turner and the victim of the sexual assault's lives have been changed forever. While not much information has been released about the victim, we do know two basic details about Brock Turner that make him deserving of another chance at life beyond bars. He was a Stanford student with no criminal record. Stanford is not a walk in the park to be admitted to, and by knowing that he was a very active and talented athlete we can deduce that he had at least good if not great grades.
Now, there will be no more Stanford. There will be no more financial aid. There will be no more college in general. Universities are not obliged to admit you if you’ve been convicted of a crime. By being a convict, you are no longer entitled to federal financial aid, public housing, or federal benefits of any type.
The rest of his life, Brock Turner will be looked at as a sex offender. People see the six-month sentence as just swatting him on the wrist, but they fail to realize that he also has the punishment of life on the sex offender registry. That in itself is a life sentence.
What does life on the sex offender registry entail? Brock Turner will no longer have a voice in matters every other citizen does; he will be disfranchised, not allowed to vote. He will never have the same prospects for jobs as everyone else does, as he will always have to check the box on every application he ever fills out saying he is a criminal. He will always have his face on the internet for the world to see, and people will always have the right to know his business. He will always be a second-class citizen.
You might think, “Well, what about the victim? Doesn’t she deserve to have justice?” Well, yes. But what is justice? We’ve become such a punitive society that we believe people are beyond helping. It’s not crazy to believe that we can help both the victim and the perpetrator while still achieving justice. Both parties should be helped, just in different ways. The victim should receive the help she needs. Sexual assault is not an easy thing to deal with, but the pain can be minimized.
Think of this: the victim didn’t know what happened to her. When she woke up, she was being probed by the police and having things stuck between her legs without even knowing that she had been assaulted. If we as a society learned to treat victims differently, she would have a very different viewpoint on what happened to her. When you wake up to something like that, with strangers between your legs, it’s hard not to feel like crawling in a hole. It’s hard not to feel ashamed. It’s hard not to internalize what happened.
Her life is forever changed, but the treatment we provide her will minimize the damage done by Brock Turner. Likewise, the treatment we provide him will minimize the damage done by a mistake he made. He deserves to be held accountable for his actions, but that doesn’t mean locking him up and throwing away the key. Why throw away the potential of someone who has so much left to live for?
His sentence is not “letting him off easy.” He will forever have the label of sex offender. Six months doesn’t even begin to compare to a life of second-class citizenship.
