COMMENT: Why Brock Turner won’t need reminding of his heroes

Pinned above the bed of a young woman in the United States is a small drawing of two bicycles.

They act as a daily reminder that despite all she has endured since January 2015, there still exist heroes in her story.

Hers is a story which has, since it came to global attention at the beginning of the summer, acted as a platform for heated debate on rape culture and white male privilege.

Hers is a story of such notoriety it could have – and should have – signalled a considerable turnaround in the judicial system’s approach to rape cases.

Instead, hers became a story which compounded the well-worn argument that when it comes to victims of rape, they serve the life sentence while the perpetrator, if even convicted, is given ample opportunity to twist the facts until a rape is deduced to nothing more than drunken fumblings and crossed wires.

 

We have been taught to believe that good will always prevail, but as Brock Turner walked free from Santa Clara County jail last Friday, one can’t help but think that that saying holds as much water as ‘they all lived happily ever after’.

Brock Turner’s father described his son’s sexual penetration of an intoxicated person with a foreign object and his intent to commit rape of an intoxicated woman behind a dumpster on an American college campus last year as ‘20 minutes of action’.

And whether we want believe it or not, the American judicial system – and more specifically Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky – was of the same opinion.

Twenty minutes of action which brought the two male cyclists who happened upon it to tears, but hey, maybe they don’t know how this whole rape culture thing works.

 

While prosecution in the case pushed for a six-year sentence against the Stanford University student, Brock Turner was sentenced to just six months.

And he walked free after just three.

After stripping a young woman of her dignity, after defiling her in countless and unimaginable ways, and after buying her ‘a ticket to a planet where she lives by herself’, Brock Turner is now sleeping in his own bed.

A bed which doesn’t need a drawing of two bicycles above it because in his story, he’s the hero.

I mean, how else would you describe a young man who bravely endured a summer behind bars just because some girl couldn’t handle 20 minutes of action behind a dumpster?