Our taus say ‘boys will be boys’ when they hear that someone’s daughter has been raped. Or they blame noodles. And in the U.S., the father of Brock Turner, a convicted 20-year-old rapist, has said that his son shouldn’t be made to pay for “20 minutes of action”.
In court, the girl Brock raped described how the attack has left her emotionally scarred; how she is afraid of the dark, of walking alone. Brock’s father, meanwhile, wrote of how his son had lost his appetite and could no longer eat steak or pretzels with gusto.
The twin narrative is incredibly offensive, but the most disturbing part is Brock’s refusal to take responsibility for his crime. In this, he is supported by the father, who is concerned that his son’s future will be ruined by harsh punishment, but who is unmoved by how the girl will cope.
Brock and the girl had been drinking heavily that night during a frat party. In the early hours of the morning, two Swedish cyclists found an unconscious girl behind a dumpster with Brock on top of her. He tried running away, but was caught by one of the cyclists. The girl says she had become unconscious during the evening and knew nothing; Brock claims she consented to everything.
In her statement, the girl talks of her shock when she awoke on a hospital gurney and realised she had been assaulted. She speaks of how she thought Brock might apologise, that they could come to a negotiated settlement and close the case. But Brock refused to take any blame at all. He chose instead to contest the rape in court.
Brock focuses not on the rape he committed but on the drinking. His defence is that alcohol was responsible for the crime, not he. He blames college culture, frat parties, the girl, everything but himself.
I am not surprised. I find most men incapable of taking responsibility for their actions. Men invariably claim they were provoked into hitting their wives, or provoked to rape, or provoked (by a failed marriage) into adultery. Women, on the other hand, are not granted this convenient defence. If they get angry, they are shrews. If they are assaulted, they provoked it by being shrews. If they complain at work or home, they are hysterical. In other words, women self-destruct. That’s why men never apologise. It’s because they can’t be blamed for anything.
And so it goes in this case too. The girl’s excessive drinking not only made her unconscious, it also made Brock rape her. And Brock? Ah poor sod. He was just a victim of circumstances.
Yes, excessive alcohol consumption leads to poor judgement. Yes, both students were guilty of this. But that problem has to be considered separately from the actual crime.
When a man walking alone and unarmed down a dark alley is mugged, the thief’s sentence doesn’t get commuted because the walker was too trusting. Nobody says, ‘Oh leave the poor thief alone. That guy asked to be robbed’. Everybody expects the crime to be punished first, and they advise the victim later.
With rape, however, which is as much an act of assault (and often battery), we ignore the crime and obsess with advising the victim. ‘She could have worn…’ ‘She ought not to have…’ These can be debated, but they don’t take away from the fact that a crime did take place and must be punished, exactly as a robber or murderer or pickpocket is punished.
The girl will take responsibility for drinking herself into a stupor for the rest of her life, but Brock has to own up to the rape, to what he is capable of becoming when drunk. It’s high time society stopped handing out alibis to men.
