Some thoughts on the Stanford Victim's impact statement, violence against women, and the justice system

This is the Victim Impact Statement a young woman who was raped in Palo Alto gave at her rapist's sentencing hearing. Her's was the rare trial conviction. Her attacker was convicted of three separate counts of felony assault. All 12 jurors found him guilty on all three counts.

He was sentenced to six months of jail time.

I encourage you to read her statement, because it is important and because it took incredible bravery on her part to write it, much less read it in open court. Please know that it is very emotionally difficult and disturbing, as are all the news articles linked below.

What follows are my feelings about this Victim Impact Statement and my feelings in general this morning about the way women are treated. It also involves a film I once watched in a class over a decade ago that I still think about. While none of this is directly related to writing or reading YA or NA, it does have to do with women and the lived experience of being a woman. It has to do, in its way, with the response YA and NA authors get when they write books about powerful women standing up to abusers or to authorty. And it is about art and how sometimes art can say things that are difficult to articulate in our own words, that sometimes when we want to scream we watch a book or see a play or are shown a film in a class in college that we don't quite understand, but years later, still think about as an instance where what we feel about the world is articulated.

. . . .

Every day, I wake up before my husband. And couple of times a week, he turns over and sleepily asks, "What's wrong?" because he finds me crying. Several days a week one of the first things I do is cry.

Every day, I wake up and I read the news. At the top of every page, some fresh horror has been visited upon a woman. Someone has been assaulted. Someone has been killed. Someone opened their mouth and said something on the internet or in a newspaper, and now strangers are sharing her private information and sending her threats that she will be raped or killed. At a public rally, someone running for public office has been told she should be killed.

This case is just the latest in a round of victimization, of survivors who try to take back their power, and who fail to find any kind of justice for their efforts. In case you have not followed this case, let me give you a quick summary. It's a terrifyingly familiar story of:

1. an unconscious woman who
2. was being raped behind a dumpster and
3. was only saved from who knows what else because two bystanders intervened after realizing the horrific thing that was occurring.
4. These witnesses then chased down her assailant to make sure that he was captured.
5. Her assailant admitted to police in statements after the incident that he did not have consent
6. but then later recanted,
7. forcing his victim to over a year through the entire legal process, including the trial and sentencing.
8. After her assailant was convicted, 12-0, on three separate felony counts
9. he only received SIX MONTHS jail time.

That's it.

That's all.

Six months.

This young woman did literally everything we tell victims they have to. They must

allow themselves to be examined;
allow their identities to be publicly exposed;
allow their lives and their privacy to be shredded by law enforcement and the media and attorneys and spectators;
be forced to speak over and over again, often in public, about the most intimate details of things done to them, in front of their friends, their families, their communities;
put work, school, church, and every other commitment in their lives or every other opportunity for support behind their dedication to their pursuit of justice.

This woman did everything we say a person is supposed to if they want to make sure the person who hurts them is held accountable.

And for all that pain and suffering: the convicted felon who assaulted her got a six month sentence, which will be reduced for time served and good behavior.

I read about the horrors these women suffer. And they come for you, no matter who you are. You can be out for one fun night with your sister like the Stanford survive. Or you can be a famous rock star. Or you can be the relatively new wife of a popular celebrity. No matter who you are -- you are at fault. You provoked the attack. You should be ashamed. You should keep your mouth shut. If you're not, you have some sort of ulterior motive to bring your allegation to authorities or to a court of law. As if being subjected to all of the above wasn't a pretty strong disincentive before the public starts taking you apart.

I read about how these women tried to leverage the systems that we tell people who have been wronged to use, and how those systems fail them. We tell them that these are the avenues of justice in a civilized society, and that failing to avail yourself of them is a choice not to seek justice for what's been done to you. Then I read about what happens to those rare brave women who try, who open themselves up to additional abuse, scorn, judgement, hatred, and revictimization.

I read stories about technologies that protect and enable the abusers that victims try to report to them. I read about judges who fail to properly understand what it means to have your life and your very being irrevocably changed by a terrible event. I read about protective systems that provide no protection until the woman (and frequently her children) who needed them is dead.

And when I tell people this, they ask me, “Why do you read the news? Just stop reading the news.” As though that is the problem. As though the news, or my reading of it, is to blame. As though, if I simply refuse to acknowledge what happens every day to women, it will somehow go aware.

I didn't always know why my Gender in Fairytales and Film professor, the late Dorothy Berkson, showed my class Born in Flames. But every day I wake up, and I read another story, and I wish I could tell her that I get it now, and that I understand what might drive women to a place where violence seemed like the only language the patriarchy will ever understand. I don’t ever want that to be the answer. I don’t think it is the answer.

But, looking at the world and how it treats my sisters in humanity, I understand the impulse.