Hi, ML. The Brock Turner story has been huge in the news lately, and not only do I think there are some important issues to unpack, I'm also curious about everyone else's take on the whole thing. I won't spend any time detailing what we know (finding a news article that just gives the basic facts instead of the most recent development seems to be impossible anyway), but the
Wikipedia entry on him and the case
gives a pretty good overview for anyone who somehow hasn't seen this yet.
I'm going to put down some of my thoughts (please know that this is me speaking as an individual and not on behalf of the ML team), and I'm very interested in what you all have to say about those, or the case in general.
First, I'm totally disgusted by this, and I'm guessing that pretty much all of you are as well. The assault itself, the lack of any indication of genuine contrition from Turner, the frankly shocking and revolting statement by Turner's father, the laughable sentence and the ludicrous reasons for it... There's nothing about the immediate circumstances from which I can take anything positive. The whole thing just makes me feel gross.
Second, I have some thoughts on the concept of consent education, and its relationship with this case.
The reason I bring this up is because what Turner did has prompted a bit of a resurgence of articles about the importance of teaching boys what consent looks like, to help prevent things like this. Now, I haven't ever hidden that I consider (what I think of as) the
hard
discussions, the ones that make us reflect on men, masculinity, or (even harder) our own personal behavior, incredibly important to any community that is honestly focused on men's issues and the growth and development of men, individually and as a group. I think consent education is crucial, I think that probably the way different people are socialized means that sometimes it will be more effective to drill down on certain segments of the population (and sometimes this is going to mean boys, or men). I think that the confrontation with our own expectations about society, the way we've developed as people in it, and our role in it, are crucial to our movement.
All that said, I think this is a crappy story to use to make that point, for two related reasons.
One: how do you design a consent education curriculum that has to be accessible to the people you're really trying to reach, the ones who might be at risk of struggling with the grey areas or the fuzzy edges of courtship and appropriate behavior and doing something harmful, that also includes a slide on "Off Limits: Don't Physically Assault and Photograph an Unconscious Complete Stranger Behind a Dumpster Like a Person Made of Garbage Would Do"? I saw an article along the lines of "Men See Themselves In Brock Turner," which I fundamentally believe is bullshit; I think most men read the circumstances of this case with the same revulsion I did. Which leads me to -
Two:
assuming
that most men don't identify with Turner, how effective is such a program likely to be? Aren't a bunch of men going to say, "now, wait a minute, you're telling me this this walking refuse golem
is somehow representative of my own experience of the world? Is there any reason I shouldn't be much more offended by the comparison than I am open to good arguments in favor of what consent looks like?" That's a rhetorical question, by the way, because all you have to do is look at the article comments or Twitter replies to that argument to see what I'm describing in action. I think it's obvious that the essential message is being lost because this case in particular is so glaringly beyond the pale - not to mention, the loss of that message is harmful in its own right.
Third, I came across an article (and please don't knee-jerk about the title, because I'm going to explain it),
"Why Brock Turner is not actually a rapist", which raises some interesting points about how we define rape in society and law. Basically, the California prosecutors dropped the charges against Turner that included rape, because under California law, rape is still defined as the penetration with a penis, of someone else, without the other person's consent. Turner never got to the point of penetrating the victim with his penis (Edit: this is
apparently still a contested point) - just a bunch of other really gross shit, including penetration (but not with a penis!) - so they couldn't make the case, and the penalties for what they could charge him with are much lower than the ones for rape, as defined. So, legally speaking, "Brock Tuner is not actually a rapist."
The issues with that are obvious, I think. First, what Turner did was, again,
really fucking wrong and gross, and even the
potential
sentence doesn't fit the facts of the case, to say nothing of my own sense of justice. It's awful to me that from the outset he was in for a lesser sentence based on bad statutory text. Second, so, apparently? California still defines rape as a crime that only men can commit. I know I don't even need to go into why that's a major problem.
Finally, one question that comes up in a bunch of these articles is, "how do we as a society want men to behave in this kind of situation," and I think the answer is something like, "we want them to behave like the men who pulled Turner off of his victim, chased him down, called the cops, and made damn sure that he was present to be answerable to the authorities when they arrived." Two men, the Swedish grad students, stopped the crime while it was in progress, and two others helped them keep Turner at the scene. Eighty percent of the men involved in this not only knew what consent looked like, but put themselves at considerable physical, social, and legal risk to make sure that such an egregious violation of that standard didn't happen without consequence. This isn't advocacy for vigilante justice, nor to say that physical confrontation is necessarily always the best course of action, but I do think that the courage and moral strength of the men who intervened here deserves more recognition.
That's my piece. There are some important issues for our men's advocacy community here. I'm looking forward to your thoughts.