“Rape culture” has been an especially popular topic of Facebook posts and news articles this week, as controversy rages over the sentence handed down in the Brock Turner rape case.

I’ll summarize the facts of the case as reported by the victim herself in her well-publicized statement:

A 23 year old woman went to a frat party with her sister. She drank a lot of hard liquor very quickly, and while that hadn’t been a problem for her in her college days when her tolerance was high, she hadn’t been drinking as much lately and became extremely intoxicated to the point of passing out.

Drunk college freshman Brock Turner, attending the same party, somehow took the victim behind a dumpster where he removed her clothing and violently penetrated her with his fingers, but ran off when he spotted by passers-by. The girl woke up at the hospital bloodied and confused, with no memory of the attack.

The student was found guilty, and sentenced to 6 months in jail and 3 years probation. This sentence has drawn outrage, as many feel it is much too lenient.

The reason rape is taken much more seriously than other forms of assault is that it damages the victim’s sexuality, and sexuality is a core part of our humanity.

Sexuality is sacred, and the censure of rape honors it’s sacredness. Not only that, but sexuality is a necessary tool for building a healthy identity and healthy relationships – rape takes away a person’s ability to do that.

Taking rape seriously means taking our sexuality seriously – but what happens when it’s the only way we take our sexuality seriously?

Traditionally, repudiating rape has only been one way among many of protecting and defending this most delicate, vulnerable, beautiful piece of our humanity.  Up until a few decades ago, most cultures recognized that sexuality was so precious and important that it ought only to be handled by one’s spouse.

Now, it’s considered a rite of passage and a means of personal growth to offer your sexuality up to be consumed by strangers for a night or two.

Traditionally, people honored the sexual parts of their body by covering them and allowing them only to be seen privately, intimately.

Now, young women’s clothing is about how much nakedness they can get away with in public.

It’s not surprising that the more we abuse and devalue our own sexuality, the more our culture complains  about “rape culture”. Anti-rape hysteria is the dying gasp of the idea that sex is sacred, as we deny with all other personal actions and values.

So I would like to compare rape to arson.

A person who has drunk themselves into unconsciousness has made themselves like an abandoned building, and this too is by matters of degree. Is it a 16 year old at their first party, inexperienced and desperately naive?

Or is it a 23 year old college graduate? I became a mother at the age of 23, responsible not only for my own life and welfare but the welfare of another. To literally poison yourself into incapacitation at a frat house of all places, as an educated adult, is to treat your sexuality with the same contempt as a house you had cared badly for and could no longer afford – it is to abandon it.

Now, someone might come along and burn the house down. This person who commits arson against your abandoned house is a criminal. They are fully responsible for their actions– they are immoral, they are bad. They deserve prison time, they deserve censure.

But what they did, and what you experienced, is not the same thing as arson against a family’s lovingly cared-for house.

A person who takes responsibility for themselves in life, who respects their body and takes seriously their actions and choices, is like a well-tended house – similarly, to a matter of degree. When this person, who is just living their life, is suddenly raped, it is like the house is set on fire while the family sleeps inside.

Unlike the abandoned house, this house was full of life, it was full of value and creativity that could have nurtured and built up so many. Both houses were damaged, but not in the same way.

Rebuilding will not and should not be the same for the owners of either house. The owner of the abandoned house is not at fault for the arson, but before they rebuild they have to account for how they treated their house in the first place. Why did they value their house so little, how can they care for it better in the future?

This is not for the purpose of heaping guilt upon themselves, but to help them rebuild or own for the first time a healthy sexual identity – the very thing that makes rape more serious than most other crimes to begin with.

So I understand the sentence in the Brock Turner case. A college freshman who molests a drunk adult at a frat party is a dangerous criminal, but not at all the same kind of dangerous criminal who lies in wait for an innocent woman jogging in the park and attacks her.

By trying to make them the same thing, we’re losing our sense of what makes rape so hurtful and wrong to begin with.