Third Way: Guilty Until Proven Innocent
geralt
It is estimated that roughly 443,000 individuals aged 12 and older experience sexual violence each year in the United States. According to RAINN, at least one in six women and one in ten men have experienced sexual violence at some point in their lives and that only an estimated one in three victims will report the sexual violence they experience. That accounts for roughly 310 out of every 1,000 survivors.
It is important to consider that no statistic surrounding sexual violence accurately represents the scale of the issue due to under-reportage. Consequently, this disproportionate presentation of statistics may prevent its readers from understanding the true scale and prevalence of sexual violence.
Survivors of sexual violence may choose not to report their crimes for a number of reasons. Among them, there is a fear of retaliation, a belief that nothing would happen, a belief that what happened to them wasn't actually assault, a fear of getting the perpetrator in trouble, or a belief that even if they did report, nothing could be done.
These reasons, as broken down by a study conducted by RAINN, showed that of the individuals polled, 20% feared retaliation, 13% believed the police would not do anything to help, 8% believed it was not important enough to report, 7% did not want to get the perpetrator in trouble, and 2% believed that the police did not have the authority to do enough to help.
Of the reported cases of sexual assault, it is estimated that around 98% of perpetrators will not be convicted or see incarceration. These statistics illuminate a clear reason why many survivors lack the faith that the judicial system will be able to bring their perpetrators to justice.
We, as human beings, are afraid to make mistakes. We are afraid to step out of line. We are afraid to stand out from the crowd. We are afraid of making the wrong decision; and in very few places is this clearer than within the walls of a courtroom hearing a trial of sexual violence. It is a common line echoed throughout these hallowed halls that to wrongfully convict someone accused of rape would be to “ruin their lives”.
As was a large portion of the defense’s approach in the infamous Stanford sexual assault case: People v. Turner. A famous Stanford case involving student athlete Brock Turner, a talented swimmer at Stanford, and the victim of his selfish and reckless crime, Chanel Miller, a brave and ambitious young woman who simply wanted to enjoy a night out with her sister.
During the People v. Turner case, Miller was referred to by the alias “Emily Doe” in order to allow her to remain anonymous. This anonymity was desired largely due to the invasiveness of the case as well as its popularity across the media. It wasn't until 2019, when Miller revealed herself as “Emily Doe” and published her memoir Know My Name. Throughout her book, Miller highlights the ways that the judicial system dehumanized and degraded her by reducing her identity to nothing more than Turner’s victim.
Throughout the Turner and Miller case, many individuals, particularly Turner’s father, argued that to convict him would be to throw away his future, even going so far as to state, in his letter to the judge, that “his life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life”.
The court system gave Turner every comfort that they stole from Miller. They said that Turner was drunk and therefore less culpable due to his intoxication at the time of the crime. Yet, the same attorney pointed to Miller’s state of intoxication as a reason for the occurrence of the crime. They took the worst night of Chanel Miller’s life and picked it apart in such a way that they may as well have been picking apart Miller herself.
In a contemporary setting we see these same principles reflected in cases such as that of a boy in New Jersey who raped a girl while at a party and filmed the incident. He was let off of being charged as an adult on the grounds that he came from a “good family” and “is a candidate for not just college, but probably for a good college” as was stated by the judge assigned to the case. A young girl had been violated, the course of her entire life changed, and this judge believed that this boy’s test scores were more important.
This is how the United States court system approaches sexual assault cases. By pointing a finger. Not at the offender, but the victim. To be a sexual assault survivor who seeks justice in the eyes of the court means to be guilty. The court does not see you as a human, but rather as a piece of meat left to bake in the hot rays of the defense attorney's questioning. Questions that read just about as well as a broken record being shredded under the turning of the needle.
“Did you fight back?”
“Were you drinking?”
“What were you wearing?”
“Why did you go home with him?”
These inquiries wound when they roll off the tongues of those we consider friends, neighbors, family, and peers; but to have them thrown at you in accusation as you sit behind a podium, with jury, judge, and proverbial executioner watching, feels nothing short of fatal.
We exist in a world wherein people who commit crimes as serious as those committed by Brock Turner can get off with a slap on the wrist and a three-month sentence, and individuals such as Chanel Miller are left to live out the rest of their days with the consequences of someone else's actions.
But Chanel is not a victim, and neither are the rest of the individuals who experienced sexual violence. We are not victims, we are survivors. We pick up our shards and we glue them back together. Rough around the edges, bleeding still, we rise and we learn to push forward, to fend off the ways that society stares at itself in our reflection. We hope that one day, this reflection will promote change. That one day we will exist in a world where sexual assault is a thing of the past. Where respect for other human beings prevails above all and every soul on Earth is treated with kindness and dignity.