Alleged Stanford Rapist Says He ‘Wasn’t Trying To Rape,’ Media Focuses On How Much His Victim Drank

Brock Allen Turner, the Stanford student who has been accused of raping an unconscious woman on campus says his “intentions were not to try and rape a girl without her consent.” Too bad that sentence makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. It’s also too bad the media is already vilifying his victim for drinking too much. This is rape culture, folks.

Rape culture has a subtle, pervasive way of permeating everything. If you are unfamiliar with the term, it speaks to the way in which society blames victims of sexual assault while normalizing male sexual violence. Its influence leads reporters to begin a story that is about five felony rape counts and an athlete who was essentially caught in the act of committing the alleged crimes like this, from the San Jose Mercury News:

Liquor flowed freely at the Stanford University fraternity party two weeks ago where prosecutors say a student athlete met a young woman who’d joined the revelry with friends and later raped her nearby, according to police reports released Thursday.

“Liquor flowed freely at the Stanford University fraternity party” where a student athlete met a young woman who’d “joined the revelry.” The second paragraph of the story is this:

He drank seven beers with swigs of whiskey. She added a couple shots of liquor to the four she drank before arriving, and then a beer.

You see, it’s important that we start the story this way. It’s important that we know exactly how much alcohol they consumed so we can later say things like, “he was too drunk to really know what he was doing” and “why did she get so drunk that she couldn’t protect herself?” Because rape culture makes sure victims always know it was somehow their fault. It makes sure society reads that narrative first – the narrative of two drunk people reveling at a party and a victim who was complicit because of the amount of drinks she had.

(Related: NYT ”˜Anti-Rape Idea’ Is Actually A Horrible, Victim Blaming Load Of Nonsense)

We know the victim was unconscious. We know that, because police referred to her as “completely unresponsive.” We know that because the two cyclists that came to her rescue said what they saw “shocked their conscience.” I can’t think of a single reason we’d need to know an itemized list of the beverages she’s had to get her to that state.

But this is what we do when we talk about rape. We focus on the victim’s decisions before and during. We scrutinize every move she’s made to find a way to blame her for her own assault. After a brief graph about the students not belonging to the Greek scene on campus, we get back to details about the party:

According to the police reports, both the woman and Turner were drinking at the party attended by more than 100 people… The woman had drunk six shots of hard alcohol — four before arriving at the party — and a sip of beer, according to the reports. She said she had blacked out from drinking before, though “not often,” and told police she found it “weird” that she just shut down.

Here’s another decision to include information about the victim’s previous drinking history. Why? Why is this information the public needs to know? Would it make a difference if she blacked out every night? Would that make the act of raping an unconscious woman okay?

The public thinks so. Which is why this kind of rape coverage is so dangerous. It takes the focus off the crime and puts it square on the victim. You would never read a story about a robbery that began,

“The Smiths had been advised to install a security system on their property for years. They avoided trimming the hedges so their home was very well hidden from view. After years of living at the desirable property, they still hadn’t installed a flood light on the front porch. The man caught climbing in the front window said it wasn’t his intention to rob a house, but it was so well hidden from view, there was no security system and it was perfectly shielded by the dark, so what did we all expect?”

How can we expect a drunk man to resist an unconscious body that can’t fight him off? This is the narrative we’re telling. It’s the one we tell time and time again. It’s why so many people shared the story of Turner being caught, of the university responding by axing him from the swim team, and charges swiftly being filed. Because we’re so used to people turning a blind eye to sexual violence against women, and it has so much to do with the way we talk about it.

(Image from Twitter, via @NBCPhiladelphia)