A letter to fathers regarding Brock Turner, Rapist and members of his tribe

Dear Dads:

Okay, between Facebook and conversation and postings herein some of you might think I’m going too far with the whole Brock Turner, Rapist thing. I can live with that.

If BROCK TURNER, RAPIST had admitted his wrongdoing, accepted the horrific nature of a sexual attack on anyone, much less a semi-comatose girl he’d lured away from any expectation of safety in numbers, had he told the truth from the beginning and not enlisted family and friends to petition the idiot jurist on his behalf, if he had not sat there looking tritely woebegone while his father spoke of ’20 minutes’ as though the blackness of soul that allowed him to attack that girl was just a passing thing, if he had hung his head and indicated true remorse and just taken his punishment…

…if he had done all of this and more, he might have done his time and slithered back into the nether regions from which he arose without his name becoming synonymous with filth.

He did none of those things. No full-throated apology, no acceptance of the magnitude of his guilt, no believable remorse, no expression of respect for his victim, nothing to indicate that he understood and was appropriately ashamed of his own actions.

He was able to pull off his obscene charade because our society protects perpetrators, not victims.

As long as colleges won’t stand up for victims of sexual assault on their campuses, cities and towns put the victims through more shaming than the perpetrators, society views perpetrators as misguided schoolboys rather than the monsters they are, as long as the Internet is filled with privacy-invading photos and videos of women and girls taken and posted by creepers with cell phones and no accountability, as long as we fail as a society to cure the gender apartheid that is a hateful feature of our culture, we will continue to spawn the likes of Brock Turner, Rapist.

What can be done? In the near term, very little, I’m afraid. This is a ship that will take a long time and a vast, concerted effort to bring about. But we can make a start. I have some suggestions:

If you are the father of a young woman whose sexual assault was ‘investigated’ in-house by the university with the predictable result that the perpetrator received barely a hand slap, please write a letter to the university president detailing why you can never recommend to another father sending his daughter to that school and provide a copy of the letter to the most vocal feminist reporter or columnist on the local newspaper.

When your friends make jokes, recount stories or make claims of prowess that you would be uncomfortable recounting in front of your daughters, cut them off, display your disdain loudly and pointedly and let them know that this is the reason they are no longer welcome in your house.

When a long-time friend posts inappropriate comments to young women on Facebook, cut him off like the dead appendage he is and let him know why. And then do some soul-searching about the people you may have harmed by your silence over forty-odd years of being identified with him. And ask for forgiveness. Theirs, not his.

When you see a young woman being ogled at the bus stop, intervene. You don’t have to make a scene but it can’t hurt to step between the young woman and the slug and stare the a-hole down. Turns out, it feels pretty good.

Speaking of ogling, when you encounter a young woman being subjected to wolf whistles and worse from the rogues’ gallery of construction workers, catch up to her and apologize on their behalf. You can’t cure stupid and it might be unwise to take a stand against a band of bullies but you can try to bring some balance to her experience in the moment.

Here’s the thing: Brock Turnerites are, one and all, cowards. There’s never been a rapist who didn’t cower in the shadows. And there’s never been a victim who would not have benefited from having someone stand between them and the darkness.

We can’t deal with the miscreants as they really deserve – they’d still get the wrist slaps and we’d all end up in prison. But we can strip away the shadows in which they hide by recognizing them for what they are and applying the label publicly.

Brock Turner, Rapist walked free the other day in part because of a failure of language.  He richly deserves to have titles indelibly applied to him that adequately describe him. Titles such as rapist, coward, scum, vermin, criminal, (expletive deleted). He should never be allowed to see his name in print without the modifier ‘Rapist’ attached. He should never be allowed to walk down the street without folks giving way – not as a courtesy but rather because it would disgust them to get any of him on them. He should never be allowed to escape language that accurately and adequately describes the blackness of his soul.

It does no good and perhaps some harm for women to post screeds about ‘white men’ as though we were some monolithic tribe of perpetrators. Point: the creeps don’t care and the non-creeps feel as assaulted as do you.

This is not a problem of men or a problem of women. It is a problem of our society that has let the canker grow. Time to cut it out. Leaving the victims to craft their own solution is cowardly, inhuman and ultimately, ineffective. We all need to be invested in curing this immense societal ill.

No ‘man’ should ever be able to make a woman feel trapped without an actual man stepping up in her defense.

There are more real dads in this country than Brock Turners. I just know it. And while we won’t turn the ship overnight and making a start means taking some uncomfortable stands, it’s the only thing that will make a difference in the long run. If we want to defend our daughters, we have to start with the men we know and demand of them respectful and respectable attitudes. And failing that, we need to expunge them from our social circles and make sure they know why. We cannot afford to let the cruel, sexist joke go unanswered or to allow the potential perpetrator to be emboldened by our silence. The time for our silence is long gone; in fact, never was there such a time.

Brock Turner, Rapist is a foul, wretched shadow of a human being who deserves our condemnation.

 

We all know Brock Turner, Rapists and potential Brock Turner, Rapists. Time to weed them out.