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Column: Why the Stanford rape case matters

"If you've ever struggled to understand privilege, well, this is it."

This January 2015 booking photo released by the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office shows Brock Turner.

There are two things about Brock Turner, 20, and the 23-year-old woman he sexually assaulted behind a Stanford, Calif., dumpster in January 2015.

Read the woman's 13-page letter, written for Turner's sentencing hearing last week and read in open court, and you can hear her voice, describing what Turner did to her body, what it's like to live with the aftermath of an assault like the one she endured at his hands. She demolishes his argument — the persistent refrain of the defense — that alcohol is the true culprit, that Turner couldn't be blamed for his actions because he was too drunk, and so was she.

Her account is brutal, because it has to be — explaining how investigators found dirt and pine straw inside her body, the abrasions on her head and legs, the sick feeling of panic when she woke up in a hospital and realized her underwear had been removed. The recounted minutiae of her life, after the attack, are haunting — driving to a secluded place after work each night to scream. Knowing every spot at her work where she could cry and no one would hear her. Putting spoons in the freezer each night so that when she woke in the morning, she could press them to her eyes, puffy from weeping, salvaging her appearance sufficiently to proceed through the day.

It's a vital counterpoint to the crazy-making story of Turner's defense — his attorney's insistence that because she couldn't remember, Turner's account of the night was the only one that could be trusted.

The act of rape is as reductionist as any crime can be. It flattens the victim. It reduces a complex person of intellect, wit, ambition and hope to just one thing: A means to satiate the attacker's need to commit violence.

Because most media outlets respect the privacy of rape victims by not reporting their name or showing their faces, it's sometimes hard to understand the import of the crimes perpetrated against them.

That's the thing about this woman. She isn't letting that happen.

Millions have read her statement, and in reading, born witness to something she says she struggled to re-learn, after the assault: That she matters. That her pain is real. That her future — her hopes, her dreams, her foibles and failings, and the success she'll go on to achieve — all of it matters.

I hope other women who have lived her story hear her words.

Because what happened to her wasn't unusual. In Detroit, 322 sexual assaults were reported in 2014, according to the Detroit Police Department. In 2013, it was 351.

That's why, until last week, you didn't know Brock Turner's name — rape is an appallingly common crime.

A jury found Turner guilty two months ago in a Santa Clara, Calif., courtroom, of three charges of felony sexual assault. Last week, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to six months in county jail; prosecutors say he'll likely serve three. Turner will spend three years on probation, and the rest of his life as a registered sex offender.

The flimsy sentence has drawn heaps of criticism. Prosecutors had asked for six years -- the maximum penalty is 14 years -- but the pre-sentencing report recommended a lesser term.

And that's the thing about Brock Turner.

If you've ever struggled to understand privilege, well, this is it. At its core, privilege is the reality that our culture values some kinds of lives more than others. And that weighted value is what Persky pointed to when sentencing Turner.

Persky noted that prison would have "a severe impact" on Turner, and that the judge did not believe Turner posed a danger to others. That last part is ludicrous — Turner was convicted of sexual assault, of forcibly inserting his fingers into an unconscious woman's vagina, an act that tore her, leaving dirt inside her body. Apprehended by two passing grad students, whose arrival stopped the assault, Turner was on top of the woman, thrusting himself against her body, nude from the waist down.

It's hard to conclude anything else than that Persky's "others" obviously doesn't include women. Because this man is dangerous.

But now let's look at the other part of the judge's rationale: That prison would have a severe impact on Turner.

Seriously? Yes, yes it would. Prison, as best I can tell, has a severe impact on everyone who goes to it. That's the point.

Turner, because he comes from a "good" family, hails from an affluent suburb, had a swimming scholarship to Stanford, is presumed to be a person with a future. And the judge's tone-deaf sentencing places far too much import on mundane details like those.

It's wretched enough that men of color are routinely sentenced to far greater terms for lesser crimes — across the board, people of color face longer sentences than white people convicted of the same crimes. That's one travesty of our criminal justice system.

But this is a different kind of debacle. One in which a woman's voice, her pain, the crime committed against her meant less than the potential of one white man's assumed bright future.

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