Apologies to friends on Facebook, where I first posted this, for the double-dipping. I’ve decided to post it again here, in case any reader needs a chance to air his or her own feelings about being the target of a predator. There’s no Mormon content here, just a memory.
When I was 17, I took a Greyhound bus from Las Vegas to Buena Park, California to visit my aunt for a couple of weeks. I had traveled alone by bus before, beginning when I was 8, and neither my parents nor I had any fears for my safety.
The bus stopped for an hour or two in some California desert town, at a dedicated Greyhound station (not just a coffee shop parking lot) for a meal and a change of drivers. While I was sitting in the waiting room, a nice looking young man asked if, rather than waiting there, I would like to go have supper with him and his wife — they lived nearby. He held the door open, courteously directing me out to his car.
It didn’t occur to me to wonder why a local man would hang around a bus station looking to be nice to a traveler. Nothing, in fact, occurred to me, except that my bus would be leaving soon and I didn’t want to miss it. Otherwise, I could very well have gone with him.
It didn’t occur to me to report that to anyone at the bus station, or to my aunt, or to my mother. In fact, it was only years later while I was remembering that trip that I suddenly realized what might have happened to me had my bus been scheduled a little later.
For some reason, that comes to mind with every new report about the Stanford rapist. The victim is not to blame, and in this case the justice system has failed us all.
Wow, that story could have ended very differently. You must count yourself pretty lucky.
Yes. Some of the most crucial turning points in my life are times when nothing, after all, happened.
I’m male and will never know how it feels to be female. But I was a target three times of a suspected sexual predator. I only reported it once.
The first was when I was about ten years old. My brother, a female friend, and I were playing at the nearby Junior High School outside of school hours. A man was following us at some distance and was clearly exposing and handling himself. We thought it odd and kept moving on, finally going home and reporting it to my parents who immediately called the police. I have no knowledge whether they found anybody
The second was in Junior High when our PE Coach would oddly lecture us now and then after we had suited up in gym clothes but he stood there without pants or any underwear, and on one occasion, totally nude. The lectures were on general health issues but not overtly sexual. We thought it very strange and nobody said anything. We just shared bewildered looks. I never said anything to anyone else and I don’t know that anyone else did either.
The third was about 1979 at BYU in the Richards Building locker room. I had been for a solo run and i went into the sauna room in the days before shorts were mandatory. There was only one guy there and he was fondling himself. I left to go shower and he followed me always keeping his eyes in my direction as I kept trying to move farther away. I dressed and left, somehow avoiding him further. I never reported. I thought many times about what I would have said and never came up with a good way to broach the subject with any staff that may have been around the locker room.
I never felt overtly that I was to blame for any of those three instances. But I had no idea what to do. I had the same vague sense that something was wrong and felt very uncomfortable to the point of embarrassed shame. But that’s as far as any of them got.
The victim considers the sentence of 6 months in jail too light for ruining her life. The father of rapist thinks 6 months in jail is too much for ’20 minutes of action.’ I keep wondering how both parties would feel about a compromise. Victim gets 20 minutes to do anything she wants to unconscious rapist with no repercussions, and then the rapist wouldn’t have to go to jail or be on probation. (Unless he knows a lot about her and knows her to be very soft hearted, he would be a fool to accept that bargain.)
A friend of mine recently made a public fuss recently in a public setting when a man she knows and dislikes touched her too familiarly. (Comes up behind her at table, puts has on both shoulders, and pushes down to immobilize her.) She told him to go away, and he tried to act like the aggrieved party. But all of the women she was with glared at him until he left.
When my husband served a mission in Germany a number of years ago, there was a Protestant preacher who had discovered that he could make Mormon missionaries very uncomfortable by asking about their ‘special underwear.’ Lots of missionaries when out of their way to avoid him. But then he met one missionary who refused to be embarrassed. When the minister approached two missionaries standing in line at a bank and started to harass them, one elder said very loudly, “Sir, why are you asking me about my underwear?” Everyone in the bank gasped and drew back, lest he start questioning them about their underwear. The minister slunk away and ‘was never heard from again.’
So it is important to speak out, not be shamed into silence. In Grant’s PE story, it might have been quite proper to point out that,”The emperor has no clothes.” But too late now.
Justice was served. The process worked. Six months in jail plus probation and a lifetime as a registered sex offender and convicted felon to destroy any good employment or housing prospects — that’s a substantial punishment for a first-time offender. He will pay for his crime for the rest of his life.
I hope everyone will take appropriate precautions to protect themselves from crime.
I am stunned, ji.
That’s all I’m going to say, and I’ll ask others to let it go without further comment.
“The judge looked at Brock Turner, knowing full well what he did to his victim, and determined that he was too young to serve hard time. He was too good of a kid to be thrown in to prison. He was too nice to have to truly pay the price for his crimes.
“After all, he was white and likes to swim — so surely, in the words of Persky, ‘he will not be a danger to others.’
“I just had to scream into a damn pillow. Of course the man is a danger to others — he took an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and brutally raped her. He is the exact type of man who is dangerous to others.”
[Source]
I’m flabbergasted by the father’s assertion that imprisonment “is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.” As serious crimes go, rape is a close second to murder — and if it was a murder that happened in 20 minutes, would anyone seriously believe the murderer shouldn’t spend much time in prison because, proportionally speaking, he didn’t spend very much of his life murdering?
I will respect your wishes not to comment on certain things, Ardis, however difficult it is.
But I will say this sentencing (which is lighter than the minimum, is it not?) has affected me in ways I would not have expected. At least in part because of unrelated context. Enough that I want to write about it, but haven’t been able to so far.
Thanks, Silver Rain. It isn’t that some things don’t need a response, but that I’m not quite up to hosting the kind of response some things deserve.
Based on what newspaper reports say about the facts of the case, he should have got more time as well as mandatory counseling. He’s got some screws loose in his head. I once had an older man use the stall next to me at a rest stop. He bumped my foot with he foot, ran his hand under the partition. I cleared my throat and got out of there as quick as I could. It wasn’t until later, reading about the antics and signs used by that Senator from Idaho that I realized the old guy was asking me if I wanted to have sex.
There a a few pivotal moments in my life when I have been confronted with a harsh reality that I understood intellectually, but hadn’t ever witnessed first hand. One pivotal moment was when I was a 10 year old in downtown Houston witnessing a homeless man digging through the trash. I was so upset by seeing this happen I remember crying as my family walked down the street. Another time was in high school when another student chewed out a black substitute teacher and walked away from her dismissing her authority due to the fact she was black. I was left completely stunned by what I had witnessed. Most recently, has been the recent discussion about campus rape at BYU and the Standord case. I have been shocked by the statements and attitudes I have read on various blogs and in the comments section of various new articles. While I understood that rape victims had a hard time intellectually, to see the attitudes surrounding rape on full display has been an eye opener. I really appreciate this post. Ardis, I always appreciate your insights both on your blog and the comments section around the bloggernacle.
I regret causing consternation. I didn’t follow the case, and I would have been fine if a six-year jail term had been handed down. This is a rape case that actually went all the way to conviction and sentencing — too many rape cases never get that far. Justice was done. My point is that the process worked to its completion and the judge and judge did their jobs, according to the laws of California. I read that the prosecutor agreed that the six-month sentence was within the judge’s discretion under the laws of California. With all that said, and recognizing that we are a nation of laws, I am troubled by mob mentality to bring out the pitchforks to hang the accused and the judge.
For anyone facing a sentencing, for any crime including rape, I hope the judge will act within the laws and in accordance with his or her best intentions, after having heard all the testimony and considering all the facts.
From comment # 12: “With all that said, and recognizing that we are a nation of laws, I am troubled by mob mentality to bring out the pitchforks to hang the accused and the judge.”
The difference in this situation is that we are not talking about “the accused” but rather “the convicted.” The rapist did not deny that he did something to an unconscious woman that injured her so that she required medical attention. He just said that he somehow didn’t notice that she was unconscious (or scraped up, or bleeding.) The jury convicted him of felony assault.
The outrage is caused by judge’s conclusion that a short sentence was in order because the convicted criminal ‘wasn’t really that bad’ in spite of the crime he was convicted of. If this sentence is within the laws, this may be an indication that the laws need to be changed, or else that the judge needs to be changed for another one who will enforce the laws more appropriately. No one is actually suggesting taking the convicted criminal or the judge out behind a dumpster and assaulting them.