The Zeal of Judgment, the Absence of Justice

“Judgment comes in many forms but never scarce or shy/

 for the litany is long as the confidence is strong…” 

- Bad Religion, “Scrutiny”

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I would like to believe that there is a breaking point for denial. That eventually, no matter how grisly the truth, we will all be forced to confront and acknowledge it. But as with the growing peril of climate change, denial continues to stubbornly thrive in the thorny terrain of debates over sexual assault, rape culture, and victim-blaming, as can be witnessed in the recent slap-on-the-wrist verdict delivered to a Stanford swimmer who attacked a young woman and will not, it seems, pay very dearly for it.

The judgment rendered in this case--to let so utterly off the hook the perpetrator of an egregious, uncontestable, and deeply damaging crime--reflects not only on the appalling and chronic justice anemia that the US legal system and most certainly rape cases suffer from, but also on the judgment passed on the worth of a woman (of any non-(cis)male, actually) in US society, of her body and her lived experiences and her voice.

True ambiguity is not a cornerstone of sexual assault; questioning the choices, be they behavioral or clothing-related, of the survivor does not equate to lessening the assaulter’s guilt. But despite the evidence of the survivor’s hospital examination after her assault--which proved that it happened and that it happened brutally, as did the accounts of some Swedish students who noticed the assault and intervened--she has faced (and called out) the typical barrage of questions about  her own actions, meant to shift blame to her and, because a woman’s word is weighed so callously, delegate the authority and control over the narrative of what truly transpired to the default voice of candor, the male.

For anyone, but most especially anyone who is not male in the US, this case is deeply chilling. I read the survivor’s statement after the so-called sentencing late at night, not heeding the trigger warnings, and wound up sobbing for several minutes after, shaking. To read in excruciating detail of the agony of the survivor’s experience and her pain, to witness through her blunt and powerful words the exquisite dysfunction of the legal system so deeply laced with sexism--it is not just a bitter and visceral story but a horrific paradigm that stands as a threat to any non-male person in this society. As she says in her statement, even had she not attended a party and drunk alcohol--for which she was castigated far more harshly than was the man who actually violated her--the victim would have been someone else. It could be any of us. Could be me. You. Think about it.

This is the reality of the world we live in. These are the risks we run in just surviving--the violation of our bodies, our privacy, our safety, our rights, and our minds, since the toll on mental health can not be understated. These are the demons that wait for us somewhere, for the one in four women who can expect a sexual assault, for those of us who will never know if we are next. We have had it confirmed in this ruling, its message crystal clear and morally sterile, that our stories and our lives and our peace do not matter.

To quote Bad Religion, in a verse of a song that alludes to abortion but applies here as well:

“A bitter debate and a feminine fate lie in tandem like two precious babes/

While the former grows warmer it’s the latter that matters, except on the nation’s airwaves…”

On the nation’s airwaves and in our court systems and on our campuses and on our streets and in the air we breathe. The “feminine fate” has received confirmation of its unimportance. The default remains. The status quo stands. The brutal calculus is reaffirmed: the hassle of a trial and the revoking of a male’s sports scholarship carries suffering superior to that of the woman violated, exposed, degraded, haunted, scrutinized, criticized, and denied justice.

Perhaps this case reveals with especial clarity how deeply the scales are tipped away from justice, but this ought to be no dramatic revelation. It is an ugly illustration but it is not new. To see it as a “one bad apple” sort of case, an anomaly, a surprise, is to place it in a vacuum. This case is replete with context, with precedent. This rapist and judge deserve condemnation, but so does our history, our present: that survivors are berated for the preventive measures they may have failed to take--wearing “appropriate” clothing, staying inside at night, not drinking, not partying, not walking in the wrong place at the wrong time or saying the wrong thing--and the rapists are pitied for the ruin of their lives and scolded for drinking, perhaps. This teaches us that we must expect assault, and that when, not if, it happens, it will be our fault for failing to live in the shadow of that anticipation, taking every possible precaution, every moment of our lives. No blame shall fall on the perpetrators (above all, it must be said, when they are white).

I am reminded of the case of a teenager named Ethan Couch, who killed a couple of people in a car accident but was let off the hook because of the way his wealth had warped his perception or rendered him too delicate to be subjected to punishment--the “affluenza” defense, you may remember. What clever name shall we call it by when rather than justice for the victims, what receives the most concern is the wellbeing of the perpetrators, of the men--for it is by far usually men--and how much their lives have been damaged? Perhaps we could just acknowledge it as male privilege, that ubiquitous force and custom that makes men the centre of every story, the lightning rod around which the conversation is always focused, the one whose life matters more.

Think also on the fact that the conviction rates for rapists are nearly the same as the rates at which rape allegations are found false--barely a few percentage points. Victims are as likely to lie about being raped as rapists are to ever spend a day in jail: very, very unlikely. It would be the equivalent of convicting only the rapists who were accused falsely, and letting all the others go free. Can we not admit that this dynamic mangles the concept of justice? This is a massive problem with such a paltry application of repercussions that analogies about iceberg tips and bandaided wounds are inadequate still. This is not even a bandaid. This is not even an attempt to stop the bleeding, except to insist that the survivors have no right to it, their own pain.

Nor should this violence serve only to show us that sexism and rape culture are far from bygone ills or myths; sexual assault may find its roots first in sexism and gender violence, but it spirals out farther than it seems. The mentality of intersectionality--recognizing the ways that different oppressions combine and interact--is so critical to activism precisely because the oppressions against which we fight have long solidified their intersectional approaches. Solidarity is crucial because the powers that be already are in solidarity with each other, against us. We can’t unravel a single thread of this matrix--the kyriarchy, the oppression-industrial complex, if I may call it that--without acknowledging, to paraphrase John Muir, that any thread comes away linked to all the others in the universe.

Sexism interlocks at a fundamental level with all the other oppressions we conveniently choose to forget: gender-based violence interacts with racism when we consider the situation of the thousands of Indigenous women who have (or have been) disappeared, or the story of Marissa Alexander, whose warning shot against her abusive husband earned her a vicious prison sentence, or the untold numbers of untold stories of people--especially gender-nonconforming people and people of color--who face sexual violence as reprehensible as the recent Stanford case but never receive the publicity. Sexism has a muting effect: the mere fact of a person’s gender being other than male begins the process of quieting their story, silencing their protest, invalidating their experience and motivations and trauma.

What gives me a bleak hope is that survivors of this particular torture are not complacent. It will never be enough that they can speak forcefully and eloquently about the unimaginable trials they have been through, that they can offer grace and fury and kindness and vulnerability and resolve all together. But the beacons of their resistance must remind us that however long and bloody, however devastating and infuriating and ridden with despair, this fight is not over, our stories still demand telling, and we will go on, and we will not go quietly.