Campus Rape, a Survivor’s Story
It’s in our moral and constitutional DNA that we take extraordinary pains to safeguard the rights of the accused, even when it means letting the guilty go free. But we also believe in justice, and the fact is that sexual assault is a brutal reality of modern campus life, abetted in too many instances by a culture of binge drinking.
.. Another girl at my college had reported a rape and had been forced to sit through peer mediation with her rapist. I didn’t want to go through that. I was a strong, tough girl. The prospect of losing a case seemed worse to me than the prospect of sucking it up and moving on.
.. It seems to me that conservatives and mainstream liberals have abdicated concern about sexual assault to the far left. It’s an astounding moral blind spot, and frankly it breaks my heart.
.. In an era where I had to choose between voting for a man who had bragged about sexual assault or a woman who had enabled a husband accused of it, in an era where we can’t even convict Bill Cosby of sexual assault
.. the general public still has to be convinced that rape and sexual harassment are real problems. It’s easy to believe there’s an epidemic of false accusations, but not that there’s too much sexual assault.
.. I know in my bones that Brock Turner got convicted only because he assaulted that girl in public. If it had happened like it had happened to me, in an empty house, with no one to see — if there had been no photos — that boy would have walked away with nothing at all. He would have been as unscathed as the one who raped me.
.. so many of the conservative men in my life won’t listen to me on this argument until I tell them my story. So here I am. I was raped. He got away with it, because I didn’t know enough to do everything right and because I was a “bad victim.” I had been drinking. I had no witnesses. There was nothing the law could do for me.