Brock Turner may not have gotten the punishment he deserved in the form of jail time, but now his face and case will forever be ingrained in history. Literally. In the form of a textbook.
In case you forgot, Turner sexually assaulted an unconscious woman behind a dumpster on the Stanford University campus. He was sentenced to only 6 months in jail, but only ended up serving 3, in a disappointing but unsurprising turn of events. His defense blamed the frat party culture and insisted Turner was a good kid who shouldn’t be punished for one “mistake”, the classic rhetoric that has been letting rapists off so easily over the years.
So although his legal punishment certainly does not reflect the severity of the crime, at least now his name will be notoriously immortalized thanks to two professors/textbook authors.
Glamour reports that University of Colorado-Denver School of Public Affairs professors Dr. Mary Dodge and Dr. Callie Rennison have included Turner’s photo and story in their textbook Introduction to Criminal Justice: Systems, Diversity, and Change 2nd Edition. In it, he is the example of a rapist.
A viral photo of Brock’s textbook appearance has been making the rounds on the Internet, although the authors have not yet commented on the response to their work. We applaud them for calling him out for what he is, and not how the courts defined him.
With the heartbreaking frequency of rapes and sexual assaults, this case may lose visibility over the years. But Brock’s face printed in a textbook will remind people that despite his loose sentence, he is a rapist, and we will neither forgive nor forget.
