Tag: Literal

Brock Turner’s prison stay may have only lasted three months, but this textbook is forever.

If you need a refresher, Turner was the so-called “Stanford Rapist” caught sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster on campus. The trial followed a sadly predictable pattern: Turner blamed his actions on Stanford’s “party culture,” and his father, in a letter to the judge pleading for leniency, lamented that his son was once “excited to buy a big ribeye steak …. Now he barely consumes any food and eats only to exist.”

Turner was eventually cleared of rape charges, but was convicted on three other felony charges and is now a registered sex offender. He was sentenced to just six months in prison—and was released after three.

Enter two textbook authors, University of Colorado-Denver School of Public Affairs professors Dr. Mary Dodge and Dr. Callie Rennison. They’re making sure Turner eternally pays for his crimes by making his face the very definition of “rape.”

“He may have been able to get out of prison time but in my Criminal Justice 101 textbook, Brock Turner is the definition of rape, so he’s got that going for him,” Hannah Kendall Shuman, a freshman at Washington State University, wrote in the caption of her now-viral photo of the textbook.

Shuman told HuffPost she found the image inside the pages of her textbook, “Introduction to Criminal Justice: Systems, Diversity, and Change 2nd Edition.”

As page 20 of the textbook reads:

“A recent highly publicized example is that of rapist Brock Turner.
Turner, a student at Stanford University, was caught in the act, and
ultimately convicted of three felony charges: assault with intent to
rape an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person
with a foreign object, and sexually penetrating an unconscious person
with a foreign object… Turner’s victim was unconscious during the
attack, as it happened behind a trash container outside of the Kappa
Alpha fraternity house on campus.”

While the book simply gives an overview of the case, it does throw in the following conversation starter in the caption under Turner’s photo: “Some are shocked at how short this sentence is. Others who are more familiar with the way sexual violence has been handled in the criminal justice system are shocked that he was found guilty and served time at all. What do you think?”

For Shuman, a student in Criminal Justice 101, the answer is clear.

“I didn’t think anyone of status or wealth would ever want to bring him up again, it seemed like America just wanted to act as if he never happened,” she told HuffPost. “I’m glad his name is resurfacing.”

The authors have yet to publicly comment on the textbook’s new internet fame (Glamour has reached out for comment), Rennison previously spoke about the importance of representation in textbooks when she was awarded the Bonnie S. Fisher Victimology Career Award from the American Society of Criminology in 2016. Then, Rennison said, “Existing criminal justice books have focused on three elements: cops, courts and corrections. They speak little about victims, reflecting how they have effectively been in the shadows of our criminal justice system.”

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