Emily Doe. The name, a pseudonym, may not be familiar, but you know who she is. Her powerful victim’s statement in the case of Brock Turner, the Stanford student convicted of raping her, became an internet sensation earlier this year.
Because of her bravery in speaking out, laws regarding rape were strengthened in California. The judge, who sentenced Turner to just six months in jail (he served only three months) for the felony convictions because a harsher sentence would have had a “severe impact” on him, is no longer handling criminal cases.
Doe’s words matter because we hear them too infrequently. With good reason, few women speak about the trauma of being raped. They are too often blamed for the crimes committed against them. They are told they shouldn’t have dressed so provocatively or shouldn’t have had so much to drink, as if wearing a short skirt or being drunk somehow excuses men from committing a crime. Too often, they are not believed when they report a sexual assault. And, if they are, few want to relive their nightmare by recounting it in a courtroom where a defense lawyer may drag out every aspect of their lives to suggest they were somehow culpable in the crime that was committed against them.
One in five women will be raped at some time in their lives. But, only a third of sexual assaults are reported to police; only 10 percent of rapes on college campuses are reported.
In a California courtroom, Doe eloquently spoke out against all of this.
“You have dragged me through this hell with you, dipped me back into that night again and again,” she said of Turner in her statement.
She added: “You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.”
Thankfully, Doe reclaimed her voice. Now, she is back with another strong, affirming message — women who are sexually assaulted are not victims, they are survivors “who are doing a hell of a lot more than surviving.”
Glamour magazine named Doe its woman of the year on Tuesday and published a new essay in which she recounts what happened after her victim statement was published by BuzzFeed.
“As soon as it was posted, I remember thinking, what have I done, making myself exposed and vulnerable again. I texted my sister when it hit 20,000 views, thinking that was it, the comments were actually quite nice, and I closed my computer,” Doe wrote.
“I started getting e-mails forwarded to me from Botswana to Ireland to India. I received watercolor paintings of lighthouses and bicycle earrings. A woman who plucked a picture of her young daughter from the inside of her cubicle wrote, This is who you’re saving,” she continued.
One comment, however, especially upset Doe.
“Sad. I hope my daughter never ends up like her,” someone had posted.
“I am learning to say, I hope you end up like me, meaning, I hope you end up like me strong. I hope you end up like me proud of who I’m becoming. I hope you don’t ‘end up,’ I hope you keep going,” Doe wrote in the Glamour post. “And I hope you grow up knowing that the world will no longer stand for this. Victims are not victims, not some fragile, sorrowful aftermath. Victims are survivors, and survivors are going to be doing a hell of a lot more than surviving.”
It is up to all of us to ensure “the world no longer stands for this,” for shaming and doubting assault victims, for worrying more about their rapists than their survival. We must do better.
