Pastor's Letter to Brock Turner's Father: No 'Kudos' for Only Raping Someone Once
A strong yet compassionate letter written and published on a blog by Pastor John Pavlovitz of North Carolina to the father of swimmer Brock Turner, who was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious student at Stanford University and received a six-month sentence, has received 3.5 million hits.
"I say this as a father who dearly loves my son as much as you must love yours: Brock is not the victim here. His victim is the victim. She is the wounded one. He is the damager," wrote Pavlovitz, a pastor at North Raleigh Community Church in Wake Forest, addressing the convict's father, Dan Turner, who pleaded for leniency in his son's case.
Stanford swimmer Turner's case has garnered international attention and sparked an uproar as many believe his sentence was too lenient. The former Stanford University student was found guilty Thursday of sexually assaulting an intoxicated, unconscious woman at a campus fraternity party last year.
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In a letter to the judge in the case, the convict's father wrote, "[His sentence] is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life."
"If his life has been 'deeply altered' it is because he has horribly altered another human being; because he made a reprehensible choice to take advantage of someone for his own pleasure," Pastor Pavlovitz, father of an 11-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl, wrote. "This young woman will be dealing with this for far longer than the embarrassingly short six months your son is being penalized. She will endure the unthinkable trauma of his '20 minutes of action' for the duration of her lifetime, and the fact that you seem unaware of this fact is exactly why we have a problem."
He continued, "This is why young men continue to rape women. This is why so many men believe that they can do whatever they please to a woman's body without accountability."
The pastor's blog, "Stuff That Needs To Be Said," has got more than 3.5 million hits since the letter was published, according to News Observer. CNN, Huffington Post and the People magazine have also reported on the letter.
Turner's 23-year-old victim read aloud a statement to him in court about the assault behind a dumpster as she lay unconscious. The statement was published by BuzzFeed, and has been read more than 15 million times.
"The night the news came out I sat my parents down and told them that I had been assaulted, to not look at the news because it's upsetting, just know that I'm okay, I'm right here, and I'm okay. But halfway through telling them, my mom had to hold me because I could no longer stand up," she wrote. "The night after it happened, he said he didn't know my name, said he wouldn't be able to identify my face in a lineup, didn't mention any dialogue between us, no words, only dancing and kissing. Dancing is a cute term; was it snapping fingers and twirling dancing, or just bodies grinding up against each other in a crowded room?" she continued. "I wonder if kissing was just faces sloppily pressed up against each other? When the detective asked if he had planned on taking me back to his dorm, he said no. When the detective asked how we ended up behind the dumpster, he said he didn't know."
In his letter to Turner's father, Pastor Pavlovitz added, "The idea that your son has never violated another woman next to a dumpster before isn't a credit to his character. We don't get kudos for only raping one person in our lifetime."
Pavlovitz continued, "There is no scenario where your son should be the sympathetic figure here. He is the assailant. He is the rapist. I can't imagine as a father how gut wrenching such a reality is for you, but it is still true."
He concluded, "You love your son and you should. But love him enough to teach him to own the terrible decisions he's made, to pay the debt to society as prescribed, and then to find a redemptive path to walk, doing the great work in the world that you say he will. For now though, as one father to another: help us teach our children to do better — by letting them see us do better."
