The system couldn't make him
Survivors keep asking for something the courtroom cannot produce.
Every few months, a case involving gender-based violence ignites the internet. We rage, we post, we demand harsher sentences. And then nothing changes. I want to talk about why. But first, a few important prefaces. First, this piece centers around sexual violence. Take care of yourself if this topic stirs up anything for you.
Second, I have spent my career in this space, starting out as a baby advocate in rape crisis centers in my homestate of New Hampshire, then building an anti-trafficking program supporting survivors who experienced the most egregious forms of sexual violence I have ever heard, and most recently leading a policy agenda on gender-based violence for the Mayor of Chicago. Yet, would you believe me if I said I didn’t identify as a survivor until very recently?
Because it's true. I've never talked about it and likely never will despite writing this here. I'm telling you this not to invite your curiosity or your sympathy, but because trauma is complex in ways we refuse to acknowledge. The cost of navigating systems that were never built for survivors is enormous. I paid it for years without even naming myself as someone who had a stake in it. That is what we do to survivors. We sensationalize their stories and commend their bravery. We extract their labor, their stories, their pain, and we funnel it all into a system that cannot deliver what they actually need.
So much of feminist discourse around sexual violence equates “listening” to survivors to punishment for abusers. I want to briefly sit with a case that ignited the internet a few weeks ago — not to relitigate it, but to use it as a mirror. A few weeks ago, a UK judge gave two 15-year old boys non-custodial sentences for raping two girls in 2024 and January 2025 — acts of violence they posted online. The gut punch is real. One of the victims said the judge’s decision was like “a rock straight to the face.” So many of us feel it – rage, disappointment, frustration.
The frustration and anger felt by the survivors is valid. They had to face the people who raped them, share their traumatic stories (multiple times, I’m sure) and demand justice from a system that was never built to protect them in the first place. We’ve been here before — with Brock Turner and Judge Persky, for example – with a system that kept finding ways to diminish the harm, redefining it as something lesser.
My frustration, however, lies more in the fact that we are still only at the point of having a jail sentence to address sexual violence. Which brings me to my third preface.
I must acknowledge the difficulty in threading this needle for the arguments I’m sewing here. The arguments I propose are done so delicately and without intent of dismissing, diminishing, or disbelieving the extreme trauma and harm that is caused in the context of sexual violence. It is heinous and the impacts of the trauma on these girls will last forever. That is heartbreaking and yes, infuriating.
But I am asking us as a society and as a movement to hold two things at the same time: rape is heinous and violent and leads to unfathomable trauma for a lifetime and the people who rape are complex and raised in a society that celebrates and promotes sexist and misogynistic attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. They themselves have often experienced their own trauma, abuse and violence, which is not to justify the harm they have caused but instead to attempt to re-orient us around addressing root causes versus slapping a bandaid on these issues.
We focus all of our time, energy, and extremely limited resources on the crime. Even funding that is dedicated to supporting survivors is inextricably connected to the criminal legal system. Government funding often requires collaboration with law enforcement, many services are on-site at courthouses, and outcomes often revolve around prosecutions and convictions. This has professionalized the anti-violence movement, further separating it from community organizing which is often led by Black and Brown communities. Reliance on this funding has led to the anti-violence movement working against rather than in collaboration with other social justice movements. That does not serve any of us and it certainly does not make us safer.
But that’s the landscape we’re operating in. Now back to the boys in the UK. Judge Nicholas Rowland said he wanted to avoid criminalizing these children unnecessarily. He wrote that he wanted to “encourage them to take responsibility for their actions, understand the effects of their behaviour on the two girls and their families and promote the boys’ reintegration into society.”
The backlash was immediate and it struck a chord with me too — but not for the reasons I am seeing online. The outrage assumed that accountability only lives within the four walls of a jail cell. Here’s what I kept thinking: Chanel Miller wanted exactly what this judge claimed to want. She wanted Brock Turner to own it, to understand what he did, to feel the weight of it. The system couldn’t produce that. A conviction couldn’t produce that. And yet we keep demanding more of that same system.
The judge’s instinct — accountability without criminalization — is actually closer to what we should want. His execution was flawed because it exists in a broken system. The one-sided consideration of the boys’ backgrounds, with no equivalent humanity extended to the girls they raped, is exactly why this system cannot be the answer.
After Brock Turner was convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault in 2016, Chanel Miller wrote a victim impact statement that became one of the most widely read documents about sexual violence ever published. She did not want to write it.
She reflected: “I thought there’s no way this is going to trial; there were witnesses, there was dirt in my body, he ran but was caught. He’s going to settle, formally apologize, and we will both move on.” She did not think trial was going to be needed – she did not gratefully or even willingly proceed to trial, dispelling a myth that most survivors want the criminal legal system to be the answer.
She admits that if Brock had admitted guilt, shown remorse, and offered to settle early, she’d be open to a lighter sentence. But instead, “he took the risk of going to trial, added insult to injury and forced [her] to relive the hurt as details about [her] personal life and sexual assault were brutally dissected before the public”
She goes on to say:
“You are guilty. Twelve jurors convicted yo
u guilty of three felony counts beyond reasonable doubt, that’s twelve votes per count, thirty six yeses confirming guilt, that’s one hundred percent, unanimous guilt. And I thought finally it is over, finally he will own up to what he did, truly apologize, we will both move on and get better.”
Chanel Miller didn’t need a harsher sentence. She needed Brock Turner to reckon with what he did. Judge Rowland, however imperfectly, named that same need. Yet, neither the courtroom nor the conviction could deliver it. Even after everything — the trial, the conviction, the statement heard around the world — she was still asking him to just get it. To see her pain, validate it and acknowledge that he caused it. He never did. The system couldn’t make him.
We are so ingrained in a carceral response that the mere suggestion of accountability outside a courtroom reads as letting someone off the hook. I find that to be a failure of imagination. But that failure isn’t universal. Communities most harmed by both interpersonal and state violence have been building and demanding alternatives for decades. The mainstream anti-violence movement just hasn’t followed their lead.
By this point, you’re likely asking so what do we do instead? If not jailtime, what do we do with rapists and abusers? Here’s the truth – I do not know right now. Because right now requests us to be building a society that respects and affords humanity and dignity to women, girls, trans and non-binary individuals in order to have the foundation for what is needed to actually create alternatives. If the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that we have so far to go.
There are tools like transformative justice and restorative justice — but they won’t work at scale in the current culture in which we are co-existing in. We must collectively interrogate the culture that raised these boys in the UK and the Brock Turners of the world to do what they did. I’d argue these boys were failed time and time again before the rapes. The culture they were raised in created compliance around their behaviors that dehumanized girls. They were not feminist, anti-sexist angels before the rape, friends. I’m certain they had signs of sexism and misogynistic beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. Did anyone tell them that was not acceptable? Who taught them those beliefs and attitudes in the first place? Did they have anyone modeling healthy behaviors and beliefs rooted in empathy and kindness?
In order to build a culture that can adequately, effectively, collectively and unanimously build equitable responses to gender-based violence, we must do the damn work. The work does not live in my brain somewhere, it’s been strategically and thoughtfully outlined by communities, organizers, and survivors.
You see, the roadmap already exists. It was written by the people most harmed by both interpersonal violence and state violence. INCITE! laid it out clearly, and I’m not going to paraphrase it — I’m going to give it to you in full:
Develop community-based responses to violence that do not rely on the criminal justice system AND which have mechanisms that ensure safety and accountability for survivors of sexual and domestic violence.Transformative practices emerging from local communities should be documented and disseminated to promote collective responses to violence.
Critically assess the impact of state funding on social justice organizations and develop alternative fundraising strategies to support these organizations. Develop collective fundraising and organizing strategies for anti-prison and anti-violence organizations. Develop strategies and analysis that specifically target state forms of sexual violence.
Make connections between interpersonal violence, the violence inflicted by domestic state institutions (such as prisons, detention centers, mental hospitals, and child protective services), and international violence (such as war, military base prostitution, and nuclear testing).
Develop an analysis and strategies to end violence that do not isolate individual acts of violence (either committed by the state or individuals) from their larger contexts. These strategies must address how entire communities of all genders are affected in multiple ways by both state violence and interpersonal gender violence. Battered women prisoners represent an intersection of state and interpersonal violence and as such provide and opportunity for both movements to build coalitions and joint struggles.
Put poor/working class women of color in the center of their analysis, organizing practices, and leadership development. Recognize the role of economic oppression, welfare “reform,” and attacks on women workers’ rights in increasing women’s vulnerability to all forms of violence and locate anti-violence and anti-prison activism alongside efforts to transform the capitalist economic system.
Center stories of state violence committed against women of color in our organizing efforts.
Oppose legislative change that promotes prison expansion,criminalization of poor communities and communities of color and thus state violence against women of color, even if these changes also incorporate measure to support victims of interpersonal gender violence.
Promote holistic political education at the everyday level within our communities, specifically how sexual violence helps reproduce the colonial, racist, capitalist, heterosexist, and patriarchal society we live in as well as how state violence produces interpersonal violence within communities.
Develop strategies for mobilizing against sexism and homophobiaWITHIN our communities in order to keep women safe.
Challenge men of color and all men in social justice movements to take particular responsibility to address and organize around gender violence in their communities as a primary strategy for addressing violence and colonialism. We challenge men to address how their own histories of victimization have hindered their ability to establish gender justice in their communities.
Link struggles for personal transformation and healing with struggles for social justice.
The work exists. We just need to collectively agree to do it.
