SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Gena O’Brien was catching up on headlines this week when she stumbled across a young woman’s account of her life since she was sexually assaulted at Stanford University – a statement to the former student-athlete who molested her behind a dumpster 16 months ago.
O’Brien has two sons, ages 10 and 14. The older boy is a competitive swimmer, like 20-year-old Brock Turner was at Stanford before his arrest. In the raw words of an assault survivor, O’Brien recognized a teachable moment. She read portions of the woman’s statement out loud to her 9th grader while he was getting ready for school and made him promise to read all 12 pages when he was done studying for finals.
“There are so many golden truths in there, stark truths,” said O’Brien, a hairdresser who lives with her family in Berkeley, California. “It’s about victimizing somebody and somebody’s feelings of being a victim of something. And I want my boys to have empathy.”
With the six-month jail sentence Turner received last week generating widespread publicity, some parents are using the case to talk with their own children about sexual misconduct, binge drinking, personal responsibility and boundaries. It’s an opportunity that even comes with primary sources – the victim’s statement, the plea for leniency Turner’s father wrote to the sentencing judge – that are helping to fuel discussions about rape with young people who are old enough.
“Let’s not kid ourselves about this. One of the reasons we are resonating with this so much is two people caught the person, it’s not a ‘She said, he said.’ Two white men caught him,” Rosalind Wiseman, the author of a book about modern boy culture called “Masterminds & Wingmen,” said. “The other reason is (the victim) did an amazing job of articulating her experience.”