An open letter to Dan A Turner
The past few days the phrase âa steep price to pay for twenty minutes of actionâ has followed me everywhere. It is on my social media news feeds, it is in every second or third headline I see, I hear it on the radio, see it on the news..I overhear colleagues and peers quoting it. And every time, it gets me mad.
Really mad.
I struggle to understand how that sentence seemed like a good one at any point when you decided to pen a letter defending the undefendable, but I do understand you wanted to defend your son, Perhaps you wanted to talk down the impact of his crime to help yourself understand it, perhaps you wanted to try to get people to see beyond the crime, to the boy you knew, i donât know.
But I do know this.
What you term twenty minutes of action, was not action for all involved. The young woman, his victim, was not active. She was unconscious. To term the act of rape âtwenty minutes of actionâ shows you do not understand (or perhaps do not wish to confront) the fact this young woman was not only incapacitated at the point of the attack, but sadly, will find herself experiencing many more âtwenty minutes of inactionâ in the course of her life to come.
I know this, because once I was her.
That âtwenty minutes of actionâ for your son will see his victim face many many minutes of inaction in her life.
She will freeze inwardly when the word rape is mentioned, On the news, in a book, in a lecture. The context will not matter, her brain will hear the word rape and stop processing for a while. I have found myself frozen to the spot when a mention of rape comes on the radio, pouring milk into my tea until the cup overflows and a friend takes it off me.
She will freeze when she and a future partner are kissing, because something, a noise, a smell, a taste or a feel reminds her of something she wants to forget.
She will freeze when dancing with friends at a club because she catches a glimpse of someone who looks like her attacker.
She will freeze out in the middle of a conversation with a work colleague because something they said made her suffer a flashback.
She will freeze when undergoing a pap smear, because lying in a drs room with her legs apart doesnât make her think happy thoughts. I hope she is braver than I, and will actually still faithfully go for her checkups, I often donât. Because I canât face the inevitable twenty minutes or more of stress, of panic attacks, of once again having to fight to claw back the survivor I knows lies hidden inside of me.
She will freeze and miss out on some of the best moments of her life. Instead of an active birth, she may experience an inactive one. I hope not. Again I hope she is stronger than I, and can birth naturally, enjoying the experience. For me though, I was not strong. I lay back and had my precious children delivered by surgery rather than have a panic attack as I lay on a bed with my body exposed to many. While I should have been holding them, enjoying watching their first breaths, instead I was lying in surgery, being stitched up. Each time I lost far more than the first twenty minutes of holding my baby.
In your letter, you talk of your son having struggled to fit in at college. Trust me, it is far harder to fit in anywhere in life once your body has been degraded, eabused, raped and treated like garbage, than when you are a freshman at college.
You talk of your son falling into a culture of alcohol consumption. He didnât fall, he walked willingly. Unlike his victim. She was not a willing participant in âtwenty minutes of actionâ yet she is the one who will lose the most.
Your son may be locked up for a few months, but she will forever be partly locked away. She will experience many twenty minutes of inaction in her life to come. She is the one paying a steep price.
All because your son had âtwenty minutes of actionâ.