Why It Matters That ‘Emily Doe’ in the Brock Turner Case Is Asian-American
By Lisa Ko
Published in The New York Times on September 24, 2019
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When Emily Doe’s victim impact statement was published on BuzzFeed in June 2016, I read it in one breathless sitting. The previous day, she had read her statement at the sentencing hearing for Brock Turner, who was found guilty of three counts of felony sexual assault by a California jury. The maximum sentence for such a conviction was 14 years, but the judge, Aaron Persky, sentenced Mr. Turner to six months in county jail. He served three. Emily Doe’s statement went viral, read aloud on the floor of the House of Representatives and on CNN, and fueled public outrage over Mr. Turner’s lenient sentence. Later that year California imposed mandatory minimum sentences for sexual assault crimes and in 2018, voters recalled Judge Persky.
I connected with Emily Doe’s fury over Mr. Turner’s lack of remorse and how the legal system dehumanizes survivors of sexual violence, from Mr. Turner’s father arguing that his son’s life was ruined by “20 minutes of action” to the defense lawyer interrogating the victim about her clothing choices and drinking habits. This month, Chanel Miller revealed herself to be Emily Doe, and her memoir, “Know My Name,” was published this week.
When I learned Ms. Miller is white and Chinese-American, I realized I’d first assumed that Emily Doe was white, a reminder of how often we internalize whiteness as a default in America. Ms. Miller is more than her racial identity alone, but the knowledge that she is Asian-American necessitates a new understanding of what she experienced and how she was perceived — as a woman of color, assaulted by a white man, trying to obtain justice in a courtroom presided over by a white male judge.
When sentencing Mr. Turner, who was a student at Stanford University at the time of the assault, the legal system took into account his athletic and academic achievements. In her statement, Ms. Miller challenged this approach, writing, “If a first-time offender from an underprivileged background was accused of three felonies and displayed no accountability for his actions other than drinking, what would his sentence be?”
Mr. Turner’s treatment during the case, and his light sentence, quickly became a symbol for many of elite, white male privilege. Judge Persky, a Stanford alumnus, was criticized as seeing Mr. Turner as entitled to future professional achievements. In contrast, Ms. Miller, who had not attended Stanford, had her own achievements dismissed and her history attacked, her “lost potential” not highlighted in the courtroom.
In her memoir, Ms. Miller writes about how growing up Asian-American had made her feel “used to being unseen, to never being fully known. It did not feel possible that I could be the protagonist.” Asian-American women intersect with racism and sexism in ways that are shared by women of other races and also unique to us. It’s impossible to acknowledge the dehumanization of and violence against Asian women — including hypersexualization, exoticization and fetishization — without connecting it to a long history of American colonialism, imperialism and militarization in Asian countries. Sexual and gender-based violence occurs across racial and ethnic lines, as well as commonly within our own ethnic communities.
A 2015 study by the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence found that between 21 percent and 55 percent of Asian-American women experience physical or sexual violence from intimate partners, with rates varying based on ethnicity. We’ve also been found to report rape and other forms of sexual violence less frequently than women of other races. A lack of financial resources as well as trauma, immigration status, risk of alienation from families and communities, and mistrust of the criminal justice system are only some of the reasons one might choose not to report an assault or publicly accuse an assailant.
But contrary to stereotypes of Asian-Americans as silent or submissive, we continue to speak out against sexual violence, from Ms. Miller, Amanda Nguyen, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Emma Sulkowicz to high-profile figures like Connie Chung and many other survivors, in the United States and abroad, who lack a public platform.
The legal system, and institutions such as Ivy League universities, have historically been invested in protecting wealth, white supremacy and patriarchy. Women, both cis- and transgender, are disproportionately affected by sexual violence, and while a vast majority of rapes in the United States are reported by white women, women of color, especially black and Native American women, are more likely to be assaulted. Three out of four sexual assaults are not reported to law enforcement, and although incarceration is not synonymous with justice, accountability or rehabilitation, only five out of 1,000 perpetrators receive prison time.
Survivors of sexual violence, especially those from marginalized groups, often fail to receive justice from a system that is biased against them from the start. Half of those who do report say that they are then re-traumatized by law enforcement, which may blame them for their own assaults.
There is no singular, or universal, survivor experience. In her anonymity as Emily Doe, Ms. Miller created what she calls an “empty space” for healing, a place for survivors “to step into and speak aloud their heaviest truths, to revisit the untouched parts of their past,” regardless of their backgrounds: “How do you come after me, when it is all of us?”.
We must continue to listen to survivors, with all of their intersecting identities, whether or not they choose to publicly share their traumas. We must support, confront and disrupt, and work to eradicate systemic issues of toxic masculinity, rape culture and sexual violence, which are perpetuated even by those residing in the White House and on the Supreme Court.
Ms. Miller writes: “I am not Brock Turner’s victim. I am not his anything. I don’t belong to him. I am also half Chinese. My Chinese name is Zhang Xiao Xia, which translates to Little Summer.” In naming herself, Ms. Miller takes control of the narrative on her own terms and opens up more space for others who choose to do so. No longer anonymous, it is the power of this specificity that creates an even stronger sense of solidarity.
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