This past Sunday, June 12th, Stanford held its 125th undergraduate commencement where 1,775 graduates walked across the stage in their football stadium to receive their degrees. Graduation’s are usually filled with excitement and happiness as students celebrate all they have accomplished and move on to the next step in their lives, but at Stanford’s commencement, the graduates were feeling emotions other than the typical joy and pride. The Stanford students, who usually walk into their stadium in different costumes as custom for their annual “Wacky Walk”, walked in with feelings of anger, sadness, and solitude as they carried signs protesting the case of Brock Turner and how Stanford handled it while also bringing awareness to rape culture.
Students carried signs criticizing the way sexual assault is typically poorly handled on college campuses and illustrating statistics and sayings about Brock, Stanford, and rape culture. These signs varied with sayings such as “Rape is Rape”, “Brock Turner is not an exception”, and “Teach your son not to rape”. Students also plastered their caps with the fraction 1/3 to show the statistic founded by the World Health Organization that one in three people will experience sexual or physical assault in their lifetime and how this assault is highly likely to be from their intimate partners.
The protests expressed by Stanford’s 125th graduating class show how outraged they are with the handling of former Stanford student Brock Turner’s unfair sentencing of six months in jail after he sexual assaulted an unconscious woman on the college campus. According to an article written by the Washington Post, the students want these protests to do more than bring light on the Brock Turner case. They hope that by protesting, they bring awareness to rape culture and sexual assault on all college campuses and sexual assault in general.
While looking through the pictures of students holding up signs protesting, one can’t help but get emotional at what they are doing. These students took a day that is supposed to be all about them and their accomplishments and turned it into a place of protest and awareness. These students are selfless and are truly future leaders of our society. These students know what is right and wrong and are not afraid to stand up for injustices. They decided to take advantage of their commencement and the amount of people they had the opportunity to reach. They made their voices be heard in a time where that’s really important.
Stanford’s protests are just one example of many of how outraged and disappointed people are with the handling of rape in our country. We can only hope that by bringing awareness to the flaws in our society we can improve and hopefully someday live in a place where there is no gray space when it comes to issues such as sexual assault. Just like the signs that were held up by many Stanford graduates, “Rape is Rape”—and that is exactly how it should be seen.
