BUT THAT DOESN’T ADVANCE THE PREFERRED NARRATIVE: Petula Dvorak: Amid Stanford’s awful sex assault case, let’s hail the men who protect instead of prey.
We are surrounded by men who get it when it comes to sexual assault. Men who protect instead of prey. Men with moral compasses who would never touch a woman without her consent — no matter how drunk she or he might be.
It doesn’t take shining armor or a white stallion to be a hero. Just ask the two Swedish graduate students who were riding bikes, not horses, across the Stanford campus last year and spotted Brock Turner rutting around behind a dumpster with a young woman who was unconscious.
“The guy stood up, and then we saw that she wasn’t moving,” Carl-Fredrik Arndt told CBS News. “So we called him out on it, and the guy ran away. My friend Peter [Jonsson] chased after him.”
They caught Turner and held him until the police arrived, which is how Turner, now 20, wound up being convicted of sexual assault.
The Swedes could have kept biking past and assumed that it was just a sex thing. Move along, not my business. Instead, they saw something, and they did something. And the woman they rescued was profoundly grateful.
“I sleep with two bicycles that I drew taped above my bed,” she wrote in a searing letter to the judge, “to remind myself there are heroes in this story.
But if “real change can only come from the advice being given to our sons” then maybe an education environment that tells them they’re losers and rapists from kindergarten through college isn’t helping.