For parents, Brock Turner case a teachable moment about sexual assault, consent

Before her son went off to college, Cindy Wilson realized there was one thing she had to do: make sure he read a powerful, 12-page letter from the victim of the Stanford sexual assault, describing in detail the devastating consequences of the attack.

“I’ll be really honest: I hadn’t thought of talking to my son about rape,” said Wilson, an Oakland mother of two. “And now I have. He needs to know about it because he could stop it.”

With the Brock Turner case focusing unprecedented attention on campus sexual assault, parents are grappling with how to talk to their kids about it — in some cases before they start college.

It can be an uneasy task. Experts say that for generations, the “talk,” if it happened at all, likely consisted of vague warnings such as “don’t get pregnant” or “don’t get anyone in trouble.”

But to many, Turner’s assault of an unconscious woman — and the role of Turner’s father, whose letter to the judge was widely seen as excusing his son’s actions and casting him as a victim — exposed a glaring need for honest conversations about consent, responsibility and bystander intervention, even with young children.

Turner, a former Stanford scholarship athlete who was convicted of three counts of sexual assault, is serving a six-month jail sentence. He has maintained that he believed he had consent and didn’t realize the woman was unconscious.

For many parents, the publicity around the Stanford case has made it easier to start a discussion about sexual consent, but it’s still a challenging conversation. “There’s no guidebook for parents,” said Wilson, who is also discussing it with her teenage daughter. “There’s no manual that says, ‘At this point, you have this discussion with this kid.'”

Charles Crosby, of Morgan Hill, was so disturbed by the letter from Turner’s father that he decided he needed to talk to his 9-year-old son about rape — a conversation he said he wishes he didn’t have to have so soon with his youngest child.

“I can’t even describe how upset and angry it made me,” Crosby said about the letter. “I completely lost it because it explains so much. You have generations of boys that are taught, ‘You are entitled to take what you want.’ It made me realize that’s exactly where society is today, and all I can do is teach my kids to be different.”

Crosby said he asked his 13-year-old what he might do if he saw something troubling, such as a man touching an intoxicated woman at a party. Hearing his son’s response — that he would tell the man to “get lost” and make sure the woman got home safely — was, Crosby said, his “proudest day as a parent.”

The case also has its heroes, which parents can point out to their children: Two Stanford graduate students intervened after they saw Turner thrusting his body on top of the unconscious woman outside a fraternity party last year. The two men, both from Sweden, chased down and apprehended Turner until the police came.

“I want my kids to be the Swedes,” Crosby said.

But experts say there is a risk that parents who have been following the story will merely warn their children not to drink too much — or, worse, tell their boys to protect themselves against false allegations, sending the message that women lie about assault.

“I’ve even heard of two cases where parents have told their sons to use their phones to video or audiotape consent so they can prove it later,” said Peggy Orenstein, a Berkeley mother and best-selling author whose most recent book is titled “Girls & Sex.”

“That does NOT seem to be communicating lessons about change and progress,” she wrote in an email. (The documentation approach doesn’t work anyway, she added, as someone can withdraw their consent at any time.)

But others, Orenstein said, have begun to teach their children about the positive aspects of consent — “that asking ‘Is this OK?’ is a lovely and caring thing to do, that if you even suspect a little bit that someone is too drunk to give consent that you move along, there will be another chance.”

Such conversations are important, said Mike Domitrz, founder of the Date Safe Project, a national organization that trains parents, schools and other organizations on consent, sexual intimacy and bystander intervention.

“Instead of saying to your kids, ‘You’d better never sexually assault someone,’ sit down and talk with them about what words to use in a given situation — how to say, ‘What are you comfortable with? What are you not comfortable with? What are your boundaries?’ ” Domitrz said.

Otherwise, he said, “The kids learn nothing.”

Domitrz and others recommend avoiding gender-specific advice, as they say it reinforces a double standard for girls and boys and falsely assumes that boys won’t be victims of assault.

Rather than teaching your sons to respect women and warning your daughters not to drink too much, said author and human sexuality teacher Deborah Roffman, the message should be universal: “There’s a single standard for everybody, and it’s called respect and responsibility for your own behavior. I insist that you bring respect and responsibility and empathy and compassion to every encounter you’re involved in.”

Turner’s “horrible crime” and his failure to take full responsibility for it seem to be rooted in a sense of entitlement that is damaging to young men, said Roffman, author of “Talk to Me First: Everything You Need to Know About Becoming Your Kids’ ‘Go-To’ Person About Sex.”

“We keep saying that we have to make sure boys respect girls, and that’s totally off base,” she said. “We have to make sure boys respect themselves. What kind of self-respecting person does that to another human being?”

Follow Katy Murphy at Twitter.com/katymurphy.