Victims Blaming in Chanel Millers Case

Despite the assault that the character had experienced, she had been still seen to be on the wrong side of the law by her close allies and the family. Although most of her family members and friends still regarded her as Chanel Miller, she was the primary victim of the sexual assault case. Anglicized through her Chinese name as Zhang Xiao Xia, she had remained to be a version and a voice that the world came to know about (Blaming the victim, 2017).

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Besides, within the legal system or framework that she described as a dark, small chamber that resided in her mind, Chanel Miller insinuated and likened her experience to Emily Doe, which is a penname of the sexual assault victim of Broke Turner because she had been reduced into a voiceless sexual victim (QuickRead, & Schullery, n.d). In certain instances, they disregarded the suffering that the character had undergone during the assault and viewed her as the wrong one. Some of the cases of blaming alongside the emails of how they occurred are outlined in the proceeding paragraphs.

For example, as the main witness of her crime, Miller’s legal effort saw Turner getting convicted of three counts of sexually related crime, but was only sentenced to prison for only six months. The reduced duration of conviction is an instance of indirect victim-blaming since the law had set a higher limit of the number of months an assailant would take in prison. Also, the convicted was not presented openly to the victim. In fact, during the court’s preceding, Miller informed the accused Turner that he never knew who she was, although he had sexually assaulted her (QuickRead, & Schullery, n.d).

Similarly, accusing the legal system in her memoir, Miller narrated her experience and ordeal of getting sexually assaulted by an individual who had more empathy from the legal system of the United States than the victim. She expressed how the legal system had handled her case, which hit the headlines within the print media in the country. More than eighteen million people read the victim’s statement after being published by BuzzFeed. The reaction of the readers also signified the instances of the victim-blaming as some felt that the case was not supposed to appear in some of the mainstream print media of the country.

The experience of the assault and the consequential blames made the victim feel low before her allies, who have witnessed the whole thing. During her sexual ordeal, two students saw Miller getting sexually assaulted by Turner on 17th January 2015 at midnight (Blaming the victim, 2017). Thus, they expected the legal system to take a stern approach in handing the assailant. However, the resulting proceedings by the legal system gave the case a different approach, which made her feel humiliated. The experience lowered her self-esteem with some percentages as she felt disregarded before the functional legal systems within the entire country.

According to their statement, Turner was a third-year student who sexually assaulted Miller while unconscious adjustment to some rubbish bins. Santa Barbara, a 22-year-old new employee of a technology company, was a recent graduate who had graduated from the University of California. During that day, both Barbara and her younger sister had agreed to attend a fraternity party held at Stanford University when they spotted the crime taking place (Blaming the victim, 2017). The experience negatively impacted the victim’s life. It shifted the societal view towards her because she was sexually assaulted and must have undergone many internal defects. This created a certain level of a vague feeling that had a tremendous negative impact on the victim’s social life.

References

Blaming the victim. (, 2017). Cyber Frauds, Scams and their Victims, 115-134. doi:10.4324/9781315679877-5

QuickRead & Schullery, L. (n.d.). Summary of “Know My Name” by Chanel Miller - Free book by QuickRead.com. QuickRead.com.