Read Joe Biden's Open Letter to the Stanford Survivor of Sexual Assault
Madison Pauly | Mother Jones
June 9, 2016
http://bit.ly/28oWXVn

[snip]

Now that the powerful statement written by the victim in the Brock Turner sexual assault case has swept the internet, Vice President Joe Biden has written an open letter of his own in support of the anonymous survivor. "I do not know your name," Biden begins, "but your words are forever seared on my soul. Words that should be required reading for men and women of all ages."

In the letter, published Thursday on BuzzFeed, Biden emphasized that the survivor was failed by a culture that allows college rape at epidemic levels. "You will never be defined by what the defendant's father callously termed '20 minutes of action.' His son will be," Biden wrote.

"I join your global chorus of supporters, because we can never say enough to survivors: I believe you," he wrote. "It is not your fault."

Here is the (excerpted) letter, courtesy of BuzzFeed:

An Open Letter to a Courageous Young Woman

I do not know your name—but your words are forever seared on my soul. Words that should be required reading for men and women of all ages.

Words that I wish with all of my heart you never had to write.

I am in awe of your courage for speaking out—for so clearly naming the wrongs that were done to you and so passionately asserting your equal claim to human dignity.

And I am filled with furious anger—both that this happened to you and that our culture is still so broken that you were ever put in the position of defending your own worth.

It must have been wrenching—to relive what he did to you all over again. But you did it anyway, in the hope that your strength might prevent this crime from happening to someone else. Your bravery is breathtaking.

You are a warrior—with a solid steel spine.

I do not know your name—but I know that a lot of people failed you that terrible January night and in the months that followed.

Anyone at that party who saw that you were incapacitated yet looked the other way and did not offer assistance. Anyone who dismissed what happened to you as “just another crazy night.” Anyone who asked “what did you expect would happen when you drank that much?” or thought you must have brought it on yourself.

You were failed by a culture on our college campuses where one in five women is sexually assaulted—year after year after year. A culture that promotes passivity. That encourages young men and women on campuses to simply turn a blind eye.

The statistics on college sexual assault haven’t gone down in the past two decades. It’s obscene, and it’s a failure that lies at all our feet...