Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday that alcohol is never an excuse for violence against women, a week after the nation was outraged after a Stanford University student was sentenced to just six months in jail after sexually assaulting a woman.
Biden said in a speech at the United State of Women Summit hosted by the White House that just because a woman doesn’t verbally protest doesn’t mean consent, “and if you cannot consent because you are unconscious, it is rape. It is rape. Period.”
In the Stanford case, now-former student Brock Turner made a controversial statement in which he blamed the school’s “party culture” for his sexual assault.
Turner was convicted for violently assaulting a women who fell unconscious after drinking at a college party. The case inspired national controversy after the star swimmer was given a sentence of six months, and likely will only serve three months in jail.
“Alcohol abuse certainly makes the problem worse, but the answer isn’t to shame women for drinking,” said Biden, arguing that real change comes from developing a culture of respect and mutual affirmative consent.
Biden said sexual assault survivors are “raped again, and again, and again, and again by the system.”
He said the current culture can produce a “feeling of voicelessness” because “built into the system, our system, from our English common law is a notion that if you knew him, you must have somehow, somehow, been partially responsible.”
He noted that his home state of Delaware had a state law on the books until 1994 that said a rapist who the woman knew would be given a lesser charge than a stranger. Although the law changed, Biden said that move “didn’t change the underlying culture.”
Biden, who authored the 1990 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), said significant cultural and legal progress has been made since then, but argued that the effort will not be complete until women know without any question that an assault is never their fault.
Biden addressed the men in the audience, and said “we have to go after the locker room talk” that disparages women.
He said that while those remarks are common, they don’t have to be, and progress can be made quickly. He said people should look to the modern LGBT movement to combat misogyny, arguing that the “mocker becomes the pariah” when people commit themselves to cultural change.
