10/06/2026
‼️Talk to your sons‼️ ….. Raise the type of young man that will chase & hold down an assailant until law enforcement arrives. This is the difference between a man & a pathetic opportunistic coward.
Two Swedish graduate students were biking across Stanford's campus one January night in 2015 when they saw a young man assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. They did not keep riding. They jumped off their bikes, chased him down as he tried to flee, and held him there until police arrived. Peter Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt did not know the woman on the ground, and she would not remember any of it. Four years later, she finally got to meet the two men who had come to her rescue, face to face and fully conscious.
Her name, the world now knows, is Chanel Miller. For years she was known only as "Emily Doe," the anonymous victim in a case that became a national flashpoint. Her attacker, Brock Turner, a Stanford freshman and star swimmer, was convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault. But what made Miller's story resonate was not the verdict. It was the statement she wrote and read aloud to him in court -- a searing account of what the assault and the trial had done to her, which, when it was published, was read 11 million times in four days and helped lay the groundwork for the movement.
Miller had done everything survivors are told to do, and the process still nearly broke her. "I had so many, quote unquote, advantages," she later said -- a r**e kit, a prosecutor, an advocate, the help of police and nurses. "And I still found it so excruciatingly difficult and emotionally damaging going through it. I thought, if this is what it looks like to be well equipped going into this, how the hell is anyone else supposed to survive this process?"
She has little patience for the question survivors are always asked. "We always say, like, oh, why didn't she come forward? Why didn't she report?" she said. "Because there's no system for her to report to. Why should she have faith in us to take care of her if she comes forward?" And she knows the cost of that failure. "They go home, and they carry the shame, and they swallow it up and it eats them from the inside out," she said. "It's so sick, that we let this happen."
Then came the sentence. Prosecutors asked for six years; Miller expected at least two. The judge gave Turner six months, citing the young man's "good character" and the fact that he had been drinking. He served three months. The leniency -- extended to a privileged young man, over the pain of the woman he assaulted -- sparked national outrage, got the judge recalled from the bench, and ultimately helped change California law. It also deepened Miller's anger at what she saw.
"Privilege is not having to reckon with his own actions," she said of Turner, contrasting his treatment with the long sentences handed to "young men of colour serving far longer sentences for nonviolent crimes." Worn down but unwilling to disappear, she had started writing a book -- and in 2019 she decided to attach her name to it, stepping out from behind "Emily Doe" to publish her memoir, "Know My Name." Coming out publicly, she said, turned out to be "the most peaceful day I've had in four and a half years."
A decade on, the crisis Miller wrote about has not eased. Roughly one in four undergraduate women experience sexual assault during college, and most never report it -- for exactly the reasons she named. The case now gripping the country, at Cornell, has made the point again: a young woman says she was drugged and gang-r**ed by seven fraternity members -- while one of them, according to the lawsuit, messaged dozens of his fraternity brothers in a group chat to advertise that there was an incapacitated woman upstairs, available for the taking. However many of them saw the message, not one came to her aid. It is its own kind of indictment -- not only of the men accused, but of everyone who knew and said nothing.
Which is why Miller keeps returning to the two men on the bikes. Peter Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt did not look away; they got off their bikes and acted. "Be the Swede," Miller tells people now. "Show up for the vulnerable, do your part, help each other and face the darkest parts alongside survivors." She keeps a drawing of two bicycles, which she slept beneath, as proof that the good in the world is real. "On the same night I was assaulted," she said, "I was also saved."
--> For Chanel Miller's own unforgettable account of her assault and the fight for justice that followed, we highly recommend her acclaimed memoir "Know My Name," at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780735223721 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4rTQYGw (Amazon)
--> Chanel Miller has gone on to fulfill a lifelong dream: making books for children. Her first, "Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All" -- which she wrote and illustrated, about a girl who lives above her family's New York City laundromat and sets out to reunite lost socks with their owners -- was named a 2025 Newbery Honor Book, for ages 7 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780593624531 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4jAkjn6 (Amazon)
Her newest, the middle-grade novel "The Moon Without Stars," follows a seventh-grader whose homemade zine turns her into an unexpected sensation at school, for ages 10 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780593624555 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4rQORTK (Amazon)
For Jon Krakauer's deeply reported book on a single college town's handling of a wave of sexual assault cases involving its football team, we recommend "Missoula: R**e and the Justice System in a College Town" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780804170567 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4jBn33A (Amazon)
If you know a teen girl struggling after sexual abuse or trauma, “The S*xual Trauma Workbook for Teen Girls: A Guide to Recovery from S*xual Assault and Abuse” may help at https://www.amightygirl.com/sexual-trauma-workbook-girls
Raising kids to have empathy for others and an understanding of consent is one of the most important things parents can do to help reduce the incidence of sexual assault. To teach children -- girls and boys alike -- about the need to respect others and their personal boundaries, we recommend "Let's Talk About Body Boundaries, Consent, and Respect" for ages 4 to 7 (https://www.amightygirl.com/body-boundaries) and "Consent (for Kids!)" for ages 6 to 10 (https://www.amightygirl.com/consent-for-kids)
There is also a helpful guide for teens on topics such as consent and coercion, "Real Talk About S*x and Consent: What Every Teen Needs to Know," for ages 13 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/real-talk-about-sex-and-consent
