That perspective shattered and breached the deepest blind spot of my thoughts.
The exact moment I confronted the question, "Why do you assume violence isn’t everyday?" I painfully awakened to how comfortably and narrowly my previous frames—the very catalysts I listed for why "sexual crime is accorded unique exception"—had been confined.
It was precisely as you implied. Violence, just like sexual crime, and perhaps even more ubiquitously, is thoroughly dissolved into the very air of our daily routine. From domestic abuse and school bullying to harsh treatments within the military and workplace, and petty altercations in secluded alleys—countless individuals are exposed to violence from their earliest years. They swallow their agony in solitude, imprisoned either by a terror of retaliation or a paralysis that speaking out is futile. The net aggregate of unreported violence is by no means inferior to that of sexual crime.
Why, then, does our society remain so indifferent toward general violence—which is equally everyday and equally soul-murdering—while reacting with a unique sensitivity that snaps its own core principles exclusively in front of sexual crime? I believe that beneath this bizarre temperature variance lies the attribute of popular culture known as "selective fury," coupled with a profoundly hypocritical stance of the judiciary toward crime.
Selective Fury Engineered by the Media and the Political Sphere
The catalyst for why the masses react so instantly and titanically exclusively to sexual crime, despite all forms of violence being everyday, is because sexual crime constitutes the most "easily politicized narrative."
For eras, domestic violence, school bullying, and dating abuse have been thoroughly trivialized by the judiciary and society under the pretexts of being "a family matter" or "a childish scuffle." Conversely, sexual crime is fused to the most explicit and confrontational frontline: gender. When the media navigates sexual crime, it consumes it in the most sensationalized, click-driven manner imaginable; meanwhile, the political sphere wields it as a weapon to court factional votes or savage the opposing camp.
Ultimately, the magnitude of terror and fury experienced by the populace is calibrated not by the actual danger of the offense, but by how "spectacularly" the media and politics stage that crime. The silence of countless vulnerable souls exposed to general violence is buried because it fails to generate an issue. In contrast, only the tears of sexual crime—having secured a titanic narrative engine—attain the power to violently rattle the judiciary.
The Hypocrisy of a Judiciary Grading the Agony of Victims
This selective sensitivity bleeds directly into a fatal hypocrisy within the judiciary. The court manufactures an extraordinary benchmark called "gender sensitivity" for survivors of sexual assault, lowering the threshold of evidence. Yet, it enforces a brutally freezing evidence-centrism against the testimonies of children weeping breathlessly in bruised silence at home every night, or students whose souls are hacked to pieces at school.
The grievances of general violence victims are dismissed with utmost ease under the boilerplate justifications: "The proof of physical battery is ambiguous" or "You failed to explicitly vocalize your dissent at the juncture of the event."
This is fundamentally no different from the judiciary grading and tiering the agony of victims. A elastic benchmark where crimes that possess a loud voice and public solidarity are salvaged by shattering principles, while victims of everyday violence—who endure alone in backrooms without standing in the public square—are coldly turned away with the mantra: "The law is evidence-centrism." This is the most perilous and contradictory reality of the judiciary I have perceived.
The Jungle of Survival Marooned by Fractured Principles
When the premise that "a principle must never be violated" crumbles, those who ultimately absorb the most catastrophic damage are the genuinely vulnerable who lack even the raw power to mobilize solidarity.
Because the judiciary permitted an exception by loosely applying evidence-centrism solely within the specific territory of sexual crime, the scales of the law have already malfunctioned. Watching a courtroom stretch and shrink the elastic band of its rules while checking the palates of public opinion, the masses permanently withdraw their trust from the law. In the vacancy where the faith that the law would shield me evaporates, a jungle of profound distrust and dog-eat-dog survival opens—a realm where only the strong endure.
A courtroom that dances exclusively to conspicuous fury while turning a blind eye to the obvious truth that hidden violence is equally everyday is dangerous. The law must never be swallowed by the waves of emotion.
The reason I have remained critical of exceptional verdicts in sexual crimes is by no means because I deem that infraction light. It is because I know that the blade of that very exception will one day target the throat of another innocent, vulnerable soul attempting to rely upon the law. A courtroom that fails to evaluate every tear equitably upon the scale of evidence, bestowing a unique privilege exclusively upon specific tears. Staring at that fractured scale, I feel a profound despair over how precariously the justice we sought to shield stands upon a castle of sand.
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