Student creates powerful sexual assault photo campaign in response to Brock Turner's jail release

It happens unexpectedly. It happens unwillingly. It happens without a reason. It happens.
And it’s what Ithaca College junior and photographer Yana Mazurkevich wants people to understand about sexual assault in a shocking new photo series created in response to Brock Turner, a former Stanford University student who was convicted in June of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster.

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, an estimated 20% to 25% of women will experience completed or attempted rape over the course of their college careers, but fewer than 5% of these incidents are reported to law enforcement. Mazurkevich’s series recreates sexual assault incidents like these using stories shared by survivors, and aims to show that sexual assault can happen anywhere — behind a dumpster, in the locker room, at a party or in a classroom — to anyone at any time.
“This topic is not something that you can sugar coat,” Mazurkevich says. “It’s something that is real and its raw and its something to really address in the most realistic, honest way. And this is the honest way of doing it.”
This isn’t the first time Mazurkevich’s photography has attracted attention, though. She released a series in April through Current Solutions, an organization that helps survivors of sexual assault by asking them to share their stories, called “Dear Brock Turner” that went viral.

Mazurkevich created her latest series, titled “It Happened,” as part of a class project, but says she was inspired to do more with it when she learned Turner would be released from jail early.
The charges against Turner — assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated/unconscious person, penetration of an intoxicated person and penetration of an unconscious person — could have put him behind bars for more than a decade. Instead, he served just three months of his six-month sentence (which many decried as being too light.
“Before his announcement of his early release, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with the images,” Mazurkevich says. “After I heard about his release, it was very much angled towards him at that point, timed exactly at his release just as a … huge middle finger to him.”
“It Happened,” which also produced through Current Solutions, has been shared far and wide on Facebook since going live, and Mazurkevich says the series has inspired a number of sexual assault survivors to share their stories with her. 

“That’s just extremely overwhelming for me, especially because it’s just a lot to be hearing strangers telling me their stories for the first time,” Mazurkevich says. “But the fact that its blowing up so much means that its such an important topic and people are finally opening their eyes and having a conversation about it.”
But not all have reacted positively. Despite her best efforts to include trigger warnings (cautionary statements warning viewers of potentially upsetting content), Mazurkevich says she’s received backlash, including from survivors, due to the graphic nature of the images.
“Sexual assault is not pretty, it’s not comfortable. It’s not like you are going to lay a pillow under somebody’s head and rape them,” Mazurkevich says. “They happen very much unexpectedly and (these photos) are going to be very … horrifying and they are not supposed to be easy to look at.”
But Mazurkevich believes her photos are a crucial addition to the conversation on sexual assault.
“To show — literally show people the actual reality and how it happens … words are one thing, but actions, especially actions shown through images are another thing,” she says.