The brier patch of sex crimes

Here's a journalism ethical dilemma for you: A father is convicted of sexually assaulting his 12-year-old daughter. As a newspaper, you want to report this heinous crime to the public, but if you name the criminal, you by implication also identify the victimized daughter, who has the same last name. Do you name the convicted sex offender?

That's not an atypical case for The News & Observer, and the newspaper has found itself in that kind of ethical brier patch in several recent situations. It presents the paper with the competing values of fully and honestly reporting the news vs. protecting the privacy of sex crime victims.

"I think it's one of the toughest issues that we face, because it just doesn't feel right to not name someone who has been convicted of a crime, and it also doesn't feel right to identify the name of a child who has been the victim of a sex crime," said John Drescher, The N&O's managing editor.

The newspaper's policy leans toward protecting the victim -- not just children, but adult victims of sex crimes as well. That's why you regularly see this disclaimer in reporting of sex crimes: "It is the policy of The News & Observer not to release the identity of people reported to be victims of sexual assault."

There is good reason for that, as Margaret Barrett, executive director of the Orange County Rape Crisis Center, explains. If the paper routinely reported victims' identities, "it deters vulnerable people from coming forward [to report the crime] because of the privacy issue. And I think there still is a lot of shame and self-blaming that is perpetuated by our society." Her organization strongly encourages media not to identify victims.

The other side of the issue is that by not identifying the victim, the paper puts itself in the situation of naming the accused but not the accuser. Newspapers don't do that with any other type of crime, out of a sense of fairness. After all, the accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, but treating his accuser as a victim has some measure of presuming guilt.

The N&O's policy has changed from my early years at the paper, when the paper did identify sex crime victims. Ongoing protests from victim advocates finally pushed us away from that policy, and you wouldn't find many people at the paper now who would make the case otherwise.

Still, the policy puts the paper in difficult positions. Last month, The N&O published a brief item identifying a woman charged with encouraging a teenager to engage in prostitution. In a follow-up story the next day, the paper reported that the woman was the teenager's mother and did not use her name, to protect the daughter's identity. "Why is it alright one day, and not the next?" reader David Wright asked. "I cannot be the only one who noticed this, but I hope for the girl's sake that no one else did."

The reason: The police report that The N&O used for the first story did not show that the accused woman was the child's mother. The reporter discovered that the next day.

A more complicated situation happened late last year when The N&O reported the testimony of a 13-year-old girl in the trial of a man accused of raping her. The story didn't identify the child but described her as "freckled and full-bellied" and included such details as her dirty-blond ponytail, her shyness and her love of math. Several readers wrote to protest that the detailed description would identify her to school classmates or others.

Mandy Locke, the reporter, said she included the details to put a human face on the victim. The readers' reactions so troubled her, Locke said, that she went back to the child's grandmother and the prosecutor to ask whether they thought her reporting had hurt the child. (They said no.) Nevertheless, "I lost sleep over that story," Locke said.