Let’s begin by thumbing through The Star’s policy manual. Right there on Page 25, it sets out the paper’s rule against identifying rape victims in news stories:
“The names of sexual assault victims should not be published unless the victims themselves come forward and ask to be identified; indeed, there may be a court order preventing their publication.”
Please note: for the most part, this is an ethics rule, a self-imposed restraint on press freedom that is widely observed by newspapers in Canada, not just The Star.
A good rule it is, too.
Sexual assault is a crime of violence. It isn’t about sex or morality. Therefore, no stigma and no shame should be attached to victims.
It may not be well understood that Canada has no law that bars journalists from naming a sexual assault victim when the crime is committed or a suspect is arrested.
The legal barrier to publication or broadcast only arises when the case goes to court and a judge decides to protect the identity of a sexual assault victim, under Section 486 of the Criminal Code.
Law-abiding media outlets honour those court-imposed publication bans, although in rare instances, unintentional (and embarrassing) mistakes have been made.
All this is a roundabout way of introducing the story of two Lancaster, Calif. girls, ages 16 and 17, who were abducted at gunpoint from a lover’s lane where they had been parked in separate cars with boyfriends.
The kidnapping ended 12 hours later when their abductor, a parole violator named Roy Dean Ratliff, crashed his getaway car and was shot to death by sheriff’s deputies.
In early editions on Aug. 2, The Star published an Associated Press wire story by Christina Almeida.
It quoted Los Angeles County Assistant Sheriff Larry Waldie as saying, “The girls are safe.” Friends and family members were overjoyed by the swift rescue.
As for Ratliff, authorities said the dead suspect had been wanted on rape charges “unrelated” to the kidnappings.
In later editions of The Star, the AP story was replaced by a Reuters version, written by Dan Whitcomb.
It included alarming news.
Kern County Sheriff Carl Sparks had told CNN’s Larry King Live TV show he believed Ratcliff had intended to murder the teenagers.
“We probably saved them by 10 minutes,” Sparks said. “He was parked, he had found a spot. He had already raped them. There wasn’t anything left to do. He saw the (police) helicopters in the air and said `I’ve got to get rid of these girls.’ And he certainly wasn’t going to drop them off at the closest market.”
Suddenly, the teens were rape victims. Yet their names already had been broadcast and faces displayed across North America.
Even when the Reuters story appeared in later editions of The Star, so did the victims’ names and photos.
To this corner, it was probably a technical breach of The Star’s stated policy a violation rendered less serious by subsequent events.
The late report of sexual assaults on the teens forced media outlets to drop the victims’ names from subsequent stories and obscure their faces from TV footage.
Columnist Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times likened this awkward media retreat to trying “to put the toothpaste back in the tube.”
In fact, The Star’s news coverage of the abduction and joyful rescue ended at this point in the story.
But there was another chapter.
One victim bombarded by interview requests from the insatiable U.S. media machine appeared on a local Los Angeles TV station. Then on Monday, they both went on NBC’s morning show, Today.
The New York Times quoted a chaplain with the sheriff’s department in Lancaster as saying the teens agreed to tell their story, believing they could help others who face a similar traumatic experience.
As the chaplain, Dr. Billy Pricer, put it, the teens chose NBC over competing networks, and insisted the interview “could not go into certain areas,” including assault details.
Holding hands during the Today interview, the teens said they were hysterical when their abductor threatened to kill them. One said they tried to kill him by stabbing him.
As you might expect, the TV interviews led to another media about-face. Abruptly, the victims’ names and faces were considered public property again.
It takes courage for a sexual assault victim to go public with her (or his) story. But until society treats them non-judgmentally, there must be privacy safeguards.
I sincerely hope the two California teenagers agreed to the interviews, free of undue media pressures or inducements. I’m not convinced that was the case.
According to The New York Times, NBC acknowledged a booker for the Today show had violated NBC News standards by buying one of the girls an $80 (U.S.) pair of pants during a trip to a shopping mall.
Disciplinary action was to follow because the action broke an NBC News rule against giving money or gifts to people who appear on news programs.
By some reports, NBC only won the network competition for the girls’ story after the kind of unseemly feeding frenzy that discredits the media in many eyes.
So colour me skeptical. For that reason, I still won’t name the victims.
