The summer debate over whether to name Kobe Bryant’s accuser drowns out a more important discussion.
Newspapers rarely cover rape, and the coverage they do offer is misleading.
The Oregonian and other newspapers are supposed to mirror the communities they cover. But when it comes to covering rape, newspapers tend to look away or distort.
An informal review of The Oregonian’s coverage of rape in a recent six-month period exposes the gaps shared with other newspapers. The words rape, sexual assault or incest appeared in at least 110 local stories. Most were news briefs or police blotter items. Most played in zoned suburban pages with limited readership. Nearly all reported a development in the justice system, such as an arrest or sentencing; only one could be labeled an issues piece. Most involved attacks by strangers and victims who were adult women. And in only one case was a live victim named.
Yet most sexual assaults actually involve people who know one another. Most sexual assaults involve children. Most never enter the justice system. And the personal toll is immense: Advocates estimate that as many as one in six women are sexual assault victims.
Kelly McBride, an ethics faculty member at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., a school for journalists, has been studying rape coverage. She says it suffers because of several factors, but particularly from the stigma attached to rape and the fact that most victims know the attacker. “Most of the time journalists don’t see the value of covering it because of the harm or intrusiveness it causes,” she says.
She recommends newsrooms treat rape not as a news event, but as a social issue. Cover it like poverty or racism, she says, so the story doesn’t belong solely to crime reporters but also involves those covering health, education and religion. Victims also will be more willing to talk and be named after initial criminal proceedings, when the trauma is especially raw, she says.
At The Oregonian, coverage largely has fallen to crime reporters, most of whom are devoted to covering breaking developments in the justice system. Last year, reporter Maxine Bernstein’s story of the police treatment of a rape victim who was willing to be named and her story exposing the failure to route rape kits to the state crime lab reflected excellent but rare enterprise coverage of rape.
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Fla., is trying to apply McBride’s approach, and that resulted in a moving story in May about three adult residents who overcame a childhood of sexual abuse. Executive Editor Janet Weaver decided to tell the story in graphic detail because the crime is so pervasive and affects so many children. “More people are touched by this than any county commission meeting we cover, and yet we just don’t do a very good job with it,” she says. “We’re so uncomfortable with all the issues it raises.”
Weaver should know. She shared with readers that she is a victim of sexual assault in an introduction to the story in which she explained the newspaper’s rethinking of coverage of sexual assault. At Sarasota, reporters now are encouraged to not assume sexual abuse victims will refuse to be named but to ask if they are willing to talk. The staff has brainstormed several story ideas that treat rape as an issue, not simply as another criminal case, from how rape and sexual assault are treated by the justice system to how victims are treated in schools.
The Oregonian re-examined its crime coverage in recent years to reduce the emphasis on single-incident violent acts such as murder and to place more emphasis on crime trends and crimes that affect more people, such as property crimes. But there was little, if any, discussion of rape.
Until editors grapple with rape coverage, the newsroom conversations will rise only with high-profile cases such as Kobe Bryant’s and likely remain focused on the naming issue. “That is the wrong conversation,” Weaver says. “We should be talking about how we cover this in a meaningful way.”
