Rape victims should continue to have their identities protected because society still hasn’t dealt with the stigma attached to this crime. Plus, keeping their names from becoming public helps victims regain some small sense of control of their lives.
Those sentiments are the overwhelming response of readers of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who sent me letters and messages about the newspaper’s handling of stories involving victims of rape.
The request to help us reconsider our current policy — not to use victims’ names unless they expressly approve it — was prompted by the case of the two California teenagers who were abducted in August. Authorities issued a nationwide alert to find them, and their rescue made headlines. But their names and photos were yanked from newspapers around the country when it became known they had been sexually assaulted.
Virtually all of the readers who responded said the decision to go public with a victim’s name has to reside with the victim, not the media.
Sam Marie Engle, of Atlanta, was raped nine years ago. She uses the word “survivor” to describe herself, but she wants the newspaper to continue its current policy.
“In the aftermath of a crime that shatters one’s sense of safety and security, the security of anonymity sometimes is all we have,” she wrote. “And the greatest gift you can give us is the gift of respecting our dignity.”
A 47-year-old Cobb County woman, who was assaulted 20 years ago while on a date, said victims have to be able “to choose privacy.”
“Although this is a crime of violence, it also violates the core of a person’s being,” she said. “Not everyone is capable of surviving the ensuing scrutiny that will occur.”
Alan Weaver of Marietta represented a point of view of several readers who responded on the subject. He wrote to say it is inherently unfair to name the accused while protecting the identity of the accuser.
“I believe that the AJC and other news organizations should make a choice to either print the names of the rape victims or to also withhold the names of the accused,” Weaver said.
(Atlanta recorded 367 rapes in 2001 but only a handful made the newspaper. For the most part the names of defendants were used only in high-profile cases. The newspaper’s policy is also to report the outcome of those cases in which those who are named as defendants are acquitted, or when charges are dropped.)
Joan Pepper of Roswell said she was advised against pressing charges 20 years ago even though she could identify her assailant.
“Would I mind if my name was used? In the ’80s, I would have crumbled. Now, I have no such concerns, as I merely survived a crime of violence, randomly directed against me that I was powerless to stop. Other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I think that is a story of survival that bears telling,” she wrote. But the decision should be hers alone, she said.
Andy Peck and colleagues at the DeKalb County Rape Crisis Center wrote to say that the stigma connected to rape may still exist because society refuses to deal with the reality that many victims are assaulted by so-called “normal” people — often friends, family members or dates — not strangers lurking in the shadows.
“Perhaps the better way to ease the stigma is not to address our attitudes and policies toward survivors so much as our attitudes and policies toward perpetrators and those cultural and social factors that support sexual aggression,” Peck wrote. “If, as a community, we are willing to address the crime of sexual assault with a clear commitment to compassion, accountability and justice, we will no longer need or want to shame victims of rape.”
