Should the name of a “victim” of rape or sexual assault become public when he or she goes to court to seek financial or punitive damages?
It’s a question that news organizations around the country are facing more and more as incidents involving sex abuse move from the criminal courts to civil trials.
Over the past 30 years or so, most news organizations have provided a shield of anonymity to victims of rape, sex assault and other sex crimes as their cases have progressed through criminal proceedings. In nearly all the cases — especially those involving high-profile defendants — the names of their alleged attackers are used.
Most news organizations — including this one — work under the presumption that naming victims would do more harm than good. If the victims are routinely publicly identified, the theory goes, many would rather forgo the potential embarrassment than work with the state to seek justice against their assailants.
But in recent years, as society has come to see rape and sexual assault more as a crime of violence than a sex crime, some newspeople contend it is time to rethink this position. Why treat this crime differently than any other?
When I posed the question to you last year, the response was compelling and nearly unanimous: Rape and sexual assault, you said, are different from other crimes, and because of that the victims should be the ones who decide when and how their names should be used in news stories about what happened to them.
That remains this newspaper’s prevailing standard. But just last week The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on two cases in the civil arena. One involved a $25 million lawsuit filed in federal court against the University of Georgia by a former student who reported to police last year that she was raped in a dorm room by three UGA athletes.
The case was closely covered and the woman who reported the rape was never named. One of the players went to trial in Athens and was acquitted of rape, aggravated assault and aggravated sexual battery. Charges against the other two were subsequently dropped.
The athletes were also brought up on charges before the student judiciary of the school and were cleared.
Now it’s the university — not the athletes — being sued for “deliberate indifference” to the female student’s complaints. UGA’s failure “to take prompt and effective remedial action” caused her to have to transfer to another school, the suit contends.
The second story involved a 23-year-old man who last week filed a $100 million lawsuit against the Atlanta Public Schools, alleging that the school system failed to protect him from sexual abuse by an assistant principal 10 years earlier.
The plaintiff in this case disclosed the allegation of abuse just over a year ago in a criminal trial where he was a defendant. The charges against him were ultimately dropped, but not before the judge in his case ordered attorneys to look into the allegation.
In May, the assistant principal — based on the student’s allegations — was charged with aggravated child molestation and, because of his position as an educator, sexual assault against a person in custody.
But the case had to be dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired. (The assistant principal resigned last year after school officials discovered through a background check that he had been convicted of soliciting sex from an undercover officer in 1984.)
In both the UGA case and the Atlanta schools case, this newspaper has chosen, at least for the time being, not to name the plaintiffs. The names of their alleged assailants were in both stories last week.
Here’s where we’d like to hear your thoughts.
Should there be a different standard employed for cloaking the anonymity of those who are alleged to be victims of rape and sex crimes when they are pressing their cases in civil courts? Or should the same cloak of anonymity prevail as it does most of the time when writing about criminal cases?
