I meant the accused and accusers for most types of crime.
I think being accused of any major crime should be a big deal. For some reason those accused of other crimes don’t usually have so many advocates ready as accused rapists.
I suppose this would be closest. Again, the striking thing is the disparity. The lifestyles and integrity of murder and kidnap victims are not usually picked apart and disparaged. Those of rape victims seem always to be.
What does publishing somebody’s name in the paper have to do with a defendant being able to face their accuser?
Threatening tweet by a teen related to the perp? Sorry, that’s not what I call “social stigma”. Social stigma is when you’re ostracized, for instance. What is described here happens with all sort of crimes (and god only knows what the perp said to his cousin, who was probably fully convinced she had victimized him and wasn’t the victim but the guilty party).
One of my coworker’s teen daughter was assaulted (not sexually) and beaten by some guy she knew. After she brought charges, she got not only threatening text messages but also direct threats (including a visit at her home) by the perp’s friends. Being threatened because you reported some unsavory character by the perp, his family or his friends isn’t specific to rape victims.
I don’t think it is, and I believe I said so in my first post in this thread. I’m only arguing that if the name of the accuser stays undisclosed because it could cause X damage to her, then the name of the accused should be too, since it’s going to cause ten times X damages to him.
And I believe that in fact the UK has laws to this effect.
As for the fact that doubts are raised about rape accusations, the reason is obvious. It’s the only serious crime you can denounce despite a complete lack of evidence. It’s difficult to argue that a murder victim isn’t dead. If you want to accuse your neighbour of being an arsonist, you need to first burn your own house down. But anybody can accuse anybody of rape without any proof, and the social stigma attached to rape is such that this unfounded accusation is going to cause serious damages to the accused.
Stating over and over again, as I read all the time, that the number of false reports is vanishingly small seems to me to require either a high level of bad faith or indoctrination or extreme naiveté. Believing that, when you can cause extreme damages to someone (and possibly can gain from it) without having to show any evidence of your accusation and when lying is going to be mostly consequence-free because nobody can prove otherwise, such attempts will be extremely rare is living in some alternate reality that bears no resemblance to the planet I’m living on.
Regardless how unpleasant it might be for a rape victim to be put in doubt, it’s perfectly legitimate to doubt such accusations.
You can accuse people of all sorts of serious crimes without proof. (You mean proof, not evidence. The accusation is evidence.) Rape, by its very nature, is often harder to prove, and that cuts both ways: It’s harder for the guilty to be convicted, and it’s harder for the innocent to clear their names.
We do not have laws in the US, generally speaking, that prevent a media outlet from revealing the name of someone who claims to have been raped. This is a matter of choice and policy for the media. Some places tried to pass such laws and ran into constitutional issues. (I am no legal scholar, so it’s possible some form of gag law might exist somewhere.) If you want to pass a law that they cannot reveal the name of an accused rapist, that will likely also run afoul of the constitution. If you just want to make it policy for the media, you have to demonstrate to the media that their current policies do more harm than good. I don’t think you’ll be able to demonstrate that.
Think about cultures where women are killed if they are raped (I don’t know that this was ever the norm in any culture, but I think it has been relatively widespread in certain cultures). Would you demand that the victim’s name be published in a case like that? If not, where do you think the tipping point should be? I’m not sure, myself, exactly where it should be.
As a thought experiment, imagine you had a video of a rape. The rapist was clearly identifiable. The rape also clearly occurred ten years ago, and the statute of limitations had run, so a conviction in criminal court is not possible. You contacted the victim who said it was absolutely rape. What, in your ideal world, should you be allowed to do, legally, with that video?
You’re correct. The UK doesn’t have freedom of the press to the same extent the US does.
FWIW, when practical, for ethical reasons I think the US media shouldn’t print the names of people arrested until they’re convicted.
However, I see no reason people accused of rape be treated differently than people accused of murre or armed robbery.
“Some people regard rape as so heinous an offense that they would not even regard innocence as a defense.”[indent]-- Unnamed civil liberties lawyer, quoted by Alan Dershowitz[/indent]
Too funny, in a thread about how horrible it is to have an accusation not have a name behind it.
In this case you have undisputable proof (as per the hypothetical) that the rape occured. I’ve no particular issue with actual rapists being shamed. I have an issue with the idea that while the supposed victim must be protected from any possible harm, the alleged criminal doesn’t need to be protected from a certain, and stronger, harm.
I guess you’re hinting at something like : “then what if it’s not absolutely obvious it’s a rape”, and “then what if the video is bit blurred” and so on, hence where it’s the tipping point?
If it’s what you have in mind, I don’t know where the tipping point is, but it’s well before “some unknown person we know nothing about and have no reason to believe claims that at some point X raped her, here are the picture, life story, home address and employer’s name of the abject monster. These informations of course will be kept forever on our website so that any person he or his family might remotely associate with for the decades to come, like friends, family, neighbours or potential employers might be appropriately scornful and distrustful of him. Remember that almost nobody ever lie about a rape so you all can take as granted that he’s the scum of the earth even if every single charge against him is dropped (only because it’s not always possible to prove that a rape occured, actual innocence being so incredibly unlikely), which we most certainly won’t announce on TV or mention on our website anyway”.
And the above is basically how I perceive a rape accusation reported by the media currently. And I don’t believe that in 2014, in western countries, the social stigma a rape victim can suffer from is remotely comparable to that.
If this is a concern – and I agree, the asymmetry you highlight is an invitatation to abuse – it seems to me a more logical response to say that accused rapists should not have their names published.
That way, the accuser would not face any possible stigma for reporting, but the possibility of a false-but-still-stigmatizing accusation is greatly minimized.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Actually, no. I was wondering more about whether a law that said you can only publish the name of a rapist once convicted would bar publication in a case like the one I described. Hinging the revelation to conviction seems to have its own issues.
I’ve actually heard something very close to this said, completely seriously, regarding child molestation: that the crime is so heinous, the accused shouldn’t even be given a trial. Remarkable failure of reasoning.
You stated that hiding the name of the victim was a media policy, not law. So nothing prevents the media from applying the same policy and not disclosing the identity of the accused. Then they could use their judgement to disclose it in some peculiar cases, like your hypothetical.
I can’t see clearly how it could be made a law. You can’t bar the media from reporting any kind of accusation for any crime in any circumstance. I guess it would have to be something like an extension of defamation, making actionable to report unproved accusations, and the media financially responsible for the resulting damages, so allowing court to decide on an individual basis whether a sufficient threshold of evidence exists to warrant publication (“we got an anonymous caller saying that X is a rapist” vs “we have the full video of the rape”).
The British law, if I’m not mistaken, allows judges to forbid the disclosure of names during the enquiries and proceedings. Even though it doesn’t prevent their publication originally, at least it strongly limits the subsequent publicity. So, it probably would be a good step.
In any case, self-discipline by the medias seems to be the most obvious solution. If they managed to do so with the victims despite not being legally obligated to, they certainly could do the same with the accused.
I don’t find this statement particularly remarkable. I’m quite convinced that if you’re tried, you have better chances to avoid a sentence if there are strong evidences that you committed a not too remarkable crime than if there are weak evidences that you committed a heinous crime. That’s one of the reasons why I’m opposed to the death sentence. I think people are more sensitive to the nature of the crime than to the existing evidences.
For instance, when the death sentence existed in France, it was very rarely applied (scaled for population, the equivalent of a handful of death sentences every year for the whole of the USA). In these circumstances, you’d expect that, contrarily to the USA now, there was essentially no doubt about the guilt of people so sentenced. But it wasn’t the case. Many cases were dubious. That’s because jurors didn’t return death sentences when the crime was very, very, certain, but instead when the crime was very, very, heinous.
So, to come back to the topic at hand, you’re much better off, as far as the public opinion is concerned, with strong evidences that you murdered your neighbour over the noise level of his lawnmower than with an unsubstantiated assertion that you’re groping 10 yo on your spare time.
Clearly, and without any doubt whatsoever, the current policy of the media does a lot more harm than good.
Is it harmful because the media do not name the accuser? Absolutely not. It is because they decide to name a 100% innocent* person as an alleged rapist. Because of how worked up everyone gets about this particular crime the only fair thing for the media to do is to name neither the alleged rape victim nor the alleged perpetrator.
And although the media will (usually) use the word “alleged” when naming this innocent* person as an alleged rapist, the average person tends to gloss right over that word and judges this innocent* person guilty of an awful crime. Because when it comes to rape, I think most readers go into “they wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true” mode.
It is heinously unfair to name an innocent person as a perceived rapist when they are innocent* of that crime.
*This asterisked section shouldn’t be necessary but, because of how rape is viewed so much more emotionally than any other alleged crime, at least in the USA, I feel the need to remind the emotionally revved up that a person is totally innocent unless and until they are convicted.
Innocent goes beyond a legal meaning. I am not bound by the court system, and I don’t think you want to be bound by it either.
I pose the same question to you that I did to clairobscur above. If you had a video that showed a rape, and the statute of limitations has passed, what should you be allowed to do with the video? Is the rapist in the video innocent?
I understand the reason the media does it, but I don’t like the implication it sends. Jane Doe accuses Richard Roe of rape. None of us know either Jane or Richard. Jane could be a lying bitch or Richard could be wrongfully accused. Jane could be a victim of rape who needs our sympathy and Richard could be a brutal rapist.
But at this point, We Don’t Know. However, the media and popular culture immediately takes sides. Jane gets to keep her identity secret while Richard has his name raked over the coals and through the mud.
It seems that at this point in the process if you are going to make such a serious accusation, at least put your name on it.
You know, it’s not up to the victim whether or not something makes the papers (has more to do with what else happened that day, and whether the surrounding circumstances make it “news”), and she may not even be the one leveling the accusation–it’s the cops that arrest a person. I mean, if a reporter calls a woman and says “Hey. The cops arrested some guy named Richard Roe and charged him with your rape. We are running that story tomorrow. Would you like us to put your name in there, too, or leave it out?”, are you seriously suggesting she has an obligation to actively encourage them to include her name? (it’s not a matter of permission, since they don’t need her permission).