It’s a bad practice to name rape victims' names in reporting

While reading our textbook, I found that some newsrooms regularly name rape victims' names. According to Professor Geneva Overholser, naming names is essential for stories’ “accuracy, credibility, and fairness,” is helpful for the victims’ recovery, and can “serve society as a whole” (p. 230). I don’t buy this argument. Most readers just want to know some background information about the victim, such as sex, age, and school or community. We don’t have to know the full name of the victim. Giving the victim’s name may make a report a little bit more “accurate and credible” than the one without the name, but I cannot see how using a victim’s name would make a report more fair or serve society and the victim better. On the contrary, there are many reasons that, until the victims are willing to be identified, the media should not name their names and reveal the explicit details of the rape.

Making the victims’ names and rape details public will very likely traumatize victims a second time, making their recovery more difficult and possibly causing depression and suicide in victims. Based on the National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC), nearly one-third of all rape victims develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The symptoms of rape-related PTSD include re-experiencing the trauma, social withdrawal, avoidance behaviors and actions, and increased physiological arousal characteristics. When the media reports a sex crime with explicit details and the victim’s name, the coverage and its consequence -- the attentions and comments the victim received – will become stimuli and clues that constantly remind the victim about the rape. This will worsen the symptoms of PTSD and make the victim more withdrawn from society. Many rape victims are very vulnerable. Data from NCVC shows that, compared with non-victims, rape victims are three times more like to become depressed and four times more like to have suicide ideation and 13 percent of them actually attempt suicide. Rape traumatizes the victims, as the crime violates the victims, humiliates them, and makes them feel a loss of control. When the media described the explicit details of the crime and/or used victims’ names without their consent, it very likely brings victims feelings of being humiliated and out-of- control. A bad reporting is almost as damaging as the crime, in terms of violating the victims.

If reporting victims’ names became a rule, many victims would not report sex crimes because they were afraid of the second-time harm caused by the reports. I agree with what Professor Benedict said, “As long as people have any sense of privacy about sexual acts and the human body, rape will, therefore, carry a stigma” (Ethics in Journalism, p. 230). She also said, “To name a rape victim is to guarantee that whenever somebody hears her name, that somebody will picture her in the act of being sexually tortured. To expose a rape victim to this without her consent is nothing short of punitive” (http://www.poynter.org/
column.asp?id=36&aid=4010). As long as the stigma towards rape still exists, the practice of naming the victim’s name will discourage victims to report the crime. These kinds of reports indirectly harm the victims and help the offenders.

General speaking, society as a whole should bring comfort to rape victims and help them recover, not expose their most vulnerable moment to the public and put salt on their wounds. Before the victims receive counseling and agree to be identified, journalists should be very careful of how to report the sex crime, at a minimum they should not include the explicit details of the rape and the victim's name.