Going Public with Rape

By John Elson

Not in years had the Des Moines Register published anything that drew such passionate national response. For five days beginning in February, the Register (weekday circ. 210,000) ran meticulously detailed stories about a 29- year-old mother who had been abducted and raped. The series contained a graphic account of the assault and the woman's subsequent experience as a witness at her assailant's trial. To many Iowans, the most riveting fact about the series was that the victim chose to let the Register use her real name. By going public, said Nancy Ziegenmeyer, she hoped to focus attention on this underreported crime and thereby prevent other women from being raped.

The Register's editors, who expected a torrent of canceled ads and subscriptions, were surprised by Iowa's overwhelmingly favorable reaction. Even more calls of support poured in after a story about the series was front- paged by the New York Times last week. Geneva Overholser, the Register's editor, believes strongly that the American press should be franker in reporting sexual assaults. "We are participating in the stigma of rape by treating victims of this crime differently," says Overholser. "When we as a society refuse to talk openly about rape, I think we weaken our ability to deal with it."

The Register series appeared at a time when the U.S. press seems to be abandoning its largely self-imposed rules about protecting individual privacy. The press once routinely shielded the identity of juvenile defendants. Now stories often name youths who have been arraigned on offenses major enough to warrant their trial as adults. Even mainstream publications have begun to practice "outing" -- that is, disclosing the homosexual preferences of closeted celebrities. Most papers now clearly state in obituaries that individuals died of AIDS. Within days of Malcolm Forbes' death, several journals noted rumors about the publisher's gay affairs.

$ Rape has long been treated by the American press as a special situation. Hiding the victim's name, the argument went, protected her from the secondary trauma of exposure to prurient public attention. Journalistic policy elsewhere varies. The Code of Practice, drawn up by Britain's Press Council, prohibits newspapers from naming rape victims without their consent. In France, on the contrary, adult rape victims are usually named. In the U.S. three states have confidentiality laws that protect the identity of rape victims. But these are in limbo, largely because of the 1989 Supreme Court ruling in Florida Star v. B.J.F. The court overturned a $100,000 damage judgment against a Jacksonville weekly that had been charged with violating Florida's law by printing the name of a rape victim, even though she had been identified in a police report.

Although few favor mandatory disclosure, there seems to be an emerging consensus that women should be encouraged to admit that they have been victims of a form of assault for which they need bear no guilt. "There's still a tendency to blame the victim," says Sarah Burns, of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. To help demythologize the crime, some prominent women have openly acknowledged that they were victims of sexual assault. In a law-review article, Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis' campaign manager, admitted she had been raped. So did actress Kelly McGillis, co-star of The Accused, a grimly realistic film based loosely on the 1983 gang rape of a woman in a New Bedford, Mass., bar.

Deni Elliott, director of Dartmouth's Ethics Institute, contends that "ultimately we're doing women a disservice by separating rape from other violent crimes." A celebrated case in point is that of the Central Park jogger, three of whose alleged assaulters go on trial this month. Because she was raped, newspapers and TV stations have generally refrained from using her name. "If she had merely been beaten and left for dead," Elliott notes, "she would have been named." One journal that did name the jogger was the black-oriented Amsterdam News. Editor in chief Wilbert Tatum argues that the city's mainstream press is guilty of hypocrisy for guarding the identity of a well-to-do white woman while it "stigmatized" the lower-class black youths accused of raping her by naming them even before they were indicted.

There are, of course, dissenters from the idea of greater disclosure. Los Angeles psychotherapist Nancy Kless, who specializes in treating crime ( victims, contends that the "secondary injury" of being named can impede patients' recovery. Irene Nolan, managing editor of the Louisville Courier- Journal, wishes her paper could name rape victims but concedes that such a move might deter some women from reporting assaults to police. "I would like to change the paper's policy, but I don't think our community is ready for it," says Nolan.

In an imperfect world, rights inevitably conflict. There can never be an absolute way of determining whether the press's right to the truth has priority over a citizen's right to privacy. In the case of rape, it may be that the traditional policy of reticence, even if quaintly motivated, still makes sense. Many women applaud Ziegenmeyer's courage. Not every rape victim can be expected to possess it.

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York