How a Paper’s Explicit Rape Policy Affects a Town

As a rookie reporter in the 1950s, Al Ford learned it was his job to name everyone who stood up to testify at a criminal trial. That included rape victims.

Then, in the late ‘60s, feminists argued that rape is a particularly personal crime that ought to be treated with special sensitivity by the press. Virtually all newspapers reversed their former policy and began to withhold the names of women who had been raped.

But the gusts of social change seemed to bypass Ford, who still identifies sexual assault victims.

“I’ve been yelled at, threatened, accused of having no compassion,” said Ford, a short, dapper grandfather of seven whose unconventional reporting policy sets the standard at the Shelton-Mason County Journal (circulation, 8,782). The Journal is one of not more than 10 newspapers in the country, and perhaps the only one in the West, which make a point of naming rape victims.

More proponents of the policy are coming forth in the wake of a June 21 Supreme Court ruling concerning a Florida newspaper that inadvertently revealed a rape victim’s name. The court held that the small, weekly paper in Jacksonville could not be punished for publishing the victim’s name because the information was lawfully obtained. While the court did not declare unconstitutional Florida and South Carolina statutes prohibiting publication of rape victims’ names, the ruling did say that, for now, it is up to journalists to decide the to-name-or-not-to-name question.

An article in the June issue of FineLine, a newsletter on journalism ethics, was weighted in favor of naming victims. Six of eight news executives interviewed came down firmly on the side of identifying victims.

And in a recent New York Times opinion piece, Geneva Overholser, editor of the Des Moines Register, said, even though her newspaper does not identify sexual assault victims, she believes in the concept of naming victims because “Rape is an American shame. Our society needs to see that and attend to it, not hide it or hush it up.”

Identifying rape victims will help lift the stigma surrounding sexual assault, proponents say. To impose anonymity on rape victims “singles out rape as something different and distinct and more awful” than other crimes whose victims are routinely named in the media, said Gilbert Geis, a UC Irvine professor emeritus who has studied the reporting of rape. “And maybe it is worse. But crimes like having your child kidnaped are pretty awful, too.”

Those who defend rape victims’ right to privacy say making the crime public compounds the suffering of a victimized woman or a man.

“One of the main issues survivors have is taking back their power,” said Jennie Balise of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women. “And here you have an editor making a decision about an intimate event in a woman’s life. He’s yet another outside authority figure who’s going to make a decision for her.”

A 16-year-old high school student who was identified as a rape victim by the Shelton paper felt that was the case.

“I was raped once and then again,” she said at a televised town meeting. “I was raped by the Mason County Journal.”

Shelton, a rainy lumber industry town at the base of the Olympic Peninsula, offers an example of what happens when a newspaper publishes the names of rape victims.

A town of its size (population 7,500) normally has a rape trial only once every few years. There were two reported in 1988, five in 1987--about average for a town of its size. But when there is a trial, almost everyone knows about it because the Shelton Journal routinely gives front-page coverage to the proceedings.

Along with naming the victim, whether she or he is a child or an adult, the paper provides an extensive, explicit synopsis of testimony. In the case of a 16-year-old high school student, the Journal printed: “She (the victim) said he (the defendant) told her he would not hurt her if she just let him do it. She said he grabbed the bottom of her jeans and tried to pull them off while she tried to hold them up.”

Because Shelton is so small, readers are likely to know both the victim and the perpetrator, said Shannon Duffey, director of Recovery, a Shelton program that assists victims of sexual and domestic abuse.

Triggers Debate

If the rapist doesn’t fit the community’s perception of a criminal, some people refuse to believe the victim, Duffey said. Often there’s a public debate about whether the victim was raped.

And the victims suffer even more personal traumas.

Former friends shun them. Anonymous callers harass them at night. Strangers suddenly ask them on dates.

“People think the victims are now more sexual,” Duffey said. “People come on to them more, treat them more as someone who wanted it versus someone who was assaulted.”

One victim said she was so upset by the thought of her neighbors reading about the rape in the newspaper that she had to leave her own trial when the paper came out. After publication, the woman said her 8-year-old daughter’s friends told her about the rape at school.

The teen-ager mentioned earlier left school and got a tutor rather than face a classroom full of peers who knew about the assault. She once told a television reporter: “I didn’t want to see anybody, talk to anybody. . . . I felt like everybody was out there looking at me, watching me.” (This victim no longer wants to talk about her experience. Some of the other victims named in the newspaper in recent years also wish to remain anonymous.)

Some Leave Town

Rather than endure the stares and suspicion of their neighbors, many victims named in the Shelton paper move out of town. “It gets very difficult to live in this community” after your name has been published, said Pride Mutoli, a board member of the Mason County Council on Child Abuse and Neglect.

Families of rape victims complain that they, too, suffer. “I just didn’t like everyone talking about it--it put me in a hard spot,” the brother of one rape victim said. “Once in awhile, I heard people say, ‘This guy (the accused) is a nice guy; he couldn’t have done anything like that. The girl is just upset.’ ”

The situation contributes to a feeling that nothing is confidential in Shelton, Mutoli said: “There’s a climate of distrust in town. Everyone worries about who they talk to. There’s a great deal of ill feeling and a lot of it is directed at the family who runs the newspaper.”

In the past, local residents have picketed, petitioned and begged that the paper reconsider the policy.

Henry Gay, 62, is the publisher of the Shelton-Mason Co. Journal. His son Charles Gay--townspeople call him Charlie--is the managing editor. The family bought the 103-year-old newspaper in 1965. Reporter Al Ford was already working there at the time. The three men found their views on reporting sex crimes were compatible. It was unfair, they thought, to report one party of a trial and not the other so they agreed to name any victim who testified as a witness in Superior Court.

The publisher said this policy is the only way to ensure that the accused is granted the “presumption of innocence.”

“Not one of our critics seems concerned about the defendant in a rape case,” the elder Gay wrote in an editorial. “They assume he is guilty.”

A few committee members do support the policy. Rita McArthur, a retired Shelton schoolteacher, said she believes the policy will help end the stigma of rape. “For so long, rape victims have been made to feel as if they were the guilty party. I think this is a pioneering project in many ways,” she said of the practice of naming rape victims. “It may bring a slow change but I think the change will come.”

Fewer Rapes Reported

But Henry Gay’s policy has not resulted in a more enlightened response to rape in the community, but in fewer rapes reported and more rapists on the loose, say those who work with victims in Shelton.

“There are a number of people out there who have been raped and whose children have been abused who will not report it because of the newspaper,” said Mutoli of the child abuse council.

For instance, when a sexual assault victim calls for help at any of the agencies in town, “one of their biggest concerns is that it’s going to be in the paper,” Duffey said. ‘I have to tell them, ‘Yes, it probably will be.’ ”

Shelton Police Lt. Al Johnson agreed the threat of public exposure can affect a victim’s willingness to report a crime. “Any time someone has to go public with that type of offense they have to do a lot of soul searching and sometimes they choose not to report.”

Mutoli added: ‘We feel it actually encourages bad guys to live here. They feel safe because none of the victims want to hassle with the newspaper.”

But Henry Gay said it’s unfair to single out his paper’s policy as the reason women in Shelton are reluctant to report rapes. They don’t report them in communities where newspapers protect the identity of rape victims, he said.

“We feel very bad when a rape victim says she has been raped a second time by the newspaper,” said his son Charlie Gay in an editorial, “but we feel she is a victim of society’s stigma, not our trial coverage.”

In fact, his father believes that they should print the names to encourage society to stop stigmatizing the crime of rape. “I think I feel as deeply for those victims as anyone,” Henry Gay said. “But I’m not changing our policy because I think in the long run it would cause more pain for all of the (future victims).”