NONFICTION - Oct. 18, 1992

VIRGIN OR VAMP: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes by Helen Benedict (Oxford University Press: $22.95; 256 pp.). In this detailed discussion of four of the most notorious rape and rape-related cases of the past 15 years, Columbia journalism professor Helen Benedict aims “to show reporters and editors how to cover sex crimes without further harming the victims.” She does so in no uncertain terms, and effectively, although as much through ideology as evidence. The problems with “Virgin or Vamp” begin with the 1978 marital-rape trial of John Rideout: Even though Rideout was acquitted, Benedict writes as if there’s no question of his guilt, just as she does in her occasional references to the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, despite the fact that he, too, was acquitted. Benedict, moreover, marshals every conceivable bit of evidence pointing to press bias against women and in favor of rape defendants, while glossing over Greta Rideout’s later-retracted rape charge against her brother-in-law; likewise, she soft-pedals the fact that the victim of the horrific 1983 Rhode Island bar rape (upon which the film “The Accused” was based) denied having made a previous claim of rape. “Virgin or Vamp” is troubling, in short, for two reasons: because the reportage of sexual crime does indeed go wrong in many of the ways Benedict describes, and because Benedict goes wrong, for some of the same reasons, in making her case. When she construes the description of one victim as “the type of girl you’d want to date” as being equivalent to calling her a “vamp,” or the headline “Tears of Two Rapists” as sympathetic to the convicted criminals, it’s hard to remain open to her larger, generally convincing argument.