A Vanishing Point for Rape Victim Anonymity

The sight of the two teenage victims on TV--so bold and self-possessed as they described their abduction, time in captivity and rescue last week--was enough to make me wonder: What are we, the media, trying to accomplish when we withhold the names of rape victims like these? Are we protecting their reputations or our sensibilities?

Much has been made of the inconsistencies in media coverage of their ordeal. Some outlets stuck to traditional policies against divulging a rape victim’s identity. Others ran the girls’ pictures and names as soon as they were identified as missing and didn’t back down once the rapes were revealed. And others, including this newspaper, switched sides as the story evolved.

For days, we refused to identify them, citing our long-standing rule against using rape victims’ names. But after they were interviewed on national television, their names wound up on our front page.

Perhaps the policy is a work in progress, which makes this an ideal time to question its very relevance. Whom does anonymity protect, anyway? We ought to publicly shame the rapist, not force the victim to cower behind her curtains, as if she’s the one who’s done something wrong.

The prohibition is a holdover from less enlightened times, when rape was deemed to sully its victims. Then, social attitudes and laws seemed to make the survivor a party to the crime. She had to prove she tried to fight off her attacker, and her sexual past was fair game at trial.

Our response was to cloak victims in secrecy, to protect them from societal shame. Some states even made it a crime for the media to report a rape victim’s name.

These days we profess to understand that rape is not about sex, but about violence and rage and that the victim is no more to blame than someone held up for money at the point of a gun. Rape is no more a result of sexual passion than domestic violence is an expression of love.

And yet we continue to shield rape victims, as if they’ve done something shameful. Our complicity in the silence may actually further the stigma, adding to the burden that rape victims face by ratifying their sense of shame.

There have been halfhearted efforts to move the media to change. “Our society needs to see that [shame] and attend to it, not hide it or hush it up,” wrote editor Geneva Overholser, in a 1989 commentary in the Des Moines Register. “We will not break down the stigma until more and more women take public stands.”

Her column prompted a local rape victim to come forward and tell her story. That led to a five-part series on the rape and its aftermath that won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in 1991.

But little has changed in most newsrooms around the country, and the few that tried publishing rape victims’ names were bombarded with protests from readers. Their concerns were essentially the same: If it were my daughter or wife or sister or mother, I wouldn’t want anyone to know they had been raped.

Well, it is our daughters and sisters and mothers and wives who are being victimized. And not knowing won’t stop it from happening.

It’s a simple proposition, in the abstract. Stop relying on an outmoded principle that only perpetuates rape’s stigma of shame. Name names and you ultimately liberate victims, by forcing us to respond to their pain.

I believe that, but how would it play out in real life, among the women whose privacy would be on the line?

It would hurt, says Gail Abarbanel, founder of Santa Monica’s nationally known Rape Treatment Center. Because for all our high-minded talk, rape victims still need protection from prying eyes. “Unfortunately, we’re still at a point in terms of social attitudes that victims’ concerns about the public consequences are well-founded,” Abarbanel says.

“I think because we know more now, the shame the victims feel isn’t the ‘Scarlet Letter’ type; it’s not that somebody had sex with you and you’re damaged goods,” she explains.

“It’s shame that your vulnerability has been exposed, that you failed to defend yourself, to prevent it from happening. There’s a burden to the violation that doesn’t exist for other crimes.”

In the 26 years since her center opened, there have been dramatic advances in the treatment of rape as a crime. Legislative and legal changes have afforded victims more rights in courts; police and medical professionals have been sensitized; technology is making it easier and less traumatic to gather and present evidence.

“Still,” she says, “there’s a reason people are more likely to say they were the victim of a robbery than to mention in conversation that they were raped. That’s because of the response and reaction when they do tell. You don’t get the immediate, unconditional support. People raise their eyebrows, they wonder, ‘What did she do? What could she have done?’

“It’s the only crime where the victim still feels on trial.”

The families of those Antelope Valley teens have come in for a fair amount of criticism for “parading” the girls before news reporters and allowing them to appear on TV. But I think of those girls as poster children who can sensitize us to the face of rape, in the same way that little Samantha Runnion put the menace of child abduction on our nation’s center stage. She too was a victim of sexual assault, but because she was killed, we allow ourselves to say her name.

We shortchange women when we presume that they can’t muster the strength of spirit to stand up to what recovery from rape requires. And we deprive them of a chance for public support if we force secrecy upon them.

I applaud those young women for going public. They didn’t talk about rape--they didn’t have to--but they told us about their plans to escape, the risks they took, the fear they felt, the strength they drew from one another.

And the only time they broke down and cried was when they recalled the death of their captor. “When you see a life taken right in front of your eyes ... it’s the worst feeling in the world.” And as the camera pulled back, I saw that they had linked arms and were holding on to one another.

Conventional thinking might dictate that the worst thing that happened to them is the one thing we don’t want to mention. But what I hear them saying is this:

We survived. Life goes on, and we are not about to hide. Secrecy doesn’t heal anybody.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.