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By
Gary Gilson
Spring 1994
It's
happening all over Minnesota, all over America. It hurts. The question
is: Can it be prevented?
In
April, the Waconia Patriot published a story about a local man being
charged with sexual abuse of a minor. Not only did the story describe
his alleged offenses in extraordinarily graphic detail, but it also
identified the alleged victim as his 17-year-old daughter. She told
authorities he had abused her since she was eight. She has been
living in a foster home for the past three years.
The
day after publication, a Carver County social worker, Charles Meyer,
called the News Council to complain on the girl's behalf: "The
fact that the paper identified this girl means she faces having
to transfer out of her high school and move out of her foster home,
where she has just experienced the three most stable years of her
life."
How
could the paper have made this identification?
Meyer
found out when he called the associate publisher, Bob Ackerwold.
Ackerwold apologized, Meyer said, and offered an explanation that
he later repeated to the News Council staff: "I was out of
the office when this story moved. All stories that include such
controversial material as sex abuse or suicide have to get my approval.
This should never have gotten into the paper. I'd like my staff
to get some sensitivity training."
The
day after the story appeared, Patriot Editor Keith Anderson apologized
to the girl, to her foster parents and to the school superintendent,
Rick Dressen. Ackerwold expressed concern about public reaction
to the story and to the Patriot, and he lamented that a full week
would pass before the next issue would come out and provide an outlet
for a public apology. So he was busy the day after publication sending
memos around town explaining what had happened and assuring people
it would not happen again.
Dressen
said both Ackerwold and Anderson, in phone conversations with him,
had held themselves accountable. But he said the newspaper ought
to go further.
"They
can demonstrate good faith by recognizing that there's a way to
do more than say you're sorry. They may have to provide some dollars
to pay for counseling for the girl, and they can serve as a model
to our community by going through sensitivity training. That would
be really positive."
Dressen
described to the News Council staff just what kind of price a youngster
has to pay when such a story appears: "Say a kid has been experiencing
sexual abuse and thinks it was her problem. She can't talk about
it. She's into heavy denial. She has low self-esteem. She's shy,
she doesn't reach out to kids to share her feelings, she lies to
social workers. She's afraid of losing whatever roots she has, knowing
that she may have to leave her foster home because living in this
community is no longer possible.
"What
you have to understand is that, at the age of kids like this, peers
are what it's all about. An abused kid doesn't come to school prepared
to learn that her peers have read about her secret in the paper.
It's humiliating. Her self-esteem is shattered. She's made to feel
blame. Some kids mock her; few have the ability to reach out and
tell her how sorry they feel for her."
Meyer
wasn't sure how or whether the pieces of this girl's life could
be reassembled: "She's tough. She says she may want to try
to stay in the same school. I don't know yet how it will go."
A
similar story appeared recently in the Aikin Independent Age. It
did not identify the alleged victim, but the circumstances in the
report left no doubt about her identity. Her mother called the paper
and the News Council and all agreed that a public hearing might
hurt the girl more. Editor Ann Schwartz said she did not know the
girl's relationship to the alleged offender, and if she had, she
probably would have written it differently. She said she was sorry
and added this: "I feel all alone out here. We could use some
guidelines on touchy stories like this."
Schwartz
said she has decided to make references to victims as vague as possible,
"But in a small town, no matter how vague we try to be, if
we name the alleged perpetrator we're almost identifying the victim."
Pioneer
Press managing editor Mindi Keirnan has decided that in some cases
stories will not name the alleged perpetrator, Keirnan says some
of her staff disagree, but she's determined not to add to the harm
of the crime.
The
superb new SDX/SPJ handbook Doing Ethics in Journalism urges three
guiding principles:
Seek
truth and report it as fully as possible.
Act
independently.
Minimize
harm.
In
sex-abuse stories, the first and third principles often conflict
with each other. no one said this work was easy.
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