This is a tough one

Hmmm... Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory has an interesting piece up examining Naomi Wolf's argument in the U.K. Guardian that rape victims shouldn't be anonymous in media reports. (And now, a reaction to a reaction of the source document. Ah, the Internet.) It's standard journalistic practice not to print the names of alleged rape victims (though it's ignored plenty of times), and Wolf thinks this is a vestige of a time when rape victims had to be protected because they'd be considered "damaged goods."

First of all, I'd be a lot more inclined to hear Wolf out if she'd published this six months ago. But today, her opinion can't be divorced from her earlier published opinion that Julian Assange's two accusers are lying about him raping them. Is she really struggling over the ethics of this, or is she just trying to justify her own reaction to the Assange case?

Second, it's true that rape is treated differently from any other crime ---- usually to the detriment of the accusers, though. Mugging victims aren't asked what they were wearing, for instance. Someone whose car radio gets stolen isn't blamed for parking on the street in a bad neighborhood. It seems kind of BS to expect rape and sexual assault victims to bear the burden of unpacking all the puritanical baggage surrounding this crime.

This is a tough one for me, as a feminist who fully understands the patriarchal dimensions of rape culture, as a rape survivor and as someone who's had more than one male acquaintance falsely accused of rape or abuse. Is it fair for a man charged with rape to have his name, address and occupation reported in screaming headlines, even though he may be perfectly innocent? Even when and if he's exonerated, his life will never be the same.

At the same time, I can assure you from personal experience that I would've been less likely to report what happened to me if I'd known that my name might've been made public. (But only if the Commonwealth Attorney had deigned to bring charges. Ha. I should've known better.) It didn't help that the guy was a literal Big Man on Campus, or that his family are minor deities in the jurisdiction where the crime occured and in his father's professional field. I've worked with the media long enough to know just how big THAT story would've gotten, believe me.

And, with everything else I was going through, just trying to function on a daily basis, I'm not sure I would've reported it if I knew I'd see my name in the paper. Or that all my co-workers, people I see three times a year volunteering for something or people I meet professionally years later will know every detail of what happened.

Is it crazy to suggest that the names of both the accuser and accused be kept private until a rape case goes to trial (which they almost never do anyway)? Is that even possible with our legal system? I don't know. But I do know that you shouldn't throw out all the rules because of one instance (ahem, Naomi). RAINN estimates that someone is sexually assaulted every two minutes in the U.S. None of them by Julian Assange.