Innocent Until Named?

To name or not to name?

That is today’s crime-reporting question that applies to accused sexual predators as well as to victims and alleged victims.

In Los Angeles this week, for example, a teacher at a summer camp for young children was jailed because of allegations he sexually abused two 4-year-old boys. He faces arraignment, at which he may be formally charged. If he is, a preliminary hearing will determine if there is enough evidence for him to go to trial.

The story was reported on local TV with the man’s name and picture. The boys were not identified. Names of minors, either victims or suspects, are rarely reported in such cases. Alleged adult victims of sexual abuse are also not identified unless they give permission.

I say “alleged� victims, by the way, after earning a PhD in circumspection from witnessing the suffering McMartins in the 1980s, learning that sexual abuse allegations are not necessarily true even when made sincerely by innocent tykes at a Manhattan Beach day-care center.

Look, child molesters are sick scum who deserve severe punishment. So if the evidence supports this guy’s guilt, he should be tried, and if convicted, he should be imprisoned for the max. Stringing him up by his toes and smacking him as if he were a pinata wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

And if he is not guilty? Oh, that. Don’t bother us with minutiae.

Thanks to media coverage, he’ll take a big hit even if he is innocent. Should the case be thrown out for lack of evidence, for example, the man still would be stamped indelibly as a fiend and danger to every kid within range. Naming him publicly--and beaming his photo to the multitudes--has already ended his career in camp work and possibly ruined his life forever.

No caring parent would entrust a child to someone who had been accused of sexual abuse or want him even passing through the neighborhood. Sending him home a free man would not erase the lingering scent of guilt.

The naming issue roared to the surface earlier with the recent abduction of Antelope Valley teenagers Tamara Brooks and Jacqueline Marris. Before they got lucky--when their armed captor, Roy Ratliff, was gunned down by Kern County sheriff’s deputies--they got famous.

Their photos were run and names bannered on TV and in newspapers (one exception being The Times) before Kern County’s sheriff said they had been raped. That disclosure brought media hand-wringing: Should names already made public now be rebottled for the girls’ protection?

That became moot when both, along with their parents, were chatted up by Katie Couric on NBC’s “Today� program. So much for anonymity.

A free-for-all over booking them on TV had kicked in like a barroom brawl where everyone cracks everyone else over the head with a chair or whiskey bottle. But it wasn’t “Today� that duct-taped and stole Tamara and Jacqueline, nor were their parents ordered to sign on for the Couric gig.

And good for all of them, too. Why should these girls hide as if getting raped were their crime? Although they declined to tell Couric (who asked gently) how they were treated physically by Ratliff, they have no cause for shame. Why shouldn’t they be as open about their sexual assaults--if that would be their choice--as about the rest of their nightmarish ordeal? Why not feel comfortable telling all, as victims of other crimes usually do?

“What’s the difference between rape and being shot and being stabbed?� asks Karen Pomer, a friend of mine who was raped by a stranger in Santa Monica in 1995. “During rape a penis is being used as a weapon of violence. My insides were completely torn up.�

The difference looms big in the media’s theater of the absurd, where a female whose breast was fondled by a sexual predator likely would not be identified, though she would be if her breast were stabbed by a mugger.

A recent story in The Times said the abduction “may force the media to reexamine their long-standing policies of withholding the names of sexual assault victims.�

If so, swell plan.

Consider the hoops jumped through to grant anonymity to alleged victims in the past, the most absurd being an electronic blue dot hiding the face of accuser Patricia Bowman in the 1991 televised rape trial of William Kennedy Smith.

How loopy was this? Bowman’s face was shielded from viewers. Yet she wore no blue dot when testifying in the courtroom and was seen by the public as she entered and left. And after Smith was acquitted, she went full-face to the planet while making the media rounds.

There’s compassionate logic to the argument that coming out about rape should be entirely the victim’s call, not the media’s. Also true is that outing victims may stop others from coming forward with charges out of fear of publicity.

But that fear exists only because of a stigma still attached to rape, one that would fade were there more openness.

What of the stated media concern that disclosing these names would violate the privacy of victims? That’s choice when it comes to TV, given how cavalierly its “caught on tape� crowd invades other privacy zones in the name of the public’s right to know.

In fact, withholding victims’ names nourishes the unfair taint of disgrace that surrounds victims. We’re self-appointed Big Daddies here, patting them on the head and saying, in effect, “We’ll hide you because you’ve been naughty.�

Says Pomer: “If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what I was wearing the night I was raped, I’d be retired.� She says she went public with her rape at a police press conference a few months later, after learning her attacker had struck again just blocks away, victimizing an 83-year-old woman. “I felt I was doing a public service by putting a name on rape statistics. Besides, what did I do? I didn’t want society to shame me for something I had no reason to be ashamed of.�

However this Name the Victim conundrum plays out, let’s have fairness.

What about also rethinking, too, the media policy of automatically reporting the names of adult suspects? In sexual abuse and assault cases for starters, the possible exceptions could be charges against priests in a scandal that appears too vast and incestuous to grant accused churchmen anonymity.

In principle, though, it’s unfair to hold back the names of accusers while shouting out names of the accused. These people are dragged through the mud without thought about what awaits them if they are not guilty, never tried or never even officially charged. Which does happen occasionally, authorities say.

Take Patrick Gillan, the San Marino High School girls’ basketball coach whose arrest on suspicion of molesting one of his players was announced by grandstanding cops at a City Hall press conference in December and reported in this paper and on local TV. The smear had already thickened when Gillan’s case ended less than two months later, and the district attorney’s office cited insufficient evidence in deciding not to file charges. Gillan later sued San Marino and its Police Department.

His beef should be with the media, too.

Our small-screen culture, in particular, is corroded by such excess, as suspects in even the tiniest of cases earn high wattage from the camera, especially when handcuffed and led off by cops.

Perhaps they’re guilty; perhaps not. It doesn’t matter, though, as long as they’re good TV.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at [email protected].