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July 26, 2003To identify or not to identify?
When I last checked up on the Kobe Bryant rape case, the accuser’s anonymity had all the structural integrity of an old sieve. The woman’s age, place of employment and hometown were all common facts. One website even lists what musicals she had been in during high school, and what characters she portrayed in said musicals.
I’m understandably curious—as are many people, naturally—about this unknown woman whose allegation, whether ultimately verified or ultimately disproved, has made many people reevaluate how they feel about Kobe Bryant. Do we have any right to know her name, or what she looks like?
Previously, I would have sided with those who favor the alleged victim’s privacy without a second’s hesitance. Having given it some thought in the face of such heavy media coverage, though, I have to question my former stance.
The idea of letting an alleged victim retain her anonymity is rooted in the desire to prevent the trauma or shame that might ensue were the greater community made privy to her victimization. However, it seems that victimization—the presence of a victim—is one of the main criteria by which something is deemed illegal in the first place, and isn’t anything to which rape victims can make exclusive claim. Nobody feels particularly good about being mugged, carjacked, domestically abused, or defrauded, yet no special privacy provisions are made for the victims of these crimes.
Why do we do this? Is it a tenacious shred of gallantry in our collective psyche? Or an overcompensation we’d rather not admit—closing (and locking) the barn door after the horse has been stolen? Are men ashamed not to shield a rape victim’s identity, feeling that it was a collective laxity on their part that led to their chattel being despoiled in the first place? At the very least, it’s a courtesy come under suspicion for its specificity.
The problem can be summed up in one deceptively simple word: alleged. From when a person first puts forth their uncontested recollection of an event, up until the moment at which it hardens (for better or for worse) into legal, jury-concluded fact, it is alleged. In granting privacy to the accuser and not to the accused, the media treats a rape allegation as if it were a fetus of sorts—something not yet proven, perhaps, but the validation of which is inevitable. That’s a huge concession we’re granting the alleged victim in a legal system that, if anything, was designed to protect the accused.
In every rape case, there is a wrongdoer and there is a victim. In granting the right of privacy to only one of the parties involved, a tacit judgment is being passed on the innocence of the accused. It assumes that the wrongdoer is always the man and the victim is always the woman—a misguided leap of faith that cannot coexist with the tenet of “innocent until proven guilty.”
Posted by patrick at July 26, 2003 03:31 AM
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