When Bad Things Happen

On the front page of Last week's

Times we ran a story about a crime that was particularly awful. A man in Dayton is alleged to have repeat­edly raped his stepdaughter over a period of years. (That story ran next to an unrelated story about another awful crime: Another man in Dayton is accused of severely injur­ing an 11-month-old baby.)

We got a lot of reaction from the rape story. Some people told us we were wrong to make the story so prominent and include as much detail as we did. They were genu­inely concerned that our publicizing the story would make the victim's experience even worse than it already was.

In a small community like ours, they said, that article made it easy to figure out who the victim is, even though we didn't name her. At least we should have put the story somewhere other than the front page, and included fewer details.

I knew the story would be controversial when it ran, and I want to pass on some of the considerations I took into account at the time I prepared it:

This story (along with the one next to it)was by far the most important news of theweek in our area - short of killing a child,these are the most serious crimes againstchildren there are. I felt that justified theplacement we gave it.

I also feel it is important for stories likethis to have an impact, and for readers tohave a clear understanding of some of thereally bad things that happen around here.The impact would be lost if we minimizedthe story and reported no detail.

In the story I wrote, I left out about 98percent of the details that were includedin the police report. Some of them wereextremely graphic. I had to balance writ­ing a story that painted a strong picturewhile trying to avoid writing one that wasunnecessarily detailed. Others no doubtwould have struck a different balance thanI did.

In retrospect, I now feel I should have been more sensitive to the impact our story could have on the victim. Many people in our community already knew the details, but many others didn't. And some parents may have felt their kids learned about something they weren't prepared to deal with.

At the time, I felt that, as a journalist, it was incumbent upon me to report the name of the person arrested and his relationship with the victim. I've done some research since last week and learned that it's not so simple. Reporting sexual crimes against children is something journalists in bigger cities have been stressing about for years.

Though it's not a legal requirement, almost all newspapers have a policy of not naming the victim in a sexual assault, re­gardless of age. Some newspapers (though a minority) also have a policy of not naming a parent who is arrested for sexual assault of his or her child, to fully protect the victim's identity.

That is something we will definitely con­sider here at The Times, though I certainly hope it will be a very long time before we have to face that decision again.

If the victim's already horrible experi­ence has been made worse by the article we ran last week and exposure it created, I am sincerely sorry for that.