The worst, kept secret...

Where did you first encounter the lacrosse accuser's real name? Were you searching yahoo.com, which indexes 89,500 websites containing her first, middle and last names? Or perhaps you stumbled upon the alleged victim's 2,000-word Wikipedia biography, complete with her name, military service record and educational history. Dilby.com hosts the woman's last known home address, voter registration information, a detailed criminal record, and even the names and ages of possible relatives. And if you'd like to know what she looks like, blogger Mike McCusker recently posted photos from the woman's high school yearbook on his blog along with stills of her face from a police video.

But no matter where you first learned the complainant's name, it's everywhere these days. I have personally heard it spoken on MSNBC and the Fox News Channel, seen it in case documents (which are also matters of public record) posted on defense attorney Kirk Osborn's website, and it even appears in article comments and message board posts scattered throughout The Chronicle's online edition.

In fact, the pages of newspapers like this one are among the only places you won't find the accuser's name. Why is that? Well, most editors will tell you that reputable newspapers have not printed the names of alleged sex crime victims since the 1970s. This policy is meant to shield victims from the social stigma associated with rape and sexual assault, and it also aims to encourage the reporting of sex crimes. Although few would disagree that this policy isn't especially fair to defendants, whose names are disclosed, we live in a society where up to 84 percent of rape survivors never notify authorities and nine out of 10 victims indicate that they would have been "less likely" to report rapes if they knew their name would be published by the news media. That is a powerful justification.

And yet cases like Duke lacrosse force us to confront the other side of those statistics: the uncomfortable reality that some reports of sex crimes aren't true. Is it really fair, then, to withhold the lacrosse accuser's name when the three defendants have had their mugshots splayed across magazine covers? Her multiple stories have been riddled with lies and inconsistencies, and few at this juncture believe she could have been raped by Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann and Dave Evans. So what happens when the players are legally exonerated, as we all fully expect that they will be?

Tom Vaden, the public editor for The Raleigh News & Observer, offered a disturbing answer to those questions in a Jan. 28 column. There Vaden noted that not only will his newspaper continue to withhold the accuser's name, but that he expects editors to do so even after charges are dropped or dismissed. This, he said, is necessary to assure "future victims that they can report a crime without wider exposure, even if the case goes against them." Vaden also noted that the "justification [after charges are dropped] for naming the accuser is punitive, which is not the business of newspapers."

While Vaden's obvious concern for rape victims is laudable, his position takes an otherwise-justifiable double standard to an almost frightening extreme. For one thing, there is no especially compelling reason to believe that printing the names of false accusers will keep future victims from reporting rapes; there is, however, evidence to suggest that false rape allegations are much more common than many people are aware, and that the media's policies may even create a perverse incentive to cry rape.

Indeed, the FBI estimates that 9 percent of rape claims are "unfounded"-defined as dismissed with no charges filed: this is several times the 2-percent rate often quoted by the media. Much more disturbing were the results of a study conducted by Eugene Kanin, professor of sociology at Purdue University, which found that 41 percent of rapes reported in an unnamed Midwestern town over a 9-year period were ultimately retracted by complainants. In a secondary study that has disturbing implications for campuses like this one, Kanin found that fully 50 percent of rape claims at two unnamed "large, public universities," were eventually recanted.

Consider then, the case of the Duke student who claimed she was raped in a Randolph dormitory bathroom in 2002, and then again on the edge of the Duke Forest in 2004; although that young woman later admitted the allegations were false (and acknowledged she's not a rape victim), her name was never printed in The Chronicle-and specifically because she chose rape, and not any other crime, for her spurious allegations.