Comments (20)

There is a balance that must be achieved, and your article seems to miss the point. As was pointed out in an earlier comment using the term alleged is proper to avoid libel. You assert that the paper should just say she was raped, but clearly if the officer is innocent until proven guilty saying she was raped does not match with being innocent until proven guilty. You can believe a victim 100% as I hope those around her are doing in order to support her through what must be an incredibly difficult time. However, believing someone 100% means nothing to whether or not the former officer is guilty in a court of law beyond reasonable doubt. So, thank you for supporting the alleged victim and believing her, but to cast stones at a news agency for proper journalistic coverage is quite a bit beyond your scope of knowledge there in the dental school.

Wow, I never expected this letter to get this much attention. I have received a couple e-mails asking for further comment already, at least one of which was from an individual from out-of-state.

I will readily acknowledge that I am not expert on journalism or the proper standards for reporting about rape. If am wrong, then I apologize to the author of the original article and the editors of the Chronicle. However, based on my limited knowledge, if it is proper journalistic style to refer to all crimes as "alleged" crimes until a person is convicted in a court of law, then it seems like this standard has not been applied consistently. I did a very quick search of the archives of the Chronicle, and I found the following articles about some recent robbery cases:

http://dukechronicle.com/article/freshman-describes-robbery-%E2%80%98-su...
http://dukechronicle.com/node/134902
http://dukechronicle.com/node/148194
http://dukechronicle.com/node/149080

I cannot find the word "alleged" in any of these four articles. The articles use language like, "a student was robbed at gunpoint Thursday night," "a female employee was robbed at a parking garage," "a senior was robbed at gunpoint two blocks from East Campus," "DUPD is investigating the attempted robbery," "Student Affairs has contacted the freshman who was robbed," "DPD will investigate the robbery," etc. Presumably the only evidence the police had that these students were robbed were the student's own testimonies... Why is that when a student is robbed, we say, "The student was robbed," and "DPD is investigating the robbery," but when a woman is bound and gagged, we call it an "alleged assault," and say the police are investigating the "alleged rape"? From the perspective of someone myself who does not know very much about journalistic ethics, it seems like different language is being used to describe rape victims than victims of other crimes. If there is a good explanation for this, I would be interested to hear it.

The letter and the comments all make good points and I am glad there is a civil debate going on here. I don't know the answer but I appreciate the discussion.

There was a recent report of a robbery that turned out to be fabricated, right here at Duke, for what it's worth.

Well, the claim that false rape allegations are more common than false robbery accusations is at best questionable. Here is a Slate article on the subject:

http://www.slate.com/id/2231012/

Bottom line is that it is almost impossible to know exactly what percentage of rape allegations are false, but the best estimate is that it is probably around 8-10%. And there is even less research on what percentage of robbery allegations (or other criminal allegations) are false. (It may be somewhat than the percentage of false rape allegations, but it does not appear to be drastically lower.)

Moreover, the article notes that around 60% of rapes go unreported. I have worked with survivors of sexual violence myself, and one of the biggest reasons that these women are hesitant to report rape is because of fear that they will not be believed. I have very serious concerns about a policy that basically assumes that the testimony of rape victims is less reliable than the testimony of robbery victims or victims of other crimes. Reporting a rape is already an extremely frightening experience for many rape victims, and when the campus newspaper seems to assume that rape reports are less credible than reports of other crimes, it will only exacerbate the situation.

Granted, the point that even a false rape accusation can ruin someone's reputation/life is well taken. I am not sure the best way to handle such a situation. Personally, I would be perfectly comfortable referring a rape report as a "rape" if there is overwhelming physical evidence of rape (as there seems to be in this case), although I would definitely include the word "alleged" whenever the defendant was involved. ("The defendant was allegedly at the bar with the woman before he allegedly took her home and raped her.") But perhaps a better standard would be to simply refer to all crimes in newspaper reports as "alleged" crimes until someone is convicted. I do not claim to be an expert on journalistic ethics, so I am not sure what the right answer is in this case. However, I definitely would take issue with a policy that refers to robbery as "robbery" but rape as "alleged rape," even in cases where there is (apparently) more physical evidence to support the rape allegation than the robbery allegations.

I speculate that the underlying cause of Eric Blair's comment has less to do with outright indignation over the use of the word alleged and more to do with a desire to see Duke less cautious when it comes to dealing with rape charges.

Supposedly the Rumney study (mentioned in the Slate article I cited) concluded that the McDowell study mentioned had some serious methodological problems and was not credible. I couldn't find a copy of the Rumney article either online nor in the library so I can't verify that claim, much less say what problems he found in the McDowell study. In any event, Rumney reviewed a large number of different studies on this subject and concluded that the most credible studies pointed to a figure of about 8-10%. That is consistent with an earlier study by Margaret DiCanio, who also reviewed a wide variety of sources and reported that around 2-8% of rape accusations are false (DiCanio (1993). Encyclopedia of Violence: Origins, Attitudes, Consequences). Sure, there is a great deal of uncertainty in these estimates. However, given that there is even more uncertainty about how often people make false accusations of other crimes, claiming that rape allegations are more likely to be false seems highly dubious at best.

In any event, it is beside the point. I recognize the fact that when any sort of crime is committed, protecting the rights of both the accuser and the accused is a very tricky balancing act. And it is especially tricky in rape cases, given that they often to boil down to one person's testimony against the other's and since false accusations can be extremely damaging even if the person is ultimately acquitted. I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, and I definitely do agree that men should not have to fear being punished for false rape accusations any more than women should fear having a legitimate rape allegation unfairly dismissed.

However, in spite of everything I said in the previous paragraph, I still fail to understand why a newspaper would want to refer to rape as "alleged rape" but can still call robbery just "robbery." Isn't there a way to protect the rights of the accused without suggesting that anyone who files a rape allegation is a liar until proven otherwise? If you want to call all crimes "alleged" until they are proven in court, fine, but don't tack "alleged" on to some crimes but not others. I simply can't see the justification for that unless you assume that people who allege rape are more likely to be lying than victims of other crimes, and I simply haven't seen any credible evidence to support that claim.

(And for the record, I actually think that the idea of not reporting the name of a person accused of rape or child abuse or other "heinous" crimes is a decent one, provided that they posed no imminent threat to public safety. However, given that arrest records are public, I doubt that idea would work in practice.)

Well, first of all, I did another quick search of the Chronicle archives and quickly found two other articles where suspects were named by name but the word "alleged" was not used to describe the crimes they committed:

http://dukechronicle.com/node/146378
http://dukechronicle.com/node/149391

And for the record, the suspect in the second case was accused of trying to have sex with a 5-year-old boy. From my point of view, if you want to talk about charges that can damage a person's reputation, it can't get much worse than that. But the article never uses the word "alleged"; it simply says, "Lombard also offered to allow the undercover officer to watch him perform sexual acts on the child via ICUii and fly to Lombard's home to have sex with the child himself." So when someone is accused of rape, we need to remind people multiple times that it is only an "alleged rape," since we wouldn't want to hurt the reputation of an innocent person, but if someone is accused of having sex with a five-year-old boy, then no such caveats are needed?

Like I said, I understand that this is a difficult question. It isn't obvious how one should report on these sort of crimes in a way that is fair to both the accused and the accuser. My concern, however, is that if any such standards exist here, it seems that they are being applied very inconsistently. As I said before, if you want to call all crimes "alleged" until a person is convicted, fine, but please don't do that for some crimes but not others. Especially if the crime is rape, where fear of not being believed already deters many victims from reporting it.

If you don't believe that some women are deterred from reporting rape due to fear of not being believed, then you probably haven't known many rape victims. I think every rape victim I have known expressed that fear to some degree or another. Granted, I have no idea how reliable the statistics are in this area, but just personal anecdotal evidence suggests that this is a very common issue.

And I would agree that there are very few instances where public safety would be threatened by not releasing the name of a person accused of a crime. The bigger issue, as I said, is the fact that arrest records are public. Even if a newspaper didn't publish the name of the person who was arrested one could easily figure out their name by making a trip to the police department. (In fact, these records are available online in many jurisdictions.)

Well, as a statistician, I do think I am qualified to say that gathering reliable statistics on this sort of thing is a very difficult challenge. How does one estimate the proportion of rape allegations that are false, given that nobody really knows for sure if an allegation is false other than the accuser and the accused? And figuring out what percentage of rapes go unreported is an even bigger challenge, since there is no obvious way to sample from the population of rape victims. My understanding is that these numbers are based on interviews at rape crisis centers or emergency rooms- they see how many women at these centers end up reporting the crime to the police. If anything, that is likely to underestimate the number of unreported rapes, since some victims will never even go to a rape crisis center.

In any event, the source for the "60% of rapes go unreported" statistic is the Department of Justice:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/ncvrw/2005/pg5o.html

I don't know the details of their methodology, but I think most would agree that the DOJ is not a radical feminist group that would try to inflate the numbers to support its political agenda.

And to answer your question, I have known at least 7-8 victims of rape/sexual assault personally, and I have met several others through a few volunteer organizations. (And for the record, one of the victims I knew was male.) In most cases, they simply told me about something that happened many years in the past, but in a few cases it was a recent occurrence. I don't want to provide any more detail than that, since I am signing these posts with my real name and I am not sure these people want me to talk about it in a public forum.

Also, I am cognizant of the fact that the rights of the accused must also be protected, but I am not sure that simply withholding the names of the accused is necessarily the answer, either. Would you want to allow Kobe Bryant to be alone with your teenage daughter? Would you be concerned if she started dating O.J. Simpson? The fact that a person is acquitted of a crime does not always mean that they were, in fact, innocent. I probably would not want to hire a babysitter who had been arrested for molesting children even if the charges were eventually dropped or if they accepted a plea agreement. Does this mean that some innocent people have to explain rape or child abuse charges for which they were wrongly arrested? Probably. Like I said, it is a difficult question, I do not claim to have all the answers. But simply withholding the name of the accused creates a number of problems as well.