The following is an excerpt from an email discussion from a concerned reader this week:
Hello,
I'm writing due to concern over the details that the PG Citizen is including when they report of cases that include sexual assault.
Most recently, the January 19 story "Man jailed for savage attack on woman in park," as well as a story from last week about a man sentenced for assaulting a young girl who then underwent an abortion, are both examples of tactless reporting thatcontain details that are not necessary for the general public to know and that, I believe, would only serve to embarrass and violate the victims even further by making the details public.
This reporting seems crude and entirely inappropriate for a small city paper.
Thank you for your consideration in this matter. I truly value being informed when/where such incidents are taking place in our city but there are limits, if only out of respect for the victims.
-- Sincerely, D.
Hi, D.
Thanks for writing.
Whether it's cases like this or Cody Legebokoff or anything in between, we struggle with the nature of this reporting.
We certainly don't wake up in the morning wanting to tell these kinds of stories but we do want to make a positive difference in the community, at an individual and social level.
With that in mind, we feel a responsibility to report honestly and thoroughly about what is going on in our courts to the community at large.
What some people call tactless or crude is what happened to these individuals. Some victims of these crimes are very unhappy that their trauma is in the public light but many of them want the world to know what was done to them and why the person who attacked them is deserving of the sentence they received and why they maybe deserved much more.
So, as strange as that may sound, it is out of respect to the victims that we don't gloss over or sanitize what happened to them because to do so would downplay and trivialize their suffering.
Perhaps I'm being nave and optimistic but I believe one way to help prevent crimes like this in the future is to acknowledge their existence,
fearlessly, accurately and publicly.
To not do so is to make that lady, that young girl and all victims of violent and sex crimes invisible, to tell them that the world doesn't care about what they went through because it might upset someone reading about it over their morning coffee.
We do our best to alert our readers that the content of the story may be troubling - savage attack on woman in park - but perhaps we should be putting warnings on stories as well.
-- Sincerely, Neil Godbout
Hello Neil,
I value hearing your perspectives and will continue to think it through.
I do acknowledge your points have validity but I'm not sure that they are more important than respecting people's privacy in a world that, more and more, seems to think that everything is everyone's business.
If I were the victim, my personal choice would be to not have so much detail published and out there. I think that stating that the attack was 'savage' and a 'sexual assault' should be enough. Do reporters ask victims for permission to publish the details of crimes committed against them?
Thank you for your patience. I know it is easy to misread the tone of an email; please accept that my comments are not meant to be critical
towards you or the reporters and queries are out of genuine caring and wondering if the details are really of value to the public.
-- Sincerely, D.
Hi, D.
We don't ask victims for their permission to publish because there is no privacy violation on our part - the details are heard in an open court and all of these details become part of the sentencing reports published online by the courts.
We naturally have to follow the rules regarding publication bans ordered by judges and we identify these bans and what is covered under those bans when reporting those cases.
I didn't perceive a tone in your email at all (compared to some that I receive!).
In all cases, the person contacting me cares enough about the situation to reach out to me and that's the important thing, regardless of whether we agree, in full, in part or not at all.
-- Sincerely, Neil Godbout
