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Although few favor mandatory disclosure, there seems to be an emerging consensus that women should be encouraged to admit that they have been victims of a form of assault for which they need bear no guilt. "There's still a tendency to blame the victim," says Sarah Burns, of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. To help demythologize the crime, some prominent women have openly acknowledged that they were victims of sexual assault. In a law-review article, Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis' campaign manager, admitted she had been raped. So did actress Kelly McGillis, co-star of The Accused, a grimly realistic film based loosely on the 1983 gang rape of a woman in a New Bedford, Mass., bar.
Deni Elliott, director of Dartmouth's Ethics Institute, contends that "ultimately we're doing women a disservice by separating rape from other violent crimes." A celebrated case in point is that of the Central Park jogger, three of whose alleged assaulters go on trial this month. Because she was raped, newspapers and TV stations have generally refrained from using her name. "If she had merely been beaten and left for dead," Elliott notes, "she would have been named." One journal that did name the jogger was the black-oriented Amsterdam News. Editor in chief Wilbert Tatum argues that the city's mainstream press is guilty of hypocrisy for guarding the identity of a well-to-do white woman while it "stigmatized" the lower-class black youths accused of raping her by naming them even before they were indicted.
There are, of course, dissenters from the idea of greater disclosure. Los Angeles psychotherapist Nancy Kless, who specializes in treating crime ( victims, contends that the "secondary injury" of being named can impede patients' recovery. Irene Nolan, managing editor of the Louisville Courier- Journal, wishes her paper could name rape victims but concedes that such a move might deter some women from reporting assaults to police. "I would like to change the paper's policy, but I don't think our community is ready for it," says Nolan.
In an imperfect world, rights inevitably conflict. There can never be an absolute way of determining whether the press's right to the truth has priority over a citizen's right to privacy. In the case of rape, it may be that the traditional policy of reticence, even if quaintly motivated, still makes sense. Many women applaud Ziegenmeyer's courage. Not every rape victim can be expected to possess it.