Ratheesh Kaliyadan
Rape reporting becomes a universal phenomena among Indian media. Everyday you have multiples of rape reports! What happens is whenever such reports appear in media, the amount of rape reporting is increasing. Unfortunately our mediavists forget to keep ethical notions regarding the victims and their life.
Privacy is the paramount issue in reporting rape cases. The controversy ranges from whether to name the victim to how to handle the accused one’s right to be presumed innocent. The media coverage on a sex crime, whether as the victim or as the accused, is to be opened up to merciless exposure of one’s past, one’s personality, and particularly one’s sex life. That is the way things stand today. “Why should the media treat the victim in the same way as the accused? Why should the media scrutinize her private life and personality? The victim committed no crime: it is not a crime to walk into one’s home, to jog in a park, to walk with a man on a beach, to go on a date, to pick up someone in a bar, nor is it even a crime to go to bed with someone other people might consider dangerous”.
Unfortunately this is what happens even today while our scribes try to expose the crime. The mediavist’s eagerness and competition leads to such a phase of reporting. Remember the slogan: “rape is not sex, it is violence.” The phrase coined from the first rape speak-outs of the early 1970s. The ethical question should be raised in the narrow paths of media houses. It’s the duty of mediavists to rectify the ongoing unethical practices in reporting sex crimes. Stop immediately focusing on the private lives and personalities of survivors and victims’ in sex crimes. Raise the real questions: why rape, incest, sexual assault, and harassment happen at all to find out the reasons.
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