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A HEADLINE SUGGESTING that it is unusual for media outlets not to name suspects charged with rape is misleading.
It is standard practice for news outlets not to name rape suspects, even when they are charged, as naming such suspects is illegal under Irish law.
Even when people are convicted of sex crimes, they are often still not named by the media as this can still be illegal if it is likely that this would identify the victim.
This is to save the victim from further distress, though in rare cases victims have waived their anonymity and asked for the perpetrator to be named.
However, as a rule (literally a law), suspects who are accused of rape, but not yet convicted in a criminal trial, cannot be named.
“Strangely man (30s), charged with rape of elderly woman in Longford, doesn’t get named”, a 14 March headline on the site TheLiberal.ie reads.
The article reports on the case of an alleged attack on 25 February, at the victim’s home; the judge in the case ordered additional reporting restrictions to protect the victim’s identity.
Some comments under TheLiberal.ie’s post on Facebook indicated that there was a serious misunderstanding of why the accused was not named.
“If he was Irish they’d have his name all over the news. Two tiered police system indeed!!”, reads one comment.
“I’m guessing he is not irish otherwise his name a d address willb [sic] all over the news,” says another.
Even without these additional restrictions, the accused would not have been named in the media. This is standard as a matter of law.
The Criminal Law (Rape) Act of 1981, as amended, contains a section called Anonymity of Accused.
It begins: “After a person is charged with a rape offence, no matter likely to lead members of the public to identify him as the person against whom the charge is made shall be published in a written publication available to the public or be broadcast.”
In other words: media outlets cannot publish identifiable information about the suspect.
The rest of the section includes clarifications and exceptions, including removing the blanket ban on the suspect being named “after he has been convicted of the offence”.
However, these exceptions are unusual and must be granted by courts. Keeping a charged suspect anonymous is not “strange”; revealing their identity would be.
That same law also prevents victims from being identified, though the rules around this are different.
And, in the particular case mentioned in TheLiberal.ie’s article, the judge explicitly ordered reporting restrictions. These forbade reporting addresses, as that information could risk making the victim identifiable to the public.
How and when suspects are named is often misunderstood, and recent news stories may have added to the confusion.
For example, Irish news outlets covered one particularly high-profile sex crime case in Northern Ireland in 2018, where Irish legal restrictions on reporting did not apply.
Similarly, there has been a recent high-profile civil case against an Irish celebrity where sexual assault allegations were made. However, as this was a civil, not a criminal trial, the rules outlined in the amended Criminal Law (Rape) Act of 1981 did not apply.
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