Recently, the line between public and private has increasingly been of great interest to me (which, I suppose would happen when one’s been reading Jürgen Habermas and Iris Marion Young and writing about public spheres and discourse). Today I read this article in San Mateo County’s Daily Journal. A woman was sexually on the Notre Dame de Namur University campus in Belmont, and an article was running in the student newspaper, The Argonaut. Evidently, someone took 500 copies of the student paper early in the morning, cut out the article, and returned the papers to their original place:
A front page article about the sexual assault appeared on the front page of this week’s student newspaper, The Argonaut. The paper was distributed Thursday and sometime before Friday morning nearly 500 copies of the paper showed up with the article snipped out. The papers were apparently stolen, vandalized and returned to the display boxes, said Editor Emeritus Erik Oeverndiek.
When I first read this, I immediately thought that it was some reactionary response by men as a protest against sexual assault awareness.
But lo, the case becomes more interesting. Officials suspect that it is a victim’s friend who is responsible, in an attempt to protect her friend’s identity in a small campus where it’s very easy for everyone to know everyone’s business.
This raises a lot of issues (that have often been raised) about the publicity of sexual assault victims and protecting their identity. Because the stigma around being sexually assaulted or raped (which is ridiculous since there is no stigma around, say, being a victim of theft), the protection of sexual assault victim identities is vitally important. However, we must also be considerate of transparency in policing matters (they must be open about crimes they are reporting), and of the need to be public about sexual assault and raise awareness.
