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Tuesday, September 25, 2001
By Barbara White Stack, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The stories the public hears are the horrific ones: A mother throws a newborn from a car. A father scalds a toddler who won't stop screaming.
Privacy advocates point to such cases and ask: Do those parents get to plead their sides in the news media and expose their little victims to publicity?
But the fact is, whether parents go to the media or not, their victims become the subjects of stories and broadcasts. When charges are filed against abusive parents, the information in the police complaints and criminal trials is open to the public.
How the media handle the identification of the children in those cases varies.
In Chicago, which has a century-old tradition of open courts, names of children are virtually never published or broadcast. When 7- and 8-year-old boys were accused -- falsely -- by police in 1998 of molesting and killing an 11-year-old girl, the Chicago media did not use names. Similarly, four years earlier, the media had withheld the names of 11- and 12-year-old boys who dropped a 5-year-old boy to his death from a high-rise.
In other places, names and photos are routinely used. Papers in New York name famous children when they show up in family court, from Macaulay Culkin to Malcolm Shabazz. And they frequently name uncelebrated children, from the 4-year-old boy abandoned by his 19-year-old mother at a Brooklyn Toys R Us to the 7-year-old boy left in Madison Square Park by his Russian immigrant mother.
In New Mexico, editors at the Albuquerque Tribune insist on true identities. That's why reporter Susie Gran used the name of a 3-year-old taken from her parents when the child's excessive weight threatened her health.
"It gives us credibility," Gran says. "This is a real person with a name and an age. It is not Carla T., who did not want her real name used. I do not believe those stories the same as I do about a real person. Anamarie Martinez-Regino, 3, of Albuquerque -- that is a real person."
Albuquerque Juvenile Court Judge Michael Martinez agrees that names give stories impact.
"A case doesn't mean much to anyone in a vacuum," he says. "It must be real for people to get attention. It must not be, 'This happened to some kid from some place.' It must be, 'Mike Martinez was hurt and his father did it.' "
Other judges aren't so sure. They point out that newspapers don't name sexual assault victims, and it's not clear that readers disbelieve those stories. Judges in Florida and Iowa, where juvenile court hearings are open, say they routinely ask reporters not to use names, and most don't.
Daniel Dawson, a juvenile judge in Orange and Ocella counties in Florida, recounted a case in which a newspaper named a man who'd been accused of sexually assaulting a stepchild. That, of course, identified the child to many people.
But, he says, most papers are more careful, and he cautions reporters about the consequences if names and pictures are used.
Florida lawyer Christene Zawisza, director of the Children First Project at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, remembers a case in which a teen-age client permitted a newspaper to use her name, then regretted it.
Still, Zawisza continues to support the system in Florida that is so open that cameras may film in juvenile courtrooms.
"The newspapers in Florida have played an exceptional watchdog function and caused many significant changes in child welfare, and that is because they have had access to this stuff," she says.
Unlike her young client, many of those named have no regrets.
Adoptive parents Sue Luebbert and Chris Hill of Pittsburgh and Valerie McDaniel of southern Michigan are among them.
Luebbert, who adopted her foster son, knows of no repercussions after the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette used her family members' names for a week. Children were not interested in the stories, and adults who read them gave her son positive feedback.
"From his point of view and from our point of view, there was less reaction than we were afraid would happen," Luebbert says.
McDaniel allowed Jack Kresnak of the Detroit Free Press to use her adopted children's names in stories about the failure of the child welfare system to intervene before their birth parents killed a sibling. She says no one has said anything to the children, who are 8, 4 and 2, and she doubts anyone will.
"I don't think anyone would be cruel about it," McDaniel says.