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To Eliminate the Stigma of Being Raped
March 4, 2004

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132391&page=1#.T_C9N44gsSo

Bridget Kelly, 26, was kidnapped by a stranger, robbed, raped, shot repeatedly and left for dead. When she learned the rape was considered too shameful to mention in media accounts, she wanted to tell her whole story. So she enlisted the help of a newspaper columnist — her own father.

[...]

As he stood at her bedside, he told his daughter the man who had raped and shot her had been caught. Her attacker had come back to the scene to show friends what he had done. Police saw him in her stolen car and pursued him.

And Michael told Bridget his paper would cover the story of the attack. She wrote in his notebook, “Say rape?” Kelly said no. “The policy of our paper, and most organizations, was not to link the name of a victim with rape,” he told Gibson.

But that policy made no sense to Bridget, who, when she could talk, urged her dad to help change it. “I said, ‘Well, why is it more shameful to be a rape victim than a gunshot victim?’ “ she asked.

“At that time I was just thinking, ‘That’s kind of a significant detail to leave out!’ “ Bridget said. “I didn’t get why they wouldn’t report that. If you’re going to tell this story, tell the whole story.”

An Outpouring of Emotion

Bridget thought the greater stigma would be to have her name withheld — as if there were something to be ashamed of. So Michael Kelly set out to write Bridget’s “whole story.”

In his first columns about his daughter, his editors wouldn’t let him mention the rape, but after a month of discussion, they relented. “Now you don’t have to read between the lines and wonder,” he wrote. “My daughter was raped.”

Once those words appeared in print — once the story was in wide circulation — there was an outpouring of reaction.

“So many women who had survived rape then came forward,” said Michael. “It was almost as if they’d been waiting for someone to give them the OK to talk about it.”

[...]

[note: from other reports, the media still additionally self-censored their descriptions of the suspect and later convicted rapist in regards to his race, which is black]