In high school, I had a choir teacher whom I was quite fond of and became close to since he shared an office with my mom. He was young, fresh out of college and had too many good ideas to count. He worked to expand the choir, get us more funding, teach us challenging music and establish traditions which would form a closer connection between alumni and current students. He even took us to Boston in the spring of my senior year, and was planning to take the choir to Baltimore or Virginia Beach the next year.
But he never got that far. Not long after we returned from the Boston trip, this teacher was arrested following a child pornography investigation.
There was a report on the news the day after the arrest which showed his mug shot, gave an account of the charges and included a couple of interviews of locals, one of whom was my grandmother. The media did make an attempt to include different perspectives on the issue, but much ambiguity remained.
The ordinary people who read the newspapers and watched the reports knew only the limited facts which the media presented, in addition to the arbitrary label which was slapped on this teacher along with the handcuffs. They did not know the progress he'd made in improving the music program, such as giving us more opportunities to perform, including at Carnegie Hall. Those of us who were members of the choir, as well as our parents and school administrators, will remember the advances this teacher made and the good he did for the students. But nobody else will remember that, because it was not in any of the media's reports. They will only remember the crime he was charged with and its heinous connotation.
There the fault lies. Reporters and journalists have a job to expose the truth, but sometimes the quest for truth can distort the truth. There was, in this case, a failure by the media to illustrate a character, and doing so could have made more complex what the charges looked like on paper. There was also a failure to recognize the inherent ambiguity of cases such as these. According to the law, a "child" is anyone under the age of 18.
Instances of child pornography could thus include an exposed photo of a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old, perhaps taken consensually with no intent to harm.
Given the recent story in The Cavalier Daily about the University student who was indicted with the charge of possessing child pornography, these issues of incertitude should be a concern for the publication. The news brief did not explicate the nature of the charges against the student, and even though this lack of information can be attributed to a lack of confirmation from the source, the absent words say just as much as those which are present. Without complete knowledge of a situation, people latch on to the bare bones of a story and create their own truths to fill in the gaps. The words are "child pornography." Who thinks of nuance when they think of a child? They think the "child" must have been someone innocent, someone who was victimized and that the "perpetrator" must be sick, perverted, monstrous. But not all cases are the same.
According to a New York Times article by Tamar Lewin, an 18-year-old in Florida faced charges of distributing child pornography because of his circulation of a picture of his exposed 16-year-old girlfriend after the two had a fight. Subsequently, he was placed on the sex offenders registry, which is a permanent listing. The law gives a blunder like this the same weight as a malicious attempt at taking advantage of an innocent victim, and the media often plasters the accused with the same defaming label. The New York Times' portrayal of this case was different because the article included essential details which complicated the nature of the crime, and this spoke to the potential of journalists to improve their coverage of stories like these.
This practice of grouping the malevolent with those who merely falter is a flaw of the legal system, and the media's failure to qualify the truths which it seeks destroys the nature of truth in and of itself. The law does have a responsibility to protect the innocent and obtain justice for the victims, and creating the legislation to accomplish such tasks sometimes does require arbitration.
Admittedly, a line must be drawn somewhere to determine who is a child and who is not. But this does not mean the law can disregard the intent of an offender when a crime is committed, or that the media should portray these stories in black and white, omitting shades of gray.
The legal system must recognize the damage caused by basing criminal offenses solely on arbitrary numbers, and the media must realize the implications of its equivocal reports. If not, unnecessary denigration of human character will continue, and such a result is not justice.
Katherine Ripley is an opinion editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at k.ripley@cavalierdaily.com.
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