please also see responses from NY Times readers below

THE PUBLIC EDITOR - New York Times OPINION Confusing Sex and Rape by ARTHUR S. BRISBANE November 19, 2011 As the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State University shows, reporting on allegations of sex crimes poses a challenge not only to get the story right but to deliver it in language that puts the facts in the proper light. Some readers, responding to The New York Times's first reports on the case, strongly objected to wording in the articles that, in their view, either underplayed the details or wrongly applied the language of consensual sex to the narrative. The objections focused on the most severe of the accusations against Mr. Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant coach. According to the grand jury report, he subjected a boy estimated to be 10 years old to “anal intercourse” in locker room showers at the university in 2002. Jennifer Crichton, a reader from Manhattan, said The Times's initial article on Nov. 5 missed the mark when it described the testimony of a Penn State graduate assistant about the incident. As The Times put it, he told the grand jury that he saw Mr. Sandusky “sexually assaulting a boy in the shower.”

“My question for The Times,” wrote Frederick Lazare of Houston, “is why did it not immediately tell its readers that the student assistant saw Jerry Sandusky raping a child. That was in the grand jury report.”

Lilith Fowler, a reader from Milwaukee, objected to a Nov. 9 Times account in which the graduate assistant was said to have testified to the grand jury that “he saw Mr. Sandusky having anal sex with the boy.”

“The boy, age 10 or 11, has no ability to consent,” Ms. Fowler wrote, “so this is not anal sex, it is a rape, and The Times should call it that.”

Patricia Raube of Binghamton, N.Y., elaborated on the same point about the same passage: “An adult can rape a child. An adult can molest a child. An adult cannot ‘have sex' — a phrase connoting consent — with a child.” In her view, the language soft-pedals the “enormity of the abuse perpetrated.”

It should be noted that four days into The Times's news coverage, the newspaper introduced the term “rape” into some of its descriptions of the 2002 incident. Joe Sexton, the sports editor, told me the paper had “no reluctance to use ‘rape' ” and was not trying “to somehow shy away from the graphic nature of the allegations.” He said the charges included a variety of acts, so the paper had used “sexual assault” to cover the range. Further, he said, the paper's reporting on Penn State officials' accounts of their actions required careful wording, as none of them besides the graduate assistant had acknowledged that rape was involved.

It is common for newspapers to use terms like “sexual assault” and “sexual abuse” and “have sex” when reporting on sex crimes. Perhaps, though, it's time that The Times and other news organizations take another look at the language they use. Victims' advocates echo what the readers told me in their e-mails: language in news media reports — and, for that matter, in the court system itself — consistently underplays the brutality of sex crimes and misapplies terms that imply consent.

“We constantly talk about victims having sex with their perpetrator,” said Claudia J. Bayliff, project attorney for the National Judicial Education Program and a longtime advocate for victims of sex crimes. “We talk about children performing oral sex on their perpetrator, which suggests a consensual act and a volitional act. We use ‘fondled,' ‘had sex with,' ‘performed oral sex on' — all those kinds of terms.”

But, she added, “my argument back is always, come on, if there is one thing newspapers have always said it is: ‘We are sorry to offend but we are going to tell the truth. We are not going to soft-pedal it for you.' ”

This is not an easy fix, and the Sandusky case illustrates why. It is complex, with 40 charges involved, and the details of the allegations are extremely unsavory. How can a reporter characterize the facts accurately and without compounding the victimization?

Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and an advocate for victims of clergy sex crimes, suggested that news organizations should be both general and specific. “I don't think the terms ‘sexually abuse' or ‘molestation' are inappropriate,” she said. “The problem is when they are the only terms used. In this case, you have eight victims with stories told about them. Each is quite different. A journalist who doesn't make it clear the spectrum of inappropriate behavior is letting us down.”

Using a broad term like “sexually assault” or “sexually abuse” is reasonable, in other words, but only if the specifics are not spared. In my view, and that of several victims' advocates I spoke with, the term “rape” is appropriate in describing the most severe allegations in the Sandusky case. But there is a problem there, as well.

“Rape” is a word in flux. The Times stylebook says to use it to mean “forced intercourse, or intercourse with a child below the age of consent.” In many cases, though, the justice system doesn't use the word. In the Sandusky case, the charges do not include the word “rape” because he was charged under the statute covering “Involuntary Deviate Sexual Intercourse.”

Ms. Murphy, of the New England School of Law, said that in surveying the 50 states, she found “something like 40 different terms to describe the act of rape of a child.”

So murky has the definition of rape become that the Police Executive Research Forum, a police think tank for big cities, recently convened police chiefs to discuss redefining the term for the F.B.I.'s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The upshot is a recommendation that the F.B.I. rape statistics, previously limited to forcible vaginal penetration by males, cover any penetration that is genital, oral or anal, regardless of whether the victims and the offenders are male or female.

This broadened definition provides clarity. When the facts warrant it, journalists should be as specific as possible, they should avoid using the language of consensual sex and, when appropriate, they should call a rape a rape.

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Here's how the public replied to the OPINION piece shown above: