Did NY Times Get Rape Coverage Right the Second Time Around?

When an 11-year-old girl said she was raped multiple times by more than a dozen men in an abandoned trailer in Texas, the story made national headlines.

Just how the story of her alleged rape should be told, however, has proved to be an explosive issue, one that has exposed critical fault lines in the way society thinks about rape and the way journalists write about it.

Much of the controversy has centered on The New York Times. The newspaper's first take on the disturbing crime provoked outrage from critics who said the Times seemed to be blaming the victim for her own rape.

The first story, "Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town," published on March 8, focused on the girl's 18 accused attackers. The article cited members of the small, impoverished community in Cleveland, Texas, who said the victim "dressed older than her age" and "would hang out with teenage boys at a playground." Those descriptions drew fire from readers, bloggers and activists who said the language was offensive to the victim.

"Why is it necessary to conjure up the image of this 11-year-old child as some tart who was asking for it?" wrote The Frisky, a women's blog. "There is no ... reason I need to know how this 11-year-old victim, or any other victim of sexual assault, dressed and wore makeup before or during the time she was physically threatened and forcibly raped."

The Times' public editor, Arthur Brisbane, agreed. "My assessment is that the outrage is understandable," he wrote March 11. "The story dealt with a hideous crime but addressed concerns about the ruined lives of the perpetrators without acknowledging the obvious: concern for the victim."

The story also sent the ever-volatile issues of gender, race and class surging to the surface.

The journalism site Poynter.com, run by the Poynter Institute, accused the Times of using voyeuristic language that didn't enrich readers' understanding of the facts but instead imposed prejudices about rape in impoverished communities. "Combined with the one-sided nature of the information presented, [James] McKinley [the author] paints a voyeuristic picture that makes the rape look like a terrible event in a desolate, poor part of town -- part of the cost of living in an impoverished area," LaToya Peterson wrote on the site.

Monday, the Times published a second piece on the story, one that focused primarily on the victim and was, for the most part, better received. New York Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha told AOL News that the second story hasn't elicited much of a response from readers.

But some criticism remained, particularly around the issue of race. The 11-year-old girl, whose identity has not been made public because of her age, is reportedly Hispanic, while many of her attackers are black, details that have heightened racial tensions in Cleveland, according to news outlets there, but failed to make a debut in either New York Times story.

Poynter spoke to Philip Corbett, associate managing editor of the Times, and explored whether the decision to omit race from the Times story was a good one. "So why weren't these racial tensions addressed in the follow-up?" Poynter asked. "Corbett said it came down to a change in focus. "The new information shifted the focus of the story somewhat away [from] the community reaction," he said, according to Poynter.

Joel Brinkley, a journalism professor at Stanford University, says it's not clear that discussing race would be helpful to readers in this case. "I'm not sure that race is relevant here," he said. "And mentioning it without reason can be harmful."

Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, said the controversy extended far beyond The New York Times, and should make the public question the way rape and crime are covered in general.

"It's not about some reporter being an overt racist. And it's not about a reporter setting out to consciously blame a girl for being assaulted," he told AOL News by phone. "It's about, what are the assumptions we don't know we have or what are the presumptions by our sources that we're perhaps unthinkingly accepting? I think that really was probably the issue in this story."

At least one observer said the original story may have elicited such a fierce reaction because it dared to bring skepticism to accusations of rape, something that makes many readers uncomfortable.

"It seemed to me that there was a lot of bending over backward [in the original Times story] to look at other possibilities or to bring the accused and their point of view into the story, and that's rare," said Bill Drummond, a UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism professor. "The tendency has been to assume that everything the victim claims is true. So more skepticism in reporting these charges of rape is about due."

He said such skepticism is especially important if the crime -- or the accusation -- touches upon the issue of race.

Shapiro said it's possible to give balance without blaming the victim.

"There are always going to be people looking to blame how a victim dressed or blame the victim's behavior," he said. "That's wrong. That's just always wrong. And I think that as journalists, we have a big responsibility to not blame the victim and instead look at how families, communities and systems either support or don't support women's expectations of safety."