A charity has urged journalists to avoid using terms such as “victims”, “historic” and ” child porn” when reporting on child abuses cases.
The National Association for People Abused in Childhood has released its ‘good reporting’ guidelines in a bid to raise awareness of how media coverage can affect those it represents.
The guidelines encourage journalists to use the term “survivors” rather than “victims”, and replace “historic” with the phrase “non recent child abuse” or state the decade in which the abuse happened.
Terms such as “child porn” are also discouraged, with “child abuse images” or “indecent images of children” preferred by the charity.
The guidelines read: “Many adults who were abused as children prefer to be known as ‘survivors’ rather than ‘victims’ in recognition that they have survived what they have been through, and that they are not permanently stuck in that place of abuse as a ‘victim’.
“Survivors are a diverse group and so are opinions on this. Some prefer ‘thriver’ or ‘abusee’. NAPAC recognises that in a legal context ‘victim’ is the word that has to be used, given that this is the terminology that exists in legislation.
“Rapes are not referred to as historical, nor are child murders or even bank robberies that happened years ago. Survivors may be living with the physical and mental consequences of abuse every day. There is nothing historic about it for them.
“‘Child pornography’ makes a comparison with adult sexual imagery and almost normalises it. This only serves to diminish what is a gross sexual violation of children – all child abuse images are crime scenes. Children by definition cannot consent to their own abuse.”
NAPAC’s report further discourages the use of the terms “affair” or “fling” when referring to a child involved in a sexual relationship with an adult, as well as “rent boy” or “child prostitute” for children being exploited by adults for profit.
Further guidelines appear on working with case studies, with journalists urged to avoid trying to persuade people to waive their right to anonymity.
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Am I the only one who thinks this is doublespeak? Surely journalists should use plain language that is understood by everyone. I resent a charity trying to effect a PR rebranding exercise on my writing, no matter how well-meaning.
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“Non-recent child abuse”?
I think not. We are journalists, not police press officers. We speak in plain English.
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What a load of “confusing prose”
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To a much less serious extent – colleagues instead of staff at Asda.
Just wonder if the people who come up with this understand the media at all. The words they want to use won’t sell papers or get clicks.
Just the way it is.
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What nonsense. I’m sympathetic to this charity’s aims but the term “child p**n”, as utterly repugnant as the phenomenon it describes may be, is perfectly accurate. The P-word describes any imagery created with the intention of arousing or gratifying those watching it. Where children are involved it is, of course, inexcusably wrong – but that doesn’t mean journalists shouldn’t call a spade a spade.
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@ Observer
I refuse to go along with Asda’s silly, pointless and confusing policy of calling its staff/employees “colleagues”. As yet, none of the firm’s PR people have pulled me up on it.
Another thing which is slightly weird is local schools referring to their pupils as “students”. A kind of understandable description for over 16s maybe, but daft for 11-year-old kids.
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I’m with the charity on this one.
When I used to work for a newspaper group one of my jobs was trying to help journalists ‘write for the web’, mostly to make articles make more sense when people were making Google searches and to get them to click on the article.
Many of the journalists constantly fell back into their ingrained vocabulary. Whilst it might have made sense for newspapers and subbing them into headlines didn’t make much sense at all when you read the article on the web.
One of my bugbears was when a senior policeman was referred to as a ‘top cop’ or children were referred to as ‘kids’ and the old Sun favourite as referring to a teacher as ‘sir’ or ‘miss’.
I think they make a fair point and a lot of journalists fall back on the tired old language instead of considering what they write and the audiences they write for.
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thriver or abusee. Ridiculous!
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All very noble, but these people don’t have to write headlines.
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What absolute nannying tosh. Almost as annoying as those emails you get from the Samaritans or whoever banging on about the suicide reporting guidelines you know inside out – when you haven’t even broken them. Someone was probably paid a lot of money to spend a lot of hours coming up with this rubbish.
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A bit like describing prostitutes as “sex workers” and binmen as “refuse disposal operatives.”
Where do all these euphemisms end?
What sort of industry would use ridiculous titles like “head of content,” “page co-ordinator,” or “corporate advisor?” Whoops!
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Words and phrases go in and out of fashion, I’m afraid.
Many, many years ago, when I worked on the newsdesk of an evening paper, a caller berated me because we had used the word ‘spastics’ in a story about disabled people.
‘You are horrible, disgraceful people,’ she yelled, going on for a minute or more about the word’s degrading implications.
I waited patiently for her to stop, then replied calmly: ‘You will, of course, have heard of the British Spastics Society, the official body for the disabled.’
There was a long, pregnant silence followed by a period of embarrassed spluttering. Then the phone went dead.
Yet who would use the word now? No-one, I suspect.
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The term “child abuse” is better than “child porn” because it is abuse. As for the rest in that list, they are as bad as using “passed away” instead of “died.”
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