Media Ethics Contravened: Prasanta Patnaik Castigates Police and Press over Public Humiliation of Alleged Female Maoists on Their Surrender

If really any female Maoist surrenders before the police, neither the police nor the press has any right to socially humiliate her in spicy projection of how she was sexually exploited by any male comrade in assumed hide outs, says eminent journalist Prasanta Patnaik, reminding them of media ethics in no uncertain terms.

Writing in Bhubaneswar’s language daily Suryaprava, Patnaik has condemned the way, time and again, some young women are being put before the TV cameras and obliging journalists by the police to divulge that they were Maoists whom their male comrades have raped at gun points.

Whether or not such surrenders are stage managed is not investigated into by the media.

But sadly, the press persons, covering the press conference held by the police, forget that the laws of this land and time honored ethics of journalism do not vouch for justifiability in projecting the face of sex victims in public, at stake being the social honor of women.

Were the police claim really true, the jungles where Maoists dwell must have often witnessed attack on male Maoists by the abused females as weapons are also under their possession and they are trained in using them. That no such instance has ever surfaced and police has never registered any case under any allegation for such offenses, is enough to make one wonder, if placing of such females by the police before the press is not willfully designed to malign the Maoists, Patnaik has noted.

He has called upon the Police and the Press not to put in future the females before the cameras to divulge how sexually they were assaulted, if at all any such act has ever happened, at least to honor women dignity, irrespective of they being or not being Maoists.

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