When a newspaper sets itself up as a quasi-court meting out punishment

Every so often the Clarence Valley’s largest newspaper catches a bout of righteous indignation and does this:

The Daily Examiner will resume publishing the details of drink drivers who front Grafton and Maclean local courts.

The paper will collate the names, age and town of residence of the offenders, the location, time and date of the offence, the PCA reading and the penalty handed down.

This list will appear in the paper after local court hearings at Grafton or Maclean.*

Obviously ignoring the fact that NSW courts have rightly imposed specific legal penalties (which cannot include further public 'naming and shaming'), it wants to punish drink drivers a second time by further stigmatising the offender and, in the Clarence Valley’s small communities also potentially penalising or socially isolating the now easily identifiable innocent parents, partners, siblings or children of these offenders.

If as suggested His Honour Magistrate David M. Heilpern supports this secondary victimisation of persons not before the court (who quite rightly have an expectation of privacy) then I am seriously disappointed in both the man and his office.

That any community interest in naming and shaming has a less than noble side is shown by this remark by a NSW North Coast resident last year when the Coffs Coast Advocate broached the subject of drink driving:

Who knows we might see some local identities and characters that are our neighbours.

Neither The Daily Examiner nor the magistrate appear to have considered that the newspaper’s actual print edition containing these name and shame reports is replicated on the Internet in perpetuity.

Additionally, I have yet to find any reputable study which demonstrates that naming and shaming drink drivers lowers the NSW drink driving rate or affects which convicted drivers reoffend, so there is no excuse for The Daily Examiner’s latest effort to boost newspaper sales.

I am not alone in believing that a return to primitive responses is no solution. Here is Dr Lauren Rosewarne from the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne:

Drunk drivers, of course, is a much more complicated problem. But to suggest that naming an offender in the paper is the answer is laughable. If a person is stupid enough to drink and drive at any time, let alone repeatedly, they are not someone who makes decisions with any clarity. If the thought of killing oneself or others was not enough to prevent them sticking their key in the ignition in the first place, their name in the paper will hardly guide them better next time.

Rather than serving as a deterrent, the name and shame will simply embarrass those people around the drunk. Humiliating children and parents and spouses. 

* 10 April 2013 issue