I am a reporter at a regional newspaper working in the magistrates’ and crown courts.
In practise, the huge majority of men aren’t named until after their first appearance in court.
The only men ever named before a court appearance are famous men. I can think of possibly seven or eight famous men this has happened to in the past decade.
Most men are named after charge, at their first mags court appearance, and only then in the most serious of cases. There are perhaps five sex crimes on my court list every day. I report an average of two or three a week due to time constraints and a dire lack of reporters. The rest are never named, their cases not reported on and they have no adverse publicity whatsoever.
In practise, if we weren’t allowed to name the defendants until conviction it’s very likely that I and every other regional court report would never attend a sex crime court case again.
I cannot spend weeks in court following a case that ends up being ‘a man is accused of raping a woman.’ If we don’t identify the defendant then we also can’t usually report the place it happened or the circumstances in which it happened. Any court report becomes meaningless and there isn’t a single editor in the land who’d send a reporter to spend their very precious time covering this type of case. There also isn’t a single reader who’d waste their time reading such a nonsensical piece of writing.
Let’s also not forget the majority of murders are also sexually motivated. Can we also not name alleged murderers if there’s a sexual element involved?
So the upshot is that no women ever see justice done publicly and sex trials become, in effect, held behind closed doors. The effect of secret justice on for victims (who already have virtually no chance of conviction) is catastrophic. We would be in a situation where the very worst crimes committed, mainly against women, would go unreported.
The only people that an anonymity law would protect are an incredibly small handful of rich, famous men. They’re the last people we should be protecting. And of those I can think of that have stood trial for crimes against women, pretty much all of them have kept their fancy, well-paying jobs.
I’ve sat through dozens and dozens of rape and sexual assault trials. It’s incredibly difficult to even get them to court. I’d say about forty percent of those that I’ve seen get to trial are found not guilty. In my two decades of experience I’d say that one of those defendants had clearly not done it. The rest simply couldn’t be proven beyond reasonable doubt. In every case, the men were horrific specimens, whether guilty of rape or not.
The chance of an upstanding person who acts with integrity facing trial for rape is almost zero. So you’ve no need to worry about your sons.