Why banning identification of child murder victims would be a serious mistake

Extensively covered across all media, who could not have been moved by this week’s pictures from the funeral of six-year-old Hope Gordon, who was found dead next to her father in West Calder.

The horse-drawn white hearse was followed by characters from her favourite cartoon Paw Patrol as it made its way from the service at Livingston’s Co-op Funeralcare to Adambrae Cemetery. Scores of mourners lined the streets to throw roses in tribute to the little girl; the money to pay for what the family called “Hope’s Day” was covered from a public appeal, which raised five times the £2,000 they sought.

Such tragic incidents are thankfully rare, but under proposals now receiving serious Scottish Government consideration, virtually none of it could be reported because of one significant detail: Hope was murdered.

A campaign by Victim Support Scotland is seeking new laws to prevent the identification of child murder victims, and last week the analysis of a three-month consultation was published, which could lead to new legislation to make identification of child murder victims a criminal offence. Restrictions would be aimed primarily at mainstream media, but with potentially serious consequences for anyone connected to such tragic circumstances.

A horse-drawn carriage with the coffin of child murder victim Hope Gordon in Livingston (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell) | Getty Images

Information void filled by conspiracy theories

Hope Gordon’s murder has an added complication because the public surely has a right to know who was responsible for the death of an innocent child, and indeed they do. As police are not seeking anyone else in connection with her death, the murderer was almost certainly her father, who is now well beyond the reach of the law.

But a law against identifying the victim because she was under 18, would also make it impossible to report that the killer was her father. All the West Calder community would be legally permitted to know was that the scene of crime tents outside the house and the two coffins taken away were because of some sort of accident.

Of course, locals would soon know what had happened and to whom. Or at least they would think they knew, because the restrictions on proper media reporting of the case would be such that the void would be filled by social media speculation, or, as in the case of the Southport stabbings, conspiracy theories of cover-ups.

Dunblane mass shooting

Mercifully, even more rare are cases of multiple murders, but as Southport showed they can happen. And last weekend, the Sunday Times carried interviews with the parents of the three little girls murdered by Axel Rudakubana, in which they expressed their hope that they would be remembered for who they were and not the manner of their deaths or the trial judge’s remarks.

An identification ban, even with waivers, would make such interviews legally complex if the families had different views about publicity. The danger of jigsaw identification, where information can be pieced together, would have made the reporting of Dunblane a virtually impassable minefield, with 16 children in the same primary school class all victims.

Unlike Southport and Dunblane, the horrific truth is that, as with poor Hope Gordon, most child homicides are committed by a friend or relative. Of the nine children under 16 murdered in Scotland between 2019 and 2024, only one was at the hands of a stranger. Four were killed by a parent and four by an acquaintance. An identification ban would have made it very difficult, if not impossible, to name eight killers because of clear links with the victims.

Beyond harm

Campaigners cite the way that sexual offences are currently handled as an example of how it could be done, where the victims remain anonymous, particularly incest cases where the perpetrator is named but not the details of the crime because the victim would them be easily identifiable. It is not against the law to report incest cases, but the identity of the offender would need to be withheld, so the reporting convention is always to name the individual but not specify the crime, and usually just refer to “historic sexual abuse”.

But there is one crucial, but glaringly obvious difference between victims of sex offences and murder; murder victims are dead, and it is a long-established legal principle, reaffirmed in the 2021 Defamation and Malicious Publications Act, that the deceased are beyond harm.

They cannot be defamed because they cannot feel hurt or damage to their reputation because they are no longer here, and to argue otherwise is a matter for religion or metaphysics. The same principle applies to some arguments behind these proposals, but from the consultation responses it’s clear the privacy of the victim is as much a concern as the feelings of the relatives left behind.

Public’s right to know

“The poor child deserves to still have rights especially as the right to live has been taken away from them. You can understand why it’s hard for victims’ families to witness how many rights the perpetrator has. No one protects the victim and in turn the family,” said one respondent.

“We are opposed to child victims losing rights they would otherwise have because they are a victim of homicide,” say Victim Support Scotland.

Without an extraordinary change to basic legal principle, the issue comes down to a clash between Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to family life, and Article 10, freedom of expression, and, under normal circumstances, this would be a matter for the civil courts to decide on a case-by-case basis, not the criminal law.

Only the Justice Secretary Angela Constance knows where this consultation will lead, but as with the blocked Gender Recognition Reform Act, basing far-reaching legal changes on a small number of highly emotional cases does not necessarily produce good or workable laws.

In this case, the public’s right to know about the most serious of crimes, the accurate public recording of deaths, and carefully developed legal principle could be relegated behind the rawest of emotions.

John McLellan is director of the news publishing trade association Newsbrands Scotland and contributed to the consultation