He was already being held in prison so I see no reason to further publish until a trial or settlement hit.

But let's assume he's charged and released on bail or otherwise. In that case, I think it's reasonable for the cops to notify the organizations he's involved with of the pending trial and for a judge to put a restraining order on him. I didn't think anything further needs to happen until he's found guilty or settles with a guilty plea.

My kid's school recently had a related event happen. A guy with a CSAM conviction was released from prison so the cops went around to all the schools to let them know about the dude. (We are friendly with the school secretary and noticed an unusual amount of cops around the school).

Edit: oops, looks like I mixed up your case with the OPs.

But I think what I said still applies and is ultimately what happened in your case.

My main issue is with a public permanent record in the form of a newspaper or news broadcast and not with responsible disclosure by cops.

Yeah in this case the guy wasn't being held.

I'd like to be able to differentiate between "permanent record in a newspaper" and "responsible disclosure", but I'm not sure where the line is.

In your case for example, what if a parent went to the media? Or what if one of the hundreds of affected parents started publicly campaigning for the person to be locked up? I think there should be limits, perhaps such as criminalising the sharing of that information unless it's from the police/courts. I don't think it even matters if the secretary at your school kept the person's name a secret, as people will jump to conclusions and start accusing others, and the whole problem here is that unfounded accusations can still cause real harm to people.

> what if a parent went to the media?

I think so long as the media outlet isn't publishing the name of the accused then I don't know how much I care about what they are publishing. Stuff blows over and is especially hard to put together if there's not a name/face with a story. I'd suspect that without a name/photo that a media outlet would simply not publish anything. If it's linked to an org I could see a "Boy scout leader accused of CSAM" and I'm not entirely against that. I think conversations about what orgs in charge of kids are doing to prevent abuse are valuable ones.

> Or what if one of the hundreds of affected parents started publicly campaigning for the person to be locked up?

I think that campaign is probably fine and publishing "100 parents calling for the arrest of a boy scout leader" is also probably fine so long as the name isn't published. There is a bit of a fuzzy line, though. For example, if a TV news station decided to cover the issue it might be easy for a parent to slip in the name which wouldn't be great.

To me, the biggest problem is how long such a name ends up staying in the public consciousness. Particularly if the individual ends up with a not guilty ruling.

> I think there should be limits, perhaps such as criminalising the sharing of that information unless it's from the police/courts.

I disagree about the police/courts as that's too early in the criminal justice process. In my book, the name getting published should happen after a conviction/guilty plea and not before.

> I don't think it even matters if the secretary at your school kept the person's name a secret, as people will jump to conclusions and start accusing others, and the whole problem here is that unfounded accusations can still cause real harm to people.

I agree. But I also don't think it's a huge problem because I've, frankly, already forgotten this individual's name. I'm sure with a bunch of extra effort I could find them and a photo (since they were convicted). If someone is accused and not convicted, then the absence of their name in a newspaper/news report would mean that it'd be quite hard to actually link their past accusation to themselves. That, IMO, is the ideal balance. That the public knows the name isn't as important as it is that if I google "cogman10" it doesn't come up with an old arrest record with my photo and "cogman10 accused of murdering a health insurance CEO" even though I wasn't found guilty.

Where this gets tricky is what do we do with a parent that decides to setup a "cogman10 accused of murdering a CEO!" webpage. Part of what's tricky here is such a webpage would be factual. Further, for very powerful people/orgs I don't like the idea that they could sue into the ground anyone that publishes something negative against them. For example, imagine an organization with rampant problems of sexual abuse but whenever it comes up they immediately settle with an NDA to silence the victims and then sues anyone that publishes information about it.

I don't have a perfect solution here. I think this is probably something better handled not by the legal system but rather journalistic ethics... but I get that that is already the system we have and it currently sucks.

He was a Scout leader, so he obviously sought ways to be close to children. Another group that does that is Catholic priests.

We know how that turned out – no one hears about abuse by priests, and they are silently moved by the Church to another parish, to continue their abusive ways for decades.

In other words, enforced secrecy does not protect potential victims. There's a balance to be found, but it is hard to know what that is.

> He was a Scout leader, so he obviously sought ways to be close to children.

Not necessarily. Mormon scout leaders didn't get the assignment by their own volition, a church leader would pick them instead. Depending on the scout sponsor group how the leader is chosen could vary.

> We know how that turned out – no one hears about abuse by priests, and they are silently moved by the Church to another parish, to continue their abusive ways for decades.

The issue with the Catholic priests was twofold. First, instead of involving cops and prosecutors early on, church goers would instead reach out to church leaders about the problem. If it did make it's way to the cops, the church would go through extra efforts to make the priest go away to a different perish. (of course without informing the parishioners about the past).

Then of course there is an issue with cops and prosecutors treating religious abuse with kid gloves. Slap on "this is a religion" and all the sudden laws matter a lot less.

> In other words, enforced secrecy does not protect potential victims. There's a balance to be found, but it is hard to know what that is.

And, to be clear, I'm not trying to say we should have total secrecy about these sorts of abuses. I think a news report about a priest or a scout leader being charged is appropriate and that cops disclosing to anyone related to the incident that they are in the process of charging the individual is also appropriate and indeed necessary (after all, the individual could have injured their kids as well which would be a part of collecting evidence). A news organization naming the priest or scout leader would likely not be appropriate.

What I'm against is things like mugshot sites publishing every arrest and name associated with the arrest as an arrest is not a conviction. It's something that can hurt innocent individuals.

I don't even have a problem with sites like this publishing the mugshots of convicts.