JUST before Christmas, from a café window in St Helier I spotted a passing white van advertising ‘Jersey’s best-kept secret’.

I am not sure of the exact product that was being concealed – or revealed,
depending how one was expected to interpret it. I think it had something to do with stationery material.

Coincidentally, and probably the reason for my inattention, was that I was reading the gory court report of an outrageous attack on a man in a nightclub doorway last summer. Despite the gruesome details of the injuries, the reporting restrictions that ‘so-and-so cannot be named for legal reasons’ meant that the young perpetrators were in line to qualify for that best-kept secret award.

Not for the first time, we were left the poser of information about man’s (or in this case, teenage girls’) inhumanity to man, yet half the story, namely, the identity of the perpetrators, was withheld. No point bringing people to justice, you could argue, if that justice isn’t seen to be done.

Mercifully, we are well past the spectacle of miscreants locked in the stocks publicly receiving a face-full of well-aimed ripe St Ouenais cabbage. Instead, a door of anonymity is allowed to slam shut with the finality of a bank vault, while the victim bears the lifelong physical and psychological scars.

So what feeds this anti-naming protection racket? Do the authorities fear like-for-like vigilante retribution? Is the shame too great to bear? Or is it simply to be wiped from offenders’ faces like so much greasy make-up of a bad evening out?

The thief who comes in the night and the ASBO’d thugs who conceal themselves under hoodies all share the cowardice that lies in attempting to hide behind identification and public scrutiny.

The convention-defying proposition brought to the States by Deputy Trevor Pitman last year sought to strip the comfy duvet from offenders who over time have slouched into a den of untouchability, cloaked in an institutional aversion to publicly pin responsibility on their shoulders.

It may have run into the buffers in the Chamber, but it wasn’t particularly draconian. It certainly didn’t amount to branding nursery children for ignorance of an unlearned moral code; it related to 16-year-olds and over, the same age-group which now enjoys the privilege, and hence responsibility, to leave school, vote and form a legal family relationship with the opposite sex.

It is certainly true that there is a judgment to be made to distinguish between the naive excesses of youthful exuberance and seasoned evil intent. There is undoubtedly a powerful argument that identifying miscreants could present an obstacle to the care and resettlement of offenders, by keeping open a wound that should be healed.

There are those who believe that naming can bestow a ‘celebrity’ status among the criminally irresponsible, goading them to achieve greater notoriety among their malevolent peers.

Moreover, there’s an inherent risk of distributing unwarranted pain and censure among the family of the accused. Last week, at Leeds Crown Court, a judge chose to lift the reporting convention, and publicly identified a 17-year-old sentenced for a vicious assault on a teenage girl.

His decision may have been mitigated by the knowledge that the lad’s father had marched him to the police station to own up, and the confidence that the family will be there to support him on his release from prison. Instilling responsible citizenship among the pampered is certainly not for the faint hearted.

Names are a powerful and necessary element to the consequences of action. People are not just an anonymous statistic. The 100th soldier to die in Afghanistan, which had the media exploding in torrents of analysis and handwringing was more than a sad statistic. So was the first casualty, and the two-hundred-and-fiftieth. Each was a member of a family, named and loved for who they were and for what they achieved.

Heroism isn’t achieved by a faceless machine, just as crime isn’t committed by a malevolent system. There’s precious little impact without a strong element of personal recognition.

From humble village war memorials or the immense 75-metre-long polished granite wall in Washington DC etched with the names of nearly sixty thousand individuals who perished in the line of duty in Vietnam, to the honour boards in school assembly rooms, each conveys a record of personal achievement and sacrifice. Their mark of pride is a testament to a society which accords value to the identity of its citizens and their activities.

You see when you start hiding names, you descend into a meaningless haze. Think back to the early days of TV soaps when labels on bottles in the local ‘boozer’ or packets of household products on shelves in the corner shop were obscured or disguised because they could not be identified for commercial reasons. The light dawned eventually, but the fact that product placement is still a live issue on TV demonstrates the power of brands and names.

Our names are the first thing we trade when we strike up any form of meaningful relationship. Why are children given names and not numbers? You could ask the same about pets and the marque of motor-cars?

There is indeed much kudos in a name or there would never have been such cross-Channel sensitivity over the final ‘e’ on the fuselage of ‘Concorde’.
Film stars regularly change their birth name to suit the image they wish to project.

Names provide personality because before the robots take over the foundry, we all possess the element of choice, and the right to be judged individually for our actions.