BBC trans omission over murderer Scarlet Blake breached rules

A BBC ruling says the broadcaster breached accuracy standards when it failed to mention Scarlet Blake, who was convicted over the murder of Jorge Martin Carreno, was transgender – Vagner Vidal/Hyde News & Pictures

The BBC breached its accuracy rules with a report on a transgender cat killer that failed to mention the murderer’s gender identity.

The broadcaster received complaints about how Scarlet Blake’s trans identity was not mentioned in an online article on Feb 23 and the BBC News at One three days later, on the day she was sentenced.

In a ruling, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) said it “considered that the omission of such information in the two instances specified by complainants, in a context where it had become material to an understanding of the case, amounted to a breach of the BBC’s standards of accuracy”.

But it said the complaints were “resolved””, not “upheld”, because they were quickly rectified with an addition to the online article within an hour of being published and a notice on the BBC complaints website about the TV report.

Most other BBC reports did refer to the fact Blake is a trans woman, which the ECU said appeared to have become known to the media when the defence mentioned it on Feb 19.

However, the fact that Blake was trans was not part of the prosecution case or a pre-trial briefing from the police.

The ECU said “there was therefore no question of referring to sex recorded at birth or using anything other than she/her pronouns until gender identity was introduced by the defence on 19 Feb, on the basis that Blake claimed her experience of coming out as transgender and her parents’ adverse reaction to it accounted for much of her subsequent behaviour”.

Blake, 26, who was born male but identifies as a woman, was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 24 years in prison for the murder of Jorge Martin Carreno in Oxford, having previously mutilated a cat.

The killer was sent to a male prison, but was referred to as a woman during the trial and the crime was officially recorded in statistics as female.

The case sparked a major row, with JK Rowling, lawyers and former ministers among those criticising descriptions of Blake as a “woman”.

The ECU rejected a “small number” of other complaints on the grounds of impartiality about how the BBC had referred to Blake as a woman.

It said: “The BBC recognises there is controversy over the distinction between sex and gender.

“People who experience a difference between the sex registered on their birth certificate and their gender identity may describe themselves as transgender. Some others may take the view that gender is entailed in what is often referred to as biological sex, and cannot be changed.”

“Against this background, a simple refusal to use the terms in which people who regard themselves as transgender describe themselves would in effect be an endorsement of one viewpoint in this controversy,” the ECU added.

The BBC said it “considers [that] impartiality is best served by the BBC’s policy of using language and terminology which is clear and appropriate to the context, taking account of the subject and nature of the content”.

In February, the BBC complaints unit upheld an impartiality complaint against Justin Webb, the BBC Radio 4 Today presenter, after he referred to “trans women, in other words males”.

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