Desperately seeking trauma fodder? Journalists should read this first
How do journalists report on people’s personal experiences without being exploitative or causing further harm? Jenny Valentish attempts to find some middle ground.
Last May I warned myself I would have to suspend my dignity for a year. I had written a research-heavy book about women and drug use in which I was also the case study, so I was bound to be asked squirmingly personal questions. It was a baptism of fire, because although I’ve been a journalist for decades, I’d never written about myself. I anticipate that this post will be the last time I do so.
What do people associate you with? Your job title? Your Walkley award? Your wilks score? For me, it’s ‘trauma’. In real life, I’d never used the word in relation to myself (I’m English, we’re more likely to call it ‘a bit of bother’), but one chapter of Woman of Substances is about predictors of addiction, including childhood sexual abuse, and within the context of that I mentioned my own experience. Those few pages became the handwringing focus of most of the media coverage.
Woman of Substances doesn’t even hint at personal trauma on the back cover or in the press release – because it’s a resource for women, not an emotional purge. But the reality is, behind most of my interviews was a fruitless battle to change topic. In one video feature, I’ve watched myself deflect for more than six minutes before finally giving in. It’s sort-of entertaining.
In the most recent incident, a radio presenter leapt upon one sentence in the book to introduce me in an extraordinarily sexually graphic way. The effect was of being scythed at the knees before I’d even had a chance to speak. I instantly objected, so it was impatiently rephrased in a less specific way. Later, I was asked to analyse whether the ongoing abuse had actually been abuse or not, which may sound reasonable to a presenter used to playing devil’s advocate, but which is kryptonite to a person who has been there. A quick-fire round of aggressively intrusive questions followed. In all, I objected three times.
That interview flouted many of the station’s own guidelines for reporting around trauma, but it was a pre-record. I complained afterwards and they did the right thing by me, apologising and editing the interview so that the humiliating parts didn’t make it to air. Nonetheless, damage had been done.
A person may seem okay when they leave an interview, but their emotional state is liable to get progressively worse with each hour that passes, and the immune system takes a battering. It’s unsurprising that the body seems to be shutting down – if a person made themselves this vulnerable to strangers during hunter-gatherer times, they’d soon be dead. In fact, your body is literally trying to silence you.
Additionally, if the individual has been triggered – such as by feeling unsafe and a loss of control – they’ll experience fear and distress. Few Mumbrella readers will have missed the furore when Kyle Sandilands subjected a 14-year-old girl – a rape victim, as it turned out – to a lie detector test to see if she had ever had sex.
More recently there was John Laws reducing to tears an elderly man who had been abused as a child. Laws had previously ‘joked’ to an incest survivor that the offenders “had a good time with you”, before asking “Was it in any way your fault?” (Read Tracey Spicer’s excellent opinion column to brush up on that.)
My relative understanding of how media works didn’t help much. It was the same for journalist Bri Lee, who weaved her own experience into the book Eggshell Skull, about her year as a judge’s associate confronted by sexual assault cases. Not that you’d guess it was about that from some of the ‘my secret shame’-style press coverage.
She tells me: “I was shocked by some of the headlines my interviews were given and I felt so misrepresented by some that I didn’t go on to share them. A lot of coverage disregarded the immense amount of research the book contained. I understand the need for an appealing ‘hook’ and that my trauma might get them more clicks, but when people share their stories it’s because they’re trying to do some good, and journalists undo that vulnerability and hard work when they don’t appreciate how their coverage shapes readers’ perceptions.”
And let’s be frank here, misrepresenting a book is also detrimental to the author’s sales and reputation. Many readers have told me they were initially put off buying Woman of Substances, thinking that it must be of the misery-memoir ilk – you know, the type with a glum waif on the cover. It was only seeing actual excerpts, or hearing about it word-of-mouth, that changed their minds.
Even when an interviewee is explicitly calling for carefulness, it will be blithely trundled over. Journalist and author Andrew Stafford wrote about the ethics of reporting on trauma for The Griffith Review, informed in part by a mental health breakdown in early 2016, in which he disappeared and was briefly listed as a missing person.
So it was confronting, when he was invited onto a radio program to talk about his essay, that the first question levelled to him was: “What was going through your mind when that happened?”
“I’d made it very clear in that essay that it was essentially a dissociative episode and I had no idea what was going on,” he says, “but also that if I did know, it wasn’t really anyone else’s business to know unless I chose to share it. Of course, the broadcaster hadn’t read it, neither had the producer, and they blamed the PR for giving them an inaccurate briefing, which he hadn’t.
“It only reinforced the reasons why I’d felt the need to write the piece in the first place. And of course I work in the media too, I know how it works and how time-poor everyone is, but it was disheartening. When you’re dealing with material that’s obviously sensitive and potentially triggering both to subjects and interviewees, I believe the journalist has a basic duty of care there, and that needs to come before creating a spectacle.”
But conversations about trauma are useful to have, so how does a journalist do so without causing further harm? Radio is particularly tricky. With your average guest segment being 10-20 minutes, the interviewee must be ushered in efficiently. That’s why, if trauma is on the agenda, it’s vital that producers brief the guests beforehand – days beforehand.
To the presenters, bear in mind that the guest has literally entered your domain, so there’s an instant power imbalance in your favour. You might not have time to metaphorically put on the kettle, but establishing trust will guarantee a more forthcoming conversation than an ambush.
- Be clear about the purpose of the interview
- Ask if there are any areas that are off-limits
- Don’t introduce someone by way of a ledger of the worst moments of their life (shout out to the newspaper that did this to me and added a fictional worst moment for good measure)
- Moderate or turn off comments
- A quick plug should not be considered pay-off for offensive questions
- Sensationalism may not be the end game, but carelessness is just as damaging
- ‘Triggering’ has become an overused word, but if you refer to, say, explicit sex acts in a way that is out of the individual’s control, you’ll activate it in its intended meaning
The following resources are also available:
- OurWatch for safe reporting of sexual assault. There’s also advice for journalists experiencing vicarious trauma
- AOD Media Watch for advice on covering stories about drugs and alcohol (full disclosure, this author is one of the group behind it)
- Mindframe’s media guidelines to aid reporting on mental health issues
- SANE’s StigmaWatch for responsible reporting of mental illness and suicide in the Australian media
Jenny Valentish is a journalist and author.
Basically, a lot of practices in the media exacerbate or even re-traumatise people. Sometimes its unexpected, sometimes it sociopathic. The question to ask yourself is that “feature” that is going to be chip paper wrapping or a forgotten segment one day really worth (in order of importance) a) the damage to the subject b) the damage to your own conscience c) the damage to society and d) the damage to your career?
Of course not. Don’t do it. One awkward meeting where you boss is pissed off with you for refusing to do something unethical is better than your own personal reputation and self esteem being damaged.
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A few years ago I worked in an agency…a top tier Sydney one, well respected but where inappropriate behaviour was the norm. It was just about boys being boys. I even saw it play out that young men who didn’t want to be part of it, were ostracised…because they were not ‘one of the lads’ and their careers stalled too as they felt excluded from ‘the banter’ and were not invited to hang out with the in crowd, who made a really big deal of their sexual exploits. There were frequent ‘bets’ about who they could sleep with, with conquests noisily discussed on a Monday morning…’ugly girls’ who they’d banged for a laugh, with the poor girls hearing the gossip and being totally humiliated. With one Monday morning one of the ring leaders proudly boasting how he’d stolen some young girls contraceptive pills as a trophy. Pretty sad behaviour. It was a form of bullying for the girls involved. I never spoke up as I didn’t want to be labelled as a grass as these boys were the popular ones, the cool crowd. Many now hold very senior management positions in the industry, here and overseas. I watched these promotions happen over the years and it makes me realise I should not have stayed a silent observer.
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A good article, and useful for journalism training.
However, the author has overlooked one resource, which should be among the others she listed.
https://dartcenter.org/asia-pacific
These resources (including the one from Dart) are all used for the education of new journalists at universities in Australia.
Kindest
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Some of this criticism is fair, but not all. The difficulty comes when people want to use their past experiences selectively – to present themselves as an authority on a particular topic because of their lived history. This is extraordinarily difficult to navigate. Of course you can’t simply plough in and drag them through the worst moments in their life – but you cannot, in all fairness to debates which require even handed treatment – simply allow their self edited narrative to stand unquestioned either. Bri Lee is a good case in point. She has her own experience – which is a valuable addition to the public discussion – but presents herself as an even handed researcher, rather than advocate for a particular position. The cases in many of her publications are summarised to fit the narrative. Not untrue, exactly, but stripped of nuance, contradiction and uncertainty that comes out in real evidence from the real world. So when you read these summaries of course you say “how can the system be so broken that it can deliver this result ?”. If you don’t examine and challenge assertions – even those that are difficult to talk about – you end up with a very one sided outcome.
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