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Mark Brayne:
Ewa ... Thank you very much for joining us. You're in Baton Rouge, is that right?
Ewa Ewart (via audio link):
I am indeed. I'm in Louisiana and I'm very sorry I can't be with you tonight.
Mark Brayne:
Ewa, it was an extraordinary film, a very, very powerful film and I know that you found the experience of making the film an extremely powerful one. I think you said to me that this was the most powerful experience that you'd had in a very long—and distinguished—career making television and making programmes. Can you tell us just a little bit about it?
Ewa Ewart:
Indeed. I think that during the last twenty years, since I started making this kind of programme, I don't remember anything more emotionally challenging and testing than making this film; not even the experience of the war zone can compare to that. But yes, it was incredibly rewarding and I think myself incredibly privileged and lucky for having been given the chance to make this film; although to be totally honest, I wish I'd never had the chance to make such a film for obvious reasons.
Mark Brayne:
What were the particular challenges and hurdles you had to work through?
Ewa Ewart:
The challenges were really to handle the children, although I have to say that in the process of gathering materials for the programme and in the course of my research I have spoken to about 140 children, of which I eventually selected 20 plus who I interviewed for the second time on camera and from whom we selected the final eight or nine you saw in the film. And I have to say that out of the 140 children, I found only one case—and in fact it wasn't even a child, it was actually the father of a child, who didn't want to talk to us—I found that most of the children, or actually all of them, incredibly eager to share their stories and the details of what they went through, with me.
But yet, despite the fact that they displayed tremendous emotional intelligence and discipline about the way they handled the memories and experiences they had gone through, I still found it very challenging to keep straight in front of them and I still found that somehow I was on a constant guilt trip because I was making them relive it again, despite the fact that for them it was like an act of cleansing; they really wanted to talk about it and they really wanted to share it. It was very important for them to know that this story had not died from news coverage a few days after the event happened and that there were people out there that still care about how they feel about it today. I think they found it really important to them.
Mark Brayne:
Ewa, we have we have with us in London four panellists—Bill Yule, Child psychologist from the Institute of Psychiatry, Lynne Jones, Consultant Child Psychiatrist and author of a book on the experience of Bosnian children on both sides of the divide of that war, and Ian Prince, Editor of Newsround on BBC Television. Jonathan Charles is with us as well and I'd like to give each of them a chance to say a brief word about the film and ask Ewa any questions they might like to raise. Bill Yule, first of all.
Bill Yule:
Thanks. I would agree it was exceedingly powerful and very moving; I was sitting in the corner almost in tears at times but I do have enormous worries about it. You've touched on one of them, about the sense of being on a guilt trip? The children wanted to talk. Was it cathartic? There was a worry that it's re-traumatising and that does really concern me.
The film was made just as we were coming up to the anniversary, which was a very tricky time anyway and what I didn't hear, and what I wanted to hear, was what help, if any, they'd been given and was it effective or not. That didn't seem to come through.
Ewa Ewart:
In the course of making this film and in the course of doing the research for the film, I made it absolutely rule number one that I would never, ever talk to children who didn't want to share their stories deliberately and willingly. So I did follow the rule very strictly and very vigorously and I only talked to people who really wanted to talk to me, and they really all wanted to talk to me. . And the way that I show, or the way that they received help, what I chose to show is that they really are helping themselves, for example, in the way that they cope with, how they deal with the experiences that they've gone through.
For example, you have Adele . who makes drawings of the terrorists and burns them. For me it was very important to show how incredibly mature and adult and emotionally secure they are that they all took their own problems in their own hands. They are being helped by a psychologist; I don't think the help is sufficient, but they help each other and they try to help themselves.
Bill Yule:
I'd entirely go along with you that no outside help should replace the help of the kids themselves and the community. I found, however, the picture of that little girl setting fire to things really quite chilling. She seemed to be saying she'd be going on and on doing it. I would worry that it was keeping it going. Of course, I don't know, I wasn't there, I didn't see her and I just contrast, as with my own reaction to what you said a moment ago, that one of the more recent effects of treatments for kids like this is indeed, based on the South American model of giving testimony; of writing it down so it can be there for future generations to see what happened.
So I can quite see what you were saying about the kids wanting to talk. I still have reservations about whether some of it is re-traumatising. But it's still very powerful.
Ewa Ewart:
Well, I can assure you—and I think was really important—that I always felt it was my duty to show the raw reaction and show the way they are trying to deal with this. At the beginning of the process, the girl who is burning the pictures of terrorists, she is incredibly together and dealing incredibly well and she's very systematic in processing this anger by just doing the drawings and burning them.
I think the kids found it really valuable and important and I've been reassured not only by them, the way they dealt with me, but by how important it was for them that people still cared about their stories. I've been challenged about the little boy who takes us on a tour of the school which culminates at the place where they killed his father. I met this boy for the first time in March and he started telling me his story. In the middle of what he was saying he said, 'Would you like me to take you to the school? I want to take you to the school and show you where it all happened.'
I looked at him in complete disbelief because it would never have occurred to me to approach a child and ask him to go back to the school and tell me exactly what happened to him. I quickly checked with his mother, 'Is it really what he wants to do?' And she said, 'Yes, it is what he wants to do. And if he says that, then he really wants to take you there.' So that was really important for him to go there and to show us exactly what happened.
Lynne Jones:
I thought it was a wonderful film, Ewa, thank you very much. I agree with Bill in a sense—it's what happens next that's important. To feel, having involved yourself with the children in this way, probably there is some responsibility to see how they are in the future; especially if you think that the psychological support that they're receiving is inadequate.
I'd completely agree with you that children find the process of talking to journalists particularly, and to anybody else involved in the justice process, as healing. I've had experience of children refusing to talk when offered therapy but then opening up completely when offered the chance to talk to a War Crimes Tribunal, or indeed, to appear in court and face their accusers. So I'm well aware of the importance of that dynamic. But in both those processes, the children I've been involved with wanted me there, because I was the therapist in those cases, to accompany them. In my experience that accompanying process can take five, six, even ten years. I'm involved with children ten years after the event, so I'm wondering what you're doing about that?
Ewa Ewart:
Well, I went out working on this film without any kind of preparation from a psychologist, child psychologist or any help for that matter. I went to all kinds of Hostile Environment courses, I learnt how to be in a war zone, but I never had any preparation from any specialists for this kind of work I operated purely on human instinct and what really helped me as well was that I was speaking to them in Russian. And also the amount of time I was giving; spending time with the children before I actually interviewed them on camera allowed me to build up quite an intimate relationship with them. In many of the cases I spent a lot of time playing, talking to them—not about what they went through—but just trying to really build up some kind of a relationship with them, and with the camera before shooting. My instinct as a human being and as a journalist working on such a particular case was to know how to do it in the least damaging way for the children. I really needed to spend time with them and develop a relationship with them.
Okay, what you see is the final result. You, Lynne, and Bill are suggesting that this could be counter-productive, actually, in terms of bringing it out in the open and exposing it to the world.
Listen; this is what the kids are like a year on! And the other really important point I want to make is why I think, a year on, this story belongs to the children and has to be told through the children's eyes. because never before have you had such a big number of children taken purposely by a group of terrorists to advance their political goal; never before have such a big number of children paid with their lives for a political crisis created by adults.
What these children are doing to us—to you, to Bill and to me and to many people—is that they are holding up this mirror and saying to us, 'Look at yourself, what you have created.' They didn't create the mess that they ultimately paid for. They've been dragged into a political conflict not of their making; it was created by the generations of their parents.
Lynne Jones:
I don't disagree with anything you've said, Ewa, and I want to say I think the film should have been made and I think what you did was wonderful; your approach was great. You've really, in a sense, become a therapist for these children as well and therefore all I'm saying is, have you considered how you will follow up? Because I think you're engaged now and the children see you as more than just a film-maker giving them a very important voice to the world. I hope you'll be able to go back yourself if only to follow up.
Ewa Ewart:
Absolutely. You've really touched the nerve of something that is really more than a burning desire to go back. I would never really want to lose touch with these children; I became incredibly involved emotionally. But from the point of view of a journalist, what I really found difficult was to find some emotional detachment from what I was doing, which is so important to the objectivity of making such a programme. I found that that was a real challenge as well, trying to stay dispassionate about it, and I found that absolutely impossible on occasions. I made great friends with a lot of the parents; they kind of adopted me. Because I spent so much time with the children and their families, and I certainly intend to keep it up.
Let me tell you one thing that I managed and that I'm proud of. When I met an older brother of one of the little boys in the film, a 15-year-old brother, I got really very friendly with him and his family and they really helped me a lot. I spent a lot of time with his people and to cut a long story short, they realised that the older child [was] quite good at learning English. When I got back from my second visit in February, I managed to get this boy into a four-week language course in a school in England, so he came and he stayed four weeks in July.
Mark Brayne:
Ewa, before we go to Ian Prince, editor of Newsround, I just wanted to pick up on your point about not having preparation before you went. Because just to bring home to people assembled here in the Frontline Club as well, and to those who will read the transcription of this conversation on the Dart Centre Web site, if there's one thing that the Dart Centre is about, it is about preparing journalists and supporting journalists and programme makers in understanding and being prepared for the experience that they're going to have when they cover trauma.
Bill Yule and I have just been at a Government-led conference here in England on disaster management and one of the points that I was making there was that journalists who go to cover 'The City' for example, need to know the difference between their Nasdaq and their FTSE indexes. Journalists who cover football or basketball need to know the difference in rules for the games, but in the journalistic culture there's not yet a preparation for covering trauma, for which there are also rules. Trauma is something that journalists who do this kind of story need to be prepared for.
Your film, Ewa, is moving and powerful and you've done an enormous service to the children in the way that you've done it and to the understanding of what happened. But what I hope might be learned from this is the fact that you could go there out of a journalistic culture that expects you to be able to go in, emotionally just not prepared. You rose to the challenge extraordinarily well. This is not about criticising anybody, but the fact that you could go there without any kind of conscious preparation or conscious training or education, is in fact quite disturbing.
Ewa Ewart:
I didn't ask for any help, so maybe I should have asked for some help in the first place. I'm someone who is regarded as having been places, so it wasn't that there was a big issue of preparation for hostile environments, in the respect that we always see situations of violence in the war zone. It really only hit me when I was there. Maybe we could create a unit, or a system of support or a system of advice for people who are not necessarily prepared for this kind of assignment. Which can be an emotional minefield. I would be very happy to share my experience, and if anyone wants to talk to me about it, I'd be very happy. Because I think this is very important.
Mark Brayne:
Well, as it happens, and to tell the people here in the room too, we have actually started exactly this kind of training at the BBC. We've done five day-long courses and reached about fifty people so far. Melanie Moore from BBC Monitoring, who is a BBC co-trainer, is in the audience here with us as we speak and tomorrow is the very next training to prepare for exactly what you're describing, including a role play around the making of a documentary covering a cancer ward where you get very involved with the emotional drama of the people whose story you're telling.
Ian Prince, as Editor of Newsround, on BBC 1 Television, you've put a lot of work into thinking about how you cover distressing stories to children and about children. So what are your short responses to the film and your comments to Ewa?
Ian Prince: Well, we actually have a team out in the Hurricane Katrina region at the moment making a half-hour documentary, getting children's experiences and hearing their own experiences about the disaster that has affected them. I think one of the powerful things about this film is hearing a story like that, that's affected children so much, in children's own terms. And that's one of my observations about your film, which I thought was powerful; I thought the children were speaking in a very eloquent way and actually came across as very empowered about the way that they were able to explain these terrible events that had happened to them.
I was going to ask you how you built up your relationship with them and I know you've touched on that a little bit already but I'm quite intrigued to know a couple of things. One, how did the children react when you got the camera out after you'd been building up relationships with them; and also was there any stage at which you decided to turn the camera off and stop the filming?
Ewa Ewart:
First of all, I would obviously always ask permission of the parents and tell them about the project. We would ask the parents if they would mind if we talked to the child, but it was always ultimately the child's decision; either s/he would share the story or not share the story. Once we started developing relations—these people are incredibly hospitable people and the fact that I could speak the language, that helped me, because we tried to not go on constantly about the story but to take a break in my questions and try to take their minds off the subject by asking them things completely unrelated to it, so that was part of building my relationships with them.
The other thing was that I made several trips and there were a lot of little girls there and only two boys, so needless to say I came back absolutely loaded with presents. They weren't incredibly large or expensive presents but just little presents to let them know I'd remembered, I'd cared and I just really wanted to show that. Some little thing that would be like Barbie for the girls and they'd absolutely love it.
And let's say, with the little one I would spend three or four hours one afternoon playing at dressing the Barbie. My approach to them was the following. I would say, 'I really need your help. Let's make this programme together. I can't do it without you. It's something we can do for the children who survived and also for your friends who died in this tragedy.' I really tried to invite them by making them feel really an important part—it wasn't just that I was using them to get a story from them; it was us making the programme together.
And I think they were quite startled to begin with and whenever I said, 'Will you help me? Can we do this together?' and they said, 'Yes, that's cool. Yes, let's do it together.' That was one of the most effective things that I found in the course of making and preparing this programme, and before I finally switched the camera on, I'm telling you, I really would go back to the family and have a tea and I would comfort the parents, so I became part of the domestic scene And I think they found it also very important, and the fact that they thought they could come to me, it was just very, very friendly.
So finally, when we put the camera on, we just chatted and I said, 'Let's make it like a conversation,' And that is how we . And there was only one case—there were a couple of cases where the kids broke into tears, at which point I obviously stopped the interview immediately and I never continued; but there were only a couple of cases like that.
Ian Prince:
I'd just like to pick up on that point about emotion, because watching the children's emotional responses in that film it was almost a film of two halves. In the first half the children were very, very matter of fact in the way that they were delivering the stories of what had happened to them. The emotion from the children seemed to come out in the latter half of the film. Was that your experience of filming or was that down to how you edited their responses?
Ewa Ewart:
Yes, you really spotted—I couldn't agree more. I found them almost to the point of being dispassionate and incredibly emotionally disciplined while we recounted three days of horror and even when we covered the details of what happened, what was happening to them during those three days, when they started faltering emotionally was when they started telling me how they were trying to cope with the aftermath of that.
I found them still very unsure, very tearful and I've still got so much material I wasn't able to use in the film because there's only a certain amount we can put in one hour of television. But my chances of talking to them were endless and the way I really told that I would find a way of using the material because it's very rich material. For example, the boy who took us to the school, he was incredibly confident while retelling his past experience—almost confident that he really had mapped it all out what he's going to do when he's grown up. He's going to go to Chechnya and kill the terrorists. This is where he says, 'I'm very fearful. I can't sleep on my own, I'm sleeping with my mother and he consciously feels that this is going to happen again. So at this stage the purpose of showing how the kids are trying to cope with the present day.
Mark Brayne:
Ewa, unfortunately we're going to have to let you go quite shortly as you're on a mobile in deepest Baton Rouge, but before we do, Jonathan Charles has just come back from Baghdad, literally almost off the plane. Jonathan, as we were saying just before Ewa came on the line, you were in Beslan at the time and you went back three months afterwards and you've written a very powerful From Our Own Correspondent for the BBC, which is on the Dart Centre web site, amongst many other personal stories. Could you give us your reflections a year on, and comments to Ewa.
Jonathan Charles:
Hi Ewa. This is the second time I've seen your film, actually. Rather bizarrely I saw it in Baghdad last weekend on BBC World Service Television. When I watched it I thought it was a very compelling, very powerful film; definitely the best film you've ever made. Bits of it made me cry, I have to say, as some of the emotions came back from the first time I saw it, reminding me of what I'd seen. My abiding memory of Beslan is one of the pictures you had in the film, which was shot by myself and a cameraman, of a father sitting on the pavement putting his head in his hands and we watched him collapse to the pavement as he realised what was happening to the children inside. So I found it a very moving and powerful film.
I have to say though, and I don't mean this in any nasty way, that your film could only have been made by someone who was not at Beslan at the time. What I mean by that Ewa is that I would have felt, if I'd gone back to speak to those children, that I was using them, that I was exploiting them; because having lived through that experience of those three days in Beslan, having lived with a family whose children were involved, I could not have done that. Partly it's cowardice, Ewa, I don't think I could have put myself through that.
Ewa Ewart:
I couldn't argue with anything you've just said and I don't think I could go to Beslan like two weeks after what happened and compile a documentary. That's why some of my conversations with the children really started in February and, you know, they wanted an amount of time to go by and create this kind of what you might call breathing space. But it also allowed the children, in a way, to gain some kind of a perspective and I genuinely found this, that it was so important to them that there are still people out there who still care.
Nevertheless, as I said at the beginning, I was still on a constant guilt trip and that thought was never far away from me and that kind of made an additional strain for me, an additional grief of what my own situation could have been. I have no right whatsoever to complain. But this is just a comment rather than trying to challenge what you just said because I agree with everything.
Jonathan Charles:
No, I agree with you, it's very interesting because when we went back a few weeks later, we went back about eight/ten weeks or so afterwards to find out how they were coping. I and my producer, when went back to make this BBC 2 special film at that point, took the decision we would only speak to adults; that we wouldn't speak to children because we didn't think at that point—it was only ten weeks after as opposed to a longer period that you left before going back—that that was too soon to start talking to the children about their experiences. Even though we'd spoken to children during the event itself, we felt that it would re-traumatise them eight or ten weeks on and we did only speak to adults.
But I think it was because my producer and I felt we could not put ourselves through that, having lived through that experience. We were oversensitive perhaps, as well, but I have to say Ewa it's a very powerful film and bits of it did make me cry.
Mark Brayne:
Ewa, thank you very much indeed for joining us. I'd love to open this up for a wider conversation with the people collected here at the Frontline Club but we've had a good run of your time and thank you very much indeed.
Ewa Ewart:
Thank you very much for all your comments; I really do appreciate them. They gave me lots of food for thought. Thank you for your generous feedback and I'm really, really sorry—I would rather have been with you instead of in this flooding Louisiana but here we are. I'm open for any follow up questions if anyone wants to contact me whether on personal grounds or professional grounds or anything related to the film; I would be more than happy to answer any questions that people might want to ask me.
Mark Brayne:
Thanks Ewa. And Good Luck in Louisiana!
Okay. Bill, can I bring you back up front? I'd like now to come to Bill and Lynne and Ian for a more substantial comment and then we'll open it up to questions.
Bill Yule:
I really felt very mean at having to open up and be in any way other than praising of Ewa's film because it is very moving. But it just seemed to me we had the chance, and we now have more of a chance, to talk about some of the issues in re-exposing kids to something awful like that. Of course it's fascinating and I was upset at myself, in a way, at going against what I've been preaching—that is the word for it—over the last 15 years, that we've got to listen to the children. But the question is, who listens and doesn't need to be as public as that, and will they thank us in a little while?
I just think it's an issue that needs to be looked at and in the end or in the short term, it could actually be researched. We could find out if it's just an excuse to say that it's testimony, which can be helpful. Certainly political activists who've been tortured found it very helpful, given their testimony that a whole new treatment Cognitive Exposure Therapy has come out of this. One, The Kidnet is working in Sri Lanka at the moment. So there are aspects of that that I can see are potentially positive but I share what Ian was pointing out in the second half that some of those kids were showing lots of signs of not just stress reactions or bereavement reactions, reactions of questioning the world and so on; all the things we know about.
And so my question really was what help was being given? It wasn't an uninformed question because—let me tell you just very quickly. When I saw it on the box, like many others I felt impelled to offer some help. So what did I do? I rang DFID (the British government's overseas aid arm) thinking they'd be the people whose place to go through. A very nice lady answered and I said, 'could you put me through to your Russian desk, please?' 'We don't have one.' I said, 'You do have one, I've got your organigram in front of me'—I'd got it up on my screen—'Ah, yes. But it's all in-country now. We can't get through to them.' I said, 'well, this is what I'm trying to do; I'm saying there is some help that we might be able to offer. How do we do it?' She did come back to me the next day and was terribly unhelpful.
The British Psychological Society was inundated with offers from people to help. The society has got no mechanism for marshalling that help and doing anything with it. So really it was quite frustrating, in the main. Then when I heard on the news that a bunch of Moscow Child Psychiatrists were jumping on a plane to go down to Beslan, I thought, 'Oh, s**t!' because not so long ago I'd done some work with Chernobyl, which had taken me to Moscow to meet the crème de la crème of Russian child psychologists and they would put the fear of God into any other atheist than me.
They reached for the powerful drugs before the kids sat down. Then I learned the group that were going down had actually received some training in our Trauma Counselling for Children Recovery Counselling from colleague of mine in Norway. So at least there's something more up to date going down there. I've just heard that they were kicked out a few weeks ago, so it will be interesting to hear. And we know that the Red Cross is in there at the moment and Steven Regel from Nottingham Traumatic Stress Service has just gone over with them, so it will be fascinating to me to find out what did and what didn't—not so much help, because it's a wee bit early for that.
Because the three days sitting there with the bombs above you with the heat radiating down, people dying and people being shot is what the kids saw; that is horrendous. And yes, they can tell you their story. I don't mean this too rudely but forgive me, it's what I usually say, they tell it in a journalistic sense and I think I mean by that The Daily Mail; and that is boom, boom, boom without any emotion initially.
And then when we're talking to them it's extraordinarily privileged, you take them back to the top of the story and say, 'Now, tell me again and tell me what you were thinking, what you were feeling.' And then you get these enormous moving stories that the kids have and they need some help to know how to get on top of it because we can't take the memories away, but we can help them to control their reactions and these sort of things. So I just think there are these issues about—expectations is putting it very negatively—but are you, as journalists, trained or familiar with the conventions of the rights of the child and the implications that that has for invading children's privacy and so on. Is it enough to get the parents' permission when the parents themselves are traumatised?
There are a whole set of issues around that and having said that, again I kick myself, but what I would hate to see is some sort of Stalinist committee that everyone's got to go through and get permission to do it and there's only one way of doing it because that way we'd lose things, so I'm conflicted and I'll shut up.
Mark Brayne:
Just before going to Lynne I'd just like to say that again, from the perspective of the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, about which all of you know because I keep sending you emails about it, one of the things that we're keen on, one of the reasons that we exist at the Dart Centre, is to help journalists understand the impact on themselves of the stories they do, so to keep themselves well, emotionally on track so that they can continue to do the best possible job.
But the other aspect is absolutely about the education of journalists in trauma. Because trauma constitutes a very large part of news and programme making, it's well over half and possibly 70 percent; and journalists have no training at the moment in an understanding of what it is they're witnessing. So one of the things that I hope will come out of evenings like this and the training we do at the BBC, the engagement of people like Jonathan and the bridge-building that we're doing between journalism and the mental health professions is a much more sophisticated and joined up approach to journalism.
This brings us to Lynne. Lynne, you've reminded me that you're technical advisor on mental health to the International Medical Corps, Child Psychiatrist and you've published a book which came out this year Then They Started Shooting. It is a riveting book about the experience of Muslim and Serb children, very closely observed. Not dissimilar to this film but over a much longer time span and a riveting account of the lived experience of children in Goradze and Foca, now known as Srbinje, in the Muslim and Serbian parts of Bosnia. I asked Lynne to talk a little bit about the context, not just Beslan.
Lynne Jones:
Mark said to widen it out and, after watching the film, to talk about other children that would be interesting for you. I wanted to tell two short stories, one about a Bosnian boy and one about some Kosovar children/. Because the process I engaged in is not so dissimilar to Ewa's. I immersed myself in Bosnian children's lives, in two towns, in my case over a year, although I was working in one town as a psychiatrist first, and then I became engaged in research. I went through a University ethically-approved process of selecting children who wanted to tell their stories and lived with them and then went back three and four years later, so I know what's happening to those children and remain in touch. In the first year I made sure that those who wanted it could access help if they wanted to.
The children in Kosova are children who are actually my patients. What was important to me, with all the children, as with Ewa, was to hear their voices and how they made sense of experiences. I also wanted to know how they dealt with those experiences in order to make themselves better so that—as I said to the children—we can learn how from them how to make children better.
So I thought it was interesting to tell you a little bit about Samir who was nine when the Bosnian war began in his very small town. He knew nothing about war; he watched the grenades with pleasure when they first arrived, thinking it was interesting. Then he was imprisoned in his house by Serbian Forces alongside his family and this is just a tiny little section of what he told me. Although this is in the third person, I've only used the children's voices; it's them speaking.
One afternoon, two Serbs came to visit again. Samir knew them, they always pretended to be friendly but he didn't believe them; neither did his father. One of them once said he would help them to escape but he offered to take them to Rogatica which was in Serb territory Father said if they went there they might be put in a camp or killed so they should stay here. His mother brought in the coffee [and] they sat on the sofa together. The Serb was telling his father about the war in Croatia. He had spent a year there and was boasting that he'd killed forty Muslims. Samir could see that his father and mother were unhappy but they just sipped their coffee without speaking.
'So what do you think? What kind of weapon did I use to kill those guys?' Father looked at the floor and stayed silent. Samir could see that he didn't want to answer but the Serb man insisted. 'Come on, what do you think?' Father lifted his head and looked at the man's stomach; there were two guns stuck in holsters. He pointed at one. The man laughed, 'No, it's not this gun.' Father pointed to the other gun and the man laughed again. He was enjoying himself. 'Not this one either.' Father shrugged. 'I really don't know what kind of weapon you used to kill them.' 'Come on, I insist.'
Samir wondered if Father had seen the knife on the man's belt. He was scared; it didn't feel like a game. 'With that knife?' 'No, not with this knife.' He looked really pleased with himself. With a flourish he pulled a small knife out of his pocket, the kind some men use as a razor. 'This is what did the job! Forty Balija (a negative Serbian appellation for Muslims), with this little knife.' Samir felt sick. The men gulped their coffee then the one who had said he would rescue them stood up. He looked straight at Samir and his sisters.
'You better choose three knives yourself and kill these children of yours. Better to kill the children yourself than watch while some Serb does the job for you. Kill the boy first and then the others. They're just Balija.' Samir and his sisters sat frozen on the coucn. Samir didn't want to speak, he was too scared; what would his father do? What was Ballia? After what seemed like hours he heard his older sister whisper, 'Father, it's not true, is it? You won't kill us?' Immediately Father hugged them and told them not to be silly. He would never do such a thing. He was here to help and protect them and he would never leave them.
They survived and they were taken in a truck to another part of Bosnia where they lived with displaced people and came back at the end of the war and I saw Samir a year after the war. He was a very troubled young man, very silent, shy but very eager to talk to me, which is an interesting paradox. He wanted to tell the story and having had good training from people like Bill, among others, we did explore how he felt about things, although I made clear at the beginning that I wasn't their therapist, [but] I am very used to interviewing children. This interviewing process was number of separate interviews spread over a long period of time.
He told me he felt lonely at school because it was hard to communicate with other children; he felt nervous when the teachers talked to him. He had intrusive memories that came out of nowhere or when he was anywhere near the house. He'd be frightened and miserable as he'd remember what had happened. This period of imprisonment, which was a very short one of three weeks, was the experience that dominated. Not the shelling or the bombing or the shooting which he also experienced, because it was in during the house arrest that he was really scared he was going to die.
I offered him therapy, which we had available in the town and which he refused because his father had decided he would take him to the local woman who was a Muslim; the Imam would have said she was a witch but she wasn't. She was a deeply religious woman used by everybody. Her service was overwhelmed during the war and she used a local process, which is very complicated and would take me hours to explain to you but it involves using melted iron and boiling water and drinking and sweating and prayer. [There's] no discussion with the child; he simply does what he is told. It is ceremony and she allowed me [to] spend the day with her to watch while she took his fear away. I did formal trauma scale tests early on when I first met him and later over a long period of time, including after the treatment He really got better; it was very impressive and he had a follow-up treatment maybe two or three months later.
When I saw him four years later he was a totally different young man. [He was] becoming a welder, obsessed with football, in love with his girlfriend, living very happily in a new house that they'd built, wanting to get on with the future When I'd seen him two years after the war, he was politically monitoring all the time. 'Is there going to be a war again? Are the Serbs coming back? [He was] very, very scared.
When I saw him at this time I asked what he felt about the Serbs who were now coming back in quite large numbers to the community. 'Well, why don't we live together? Why not? There are good and bad people. If they're good people, why don't we live with them?' So his fear and his anger, without any specific therapeutic input, apart from what I have described had diminished. I think that had a lot to do with his family and their support and the love and the feelings he had living with them.
Just to put that in context, briefly, I'll just tell you about a Kosovo family because it's pertinent to the issue of justice here. During the war, very typically, they and their mothers and sisters and aunts were left by the men who moved out of town, thinking this would make their families safer; this was very common. Serb paramilitary forces moved into the town, rounded up this extended family of twenty-five people and harassed them for two hours, I won't bore you with the details, shooting above their heads, shooting at the ground lining them up and pretending to shoot them, then moving them on, lining them up again.
They ended up in the corner of a garden under a hazelnut tree—I'll tell you why I know all this in such detail—and then they opened fire and everybody was killed except the girls, who put up their arms like this, and two other children. So five survived, left lying bleeding on the ground. Other forces moved in, picked them up, found they were alive, took them to Pristina hospital where they spent three months, not very well treated but taken care of. [They were] completely isolated, no idea who'd lived and who'd died. I saw them when we came back into Kosovo, after we were allowed back in with British forces and I was immediately asked by a journalist, in fact, Emma Dayly, an excellent journalist from the Independent who said, 'I've found these children. You have to come and see them they're in a very bad way and they're in the hospital.'
So I came to see them and the first thing the girls said was, 'Our mothers are alive,' although they'd seen their mothers die in front of them. So the first issue was how do you tell the truth? How do you talk? And with the family together we had to tell them the truth; you have to tell children the truth. So of course both cried and were extremely upset, but after that their reactions were completely different. Arlinda wanted to immerse herself in what had happened, like the young man in the film. She took me round; I know this event in vivid detail, I can relive it myself because I was walked through it, step by step as Arlinda replayed it for me. The other children had no interest in that; they did not want to discuss the event. They wanted to discuss the past and their grief and their loss and their feelings about missing their mother, but they never, with me, discussed the killing.
I asked them if they wanted to but having said, 'No, we don't want to talk about it,' I didn't ask them to do so. The only one with PTSD was Arlinda, which is interesting. She was the one who was immersed in the event and she was the one who needed to talk about it a lot. These children were medivaced to England where I'm very glad to say they had a lot of surgical treatment; I followed them up in Manchester and worked with them.
Eighteen months after the event the War Crimes Tribunal came along and said, 'we want to interview these children, will it re-traumatise them?' I said, 'Let's ask the children.' So they all went up to Manchester [and] every child wanted to be interviewed, including the five-year old boy. We used the child sex abuse police facilities with video cameras and they knew what they were doing. We talked about how it might feel afterwards; I would be available to them afterwards. I heard the whole story six times in that day, which I'd never heard before. They all wanted to do that and they all told me how important it was for them.
Two years later they were the first children to have a War Crimes Trial in Belgrade, which is the first time a Serbian has been tried in Belgrade for crimes in Kosovo and they were the key witnesses. They asked if I could go with them, so I said, 'Fine.' I managed to get leave from my job and we had a very extraordinary week in Belgrade protected by Serbian Security Forces and raced around in SUVs. They was very worried about us because there'd just been an assassination of a prime minister. All the children lined up for the ID parade, they all stood up in court and faced their attackers and they appeared to find it healing.
They're doing well. They've also had a documentary made about them—their choice. I think it's interesting to see the role of the media in healing and talk about what role it can play.
Mark Brayne:
Ian—the role of the media in building the narrative of children's trauma and conveying it in a way that is respectful and understandable.
Ian Prince:
Yes, in Newsround, what we try and achieve in telling some very traumatic stories in recent years, if you think of the amount of stories that have been around—there have been the London Bombs, there's been the Tsunami, there's been the ongoing Iraq conflict etc; there was the Soham murders a couple of years ago. So, very distressing stories that we have to tell to our audience and for those of you who haven't seen Newsround for a while it's still going strong; it's actually on three channels now and there are about eight programmes and bulletins a day on BBC 1 and BBC2 and on CBBC children's programmes so it's very much at the heart of children's programming.
I think the way that we approach it is that we structure our story telling in a way to help our audience process that information and—hopefully, where it's possible—to come to some kind of resolution in their own mind. What we try not to do is 'wham, bam! here's a load of facts, goodbye!' With a particularly distressing story, Beslan for example, the week that that happened, Jonathan—I was just thanking him earlier for doing a live into Newround for us; that's the first chance I've had in the past year!
What we were actually doing there was concentrating much less on the detail of the distressing events, much less in terms of all the killing and how that happened. What we concentrated more on was why that might have happened, to give as much context to our audience as possible because a very basic question with anything is, 'why is this happening?' And if children don't understand why, it's the kind of thing they might dwell on more and more so we put in as much context as we can—what are the reasons why this event might have happened? What are the consequences of the event and what is being done to help those people?
So it just paints, I think possibly, a slightly wider story than some other news programmes do. With the London bombs it was a very difficult one because at that time it was difficult to answer the question, why it happened. Who had done it? Where had they come from? Were they UK Nationals, were they not? So we concentrated a lot then on the fact that as much was being done as possible to try and catch the people who had perpetrated the bombings.
We find with our audience, one of the first questions they ask is, why has this happened? So we try to deal with that as much as possible. And the other question that they instinctively ask is, 'Is this going to happen to me?' Even though something may have happened a long, long way away—my own boy is now seven and I've seen it with him for the first time with the recent hurricane. He said, 'Those pictures are terrible. Is this going to happen here?' So we will actually put script lines in our stories to explain that hurricanes—and certainly not of that scale—generally, didn't happen in the UK. Something like Beslan or Soham, these things are in the news because they are so unusual and so rare.
When we did some background about the Iraq conflict, during the actual war itself, we were putting in very, very basic facts such as Saddam's missiles could not reach the UK. The range of the missiles was not going to reach the UK and there was not going to be fighting on the streets of the UK. These are very, very basic questions that our audience ask; we try to answer those questions.
Another thing that we do, in terms of bringing some kind of resolution in the mind of our audience, is we give feedback. We ask for email comments on stories—so with Beslan we had email comments from our audience that one of our reporters or presenters read out and that gives, to an extent, the emotional dimension of the story as well, which we're very keen to acknowledge. So again, it's not just bare facts; we report the story, the context. We give email reaction from our audience—and they might even email something in like, 'this is terrible! How could this happen? I'm really sad. I've been drawing pictures with my friends.' [It's very] simple stuff [but] by reading that back to our audience, giving them the information, hopefully, we don't leave them with any sense of isolation.
So again, the general principle is that we give them, I hope, the tools to be able to process that information in their minds as much as possible and not leave them with bare facts, which they could then dwell on.
Mark Brayne:
One suspects that there are lessons and things to be learned from the approach that you take in Newsround, for the wider journalism of trauma.
Jonathan Charles:
Can I just say one thing? Sometimes journalists forget that they are not psychiatrists, or not Child Psychologists and they go in and they think they are genuinely helping people by getting them to recount their tale and I think that's wholly wrong. One reason we decided not to go to speak to the children again is that I think children naturally want to tell their story. It's not difficult to go and persuade a child to talk to a camera but sometimes, as adults it's our duty to stop them doing that. And I think as reporters we all need to remember that and too often reporters don't remember that. And that was why we decided to take the approach we did, when we went back to Beslan.
Ian Prince:
That's interesting. One example, one case that I was involved in, I was making a film a couple of years ago in Sierra Leone amongst former child soldiers and we did it in conjunction with UNICEF. Before UNICEF would allow us anywhere near these children, some of whom were as young as eight—they'd been forced to take drugs, they'd been forced to commit atrocities under the influence of drugs; very, very harrowing stories—but UNICEF made us go through hoops in terms of discussions with them. They were speaking to the children, they were getting advice from people on the ground before we went out, to identify the best possible case studies for us to talk to.
UNICEF has actually produced a pamphlet about how to interview and how to deal with children—an information pamphlet for the media.
Darius Bazargan:
I work for the BBC in various different places. I've got a question for Ian, which we've sort of discussed amongst ourselves but I'd be interested to know. Obviously all of the stories from the Iraq war to terrorists attacks, big natural disasters and so on, are very distressing for children and you have to explain that these are unusual events—for example Beslan; for example Soham—children weren't collateral damage. That awful phrase when people are dropping bombs and children get hit; they're generally trying to hit someone else. A natural disaster is indiscriminate, children have less body strength so maybe they are more the victims; it's indiscriminate.
But the people who went into the school in Beslan [and] Ian Huntley went out with the deliberate intent to harm children—not children being caught up in another violent event. These people specifically went to harm children so it's not enough in those cases to say, 'well, terrible things happen but they wouldn't happen to you.' Wars happen and children get caught up in it but they're not really trying to hurt children. But these people went very deliberately to harm children; it's different isn't it, when you explain that sort of story?
Ian Prince:
It is different; that's quite a difficult dimension to acknowledge in those kinds of stories. But just to put Soham into context, we did put the line in there that this is in the news because it is so very unusual and statistically, it is still incredibly rare, particularly in the UK, for anything like that to happen to children. Another documentary we're doing at the moment is actually the biggest risk to all of us going home tonight, and it's certainly one of the biggest risks in the UK to children, and that's road traffic accidents. To most children, one of the biggest risks in the UK is cars and roads, walking to school and crossing the road and so we're doing that story as well and that's sometimes a fact that we put in with one of these other stories. We say the risk of something like this happening to you is much, much less than being injured by a car and yet cars are something that people tend not to worry about because they're there all the time.
Mark Brayne:
Joanna, can I come to you because you made a very important point in the break about the links that don't exist between journalism and the mental health professions; the bridges that could usefully be put in place.
Joanna Morris-Smith:
I'm a child psychologist and I work at the Great Ormond Street Hospital Child Trauma Clinic. I also have another clinic down in Surrey. Our particular interest was that we had been told that there was some money, in fact a huge amount of money that had been donated and it had come through readers of particular newspapers and that a portion of it might be available to do some psychological support or training that would help people working with the children of Beslan. And so our interest was really to try to make contact with people who were connected to Beslan and also are professional therapists, who we could help teach them these new techniques. It's EMDR that we were actually thinking of teaching at the time, particularly.
We set out to try and find those links. We actually made contact with somebody who subsequently came over and did a training with us to get experience of what it was like but it turned out to be somebody completely inappropriate whose actual interest was to take us to the borders of Chechnya to do some work there and perhaps in Chechnya, when the whole goal of what we were offering would have been for the Beslan children; and children specifically.
The very sad thing was that this all happened within a month of Ewa starting her work out there and making those connections and for me, watching that film was extremely moving and I think it is an extremely well-put together film. It really highlights the symptoms of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and trauma in children. I think it's a brilliant training film for professionals. I do have my concerns, as Bill has mentioned, about using the children etc, but as a training film for professionals I think it teaches them a lot about it.
But the sadness for me in watching this whole film was that she had had no access to anybody like us to talk to before she went. We were trying to make the bridges; we lost our bid on any of the money to get this help out there because we couldn't get the right connections going. There she was [and] we could have been a part of that process and each of those children could have been helped into a better place, therapeutically, than the one they were actually left in when I was watching that film. And that for me was the heart-tearing bit, that these are all resolutions that children reach themselves; we've seen it. But they can go somewhere so much better with treatment.
Derek Somerfield:
I've been involved with some of these things for some years. I came late and didn't see the film but if the framework of the evening is to do with journalistic handling in an appropriate way of children in tragedy, if that's the framework, I sort of feel that you're being overly deferential to the idea that mental health professionals have some kind of special insight and sensitivity about things. I speak as one myself.
If I could coin an aphorism I think a child is as sensitive or as tough or as weak as the culture they are living in thinks they are. If you look at the media handling of Aberfaan, 1966 (a disaster in Wales in which 116 schoolchildren and 28 others were killed when a mining slagheap engulfed a village school), there was no army of counsellors and psychologists descending and making remarks, as at Beslan, of profound psychological scars for years and years. Beslan had 48 psychologists and psychiatrists on 24-hour alert, for Christ's sake! None of that sort of stuff at Aberfan! The kids got back to school, it was normal, it was commended in the media for its self-sufficiency; there was no psychologisation of these kids. It was a matter-of-factness—whilst not diminishing the horror of the coal tip engulfing the whole school.
If we assume these kids have incredibly thin skins and there's this thing called trauma, which is really going to stalk them, I think we will see what we come to find. I actually think that a lot of the time I'd rather have these kids talking sensitively, non-coercively, to a journalist, than to some of the mental health professionals who've swanned around the world—in the whole industry—saying 'Hey, wait a moment, we've got to get in there first even if the family reunion has to be delayed!' Don't be too deferential, honestly.
Mark Brayne:
I suspect Bill and Lynne will have something to say on that so just before I give you the microphone, it's worse for the journalists amongst us to bear in mind there is quite a lot of discussion around on what constitutes appropriate best practice in the intervention or non-intervention post trauma. [There's] a big debate around whether you debrief and whether you shouldn't debrief—watchful waitingness. Now there are very clear guidelines from Britain's National Institute for Clinical Excellence saying don't debrief but that doesn't mean to say don't do anything at all. You've just got to be very careful about doing the right thing.
I just need to say, as a psychotherapist and as a journalist, the danger with this debate is that journalists can be very confused when they hear therapists battling it out over what's appropriate and what isn't appropriate. I just want to put that little bit of context in for the journalists among us. Bill, first of all.
Bill Yule:
A very simple question! Does that mean that you deny the findings that came out in the British Journal of Psychiatry 18 months ago that 33 years later, 29 percent of the children of Aberfaan have serious mental health problems?
Derek Somerfield:
Yes I've read through it. It's rubbish! They have led normal lives. The children of Aberfan have grown up, they're 40 and 50 now and they've had entirely normal lives.
Lynne Jones:
First of all I know that Mark would like to push the debate away because it's confusing. The debate is enormously important and I think journalists would do well to pay attention to it because it does affect the use of resources—access that you wanted or didn't get, how enormous sums of money are spent. Unlike Derek or Bill, who I'm proud to say have both had a profound influence on my own work, I've spent the last 15 years mostly in a war zone or in a disaster zone working, immersed in this work.
My position on the debate is slightly different. I actually think there is a construct called trauma and I've certainly seen in different cultures, different expressions of a traumatic reaction that can be prolonged; it is not in the majority. I think thirty per cent is probably right, though I haven't read the paper they're referring to. My experience is, if you want a breakdown—it's a breakdown I use for teaching, is that in any disaster you can draw a pyramid and you can expect that about thirty per cent are going to have symptoms that could be mediated with assistance. About three to five per cent are going to have serious problems that really need help and the rest, which [means] the majority don't need our help.
My problem with the army of trauma counsellors, and I know Bill feels the same, who arrived in Indonesia and in Sri Lanka is, they knew much less than most journalists as to how to work. Scientologists doing therapeutic massage. People doing EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing)! A study done by UNICEF two years ago, showed that the Indonesians are terrified of EMDR. Now I actually think that EMDR works. Eye Movement Desensitisation is a therapy for helping with traumatic images, which has been proved to work. The problem is, and this raises the problem of culture and context, not everybody wants you to sit in front of them doing this. They think they're being bewitched; they become very upset and they'd rather not have the therapy.
So this shows you that even with interventions that work, you have to think about culture and politics and be culturally literate. This applies to both therapists and journalists; how you talk to a child, who you talk to, how you work. What matters is probably not how much therapeutic training you've had but whether you are culturally and politically literate.
And secondly, and nobody's mentioned this, what is your continuing relationship with that child? What all the evidence shows and I know from reading both their papers, Derek and Bill agree with this, is that one of the major protective factors is social relationships. We now know that people with PTSD do better if they're not isolated. We know that people are less likely to get it if they have supportive and caring families.
Now what Ewa did, it seems to me, is she went in and formed very powerful relationships with those children. My concern for the follow up is, how do they feel if she doesn't come back? My concern when Newsround comes in and interviews children who want to talk, is 'great!' But what do they tell them about continuing a relationship? Because if a child has opened up to you and given you this gift of whatever story they've had—and I do share with Derek—my experience of working with children in these contexts is that they're pretty tough. The ones who say they want to talk are pretty tough.
But they make a friend of you. They become . it's a very strong relationship and if you don't talk about how that connection is going to be sustained—and email is very useful—then you are doing a disservice because you have helped in the healing process by forming a relationship and you can seriously mess them up if you just rupture that. That's my view.
Mark Brayne:
I have to say Derek that I'm delighted you're here today. I've heard a lot about you and it's nice to meet you for the first time and thank you for raising this. It's a very important dimension to the debate.
We are now approaching the end of our time. This is a discussion that could go on for a long time and will. It's a very important discussion indeed. I'd just like to ask each panellist to very briefly wrap up with a final thought on Beslan and the lessons we can learn from the coverage of children's trauma because unfortunately it will happen again.
Jonathan Charles:
We deal in trauma all the time. As Mark says you only have to watch a news bulletin to see that. And certainly, as a foreign correspondent, I would say that ninety-five per cent of our work is now trauma of one sort or another. But, we are mentally ill-equipped to deal with it because we don't have that background that you have and that is a real problem.
I see time and again my colleagues, including at Beslan and in the aftermath of Beslan, going in and traumatising people with their questions. Not just in the event of the thing itself but in the aftermath of the event. They are so fixated on getting the story that that is all they care about and I think we have to get people into a very different mentality; that they have to sit and think about their responsibilities as journalists first of all. We're starting to do that. Organisations like the BBC are starting to do it but I think we're far away from being anywhere near that. I've heard yet more horror stories about what some journalists were doing in New Orleans, including BBC journalists, I'm sorry to say.
Bill Yule:
I think we'll look at some of the recent evidence from 9/11 as mediated by television. There was very, very good evidence that children who most watched the repeated over and over and over playing of the planes hitting the twin towers got very, very anxious and upset. And that was not just kids in New York. Studies in London and Seattle showed exactly the same thing. So the power of the story is there. And the question then is, how, when you're telling the story, because I'm not arguing for censorship, but yes, the parents have a certain responsibility to know about it and so on but it's what we were discussing the last few days at the Emergency Planning Conference was, if you can give them something to do that is constructive, get that message over as well, however small or whatever, that is quite empowering and appears to be a protective way of dealing with things.
But to come back to the point I made earlier I think these are issues—we can argue and I think we will; Derek and I will continue shouting at each other for a long time—but in the end we can answer some of the questions by researching them, by gathering data to see whether these things do pop up in different cultures; whether we've got to do things in a different way. And bit by bit we can get closer to being more helpful and this is all that matters to me.
Ian Prince:
I perfectly agree with what you're saying when you say we need to think very, very carefully about how we approach children and how we deal with them. I think there is a large element not being very professional in this, from your point of view. But I think there's a large part that instinct can actually play and I think Ewa referred to that in the way that she was talking to children.
But just turning everything on its head and seeing it from the broadcasting point of view and from a children's point of view, I think there's an absolutely crucial and fundamental element here, which is that children's voices should, and must, be heard in all these stories no matter what they are. If we ignored children and ignored what children had to say, I think that would skew any perception about the impact that these stories have had. So I think that's a very important principal.
Lynne Jones:
Since you've given me the opportunity I will say one more thing, which is I think the media has an enormous role to play in educating the public about what is the place of trauma in these situations. This is a film focussed on trauma but as a mental health professional, and I speak as a psychiatrist now, the research from post 9/11 even bears me out. PTSD is not necessarily the main diagnosis and as a psychiatrist trying to deal with post-conflict and post-disaster psychiatry, I have many other, greater problems that don't get any media attention at all and the media has no interest in them.
My favourite story is arriving at an orphanage in Sarajevo under siege in the middle of the war. A friend of mine took me out there because this is where 60 schizophrenics had arrived having found their own way from a hospital that had been taken over by the Serb Military. After wandering into the city they'd been gathered up and put here and I went up to see what I could do. I was told that CNN's Christiane Annanpour, no other, had come a few days earlier looking for children, traumatised children, and there were none. She said, 'Well what is here then? Are there any soldiers here?' 'No'. 'Well, no traumatised children, no soldiers—no story!' And she left. And actually, if she'd walked in and seen how these people with serious mental illness were coping with the war, she would have had the story of a lifetime.
These are the stories that don't interest and others: children with developmental disorders, children with learning disability, hungry children—it's not just trauma. There are other stories that are really important.
Mark Brayne:
Just a couple of points before we conclude. Ewa's email, for anybody who wants to get in touch directly with Ewa Ewart is: eva.ewart@bbc.co.uk—English spelling—and when she says do get in touch with her she really means it. I know of few journalists—there's one sitting on my left here as well—who care as passionately and deeply as Ewa does. Actually, that said, there are a lot of journalists who care as passionately and deeply about what they do, but Ewa is an extraordinary documentary maker.
I want to thank Vaughan on the electrics over there. Vaughan, owner, founder extraordinaire of this extraordinary place, the Frontline Club. It is a unique institution any where in the world—restaurant on the ground floor, clubroom in the middle and this amazing space up here to have this kind of conversation. These conversations take place every week; some of them are Dart Centre, most of them are Vaughan's own making subsidised by the Soros Open Society Institute. Film showings about the nature and craft of particularly broadcast journalism; some astonishing stuff gets shown here so get yourself on the mailing list if you're not already on it and do come and join up as a member.
Just to thank the panel: Jonathan, fresh off . well, not very fresh, off the plane. Bill, Lynne and Ian, thank you very, very much for coming along for what I've found to be a quite stimulating and quite extraordinary discussion. And thanks to Ewa as well.
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