Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

This is a transcript from a Frontline Club discussion on South Africa.

Mark Brayne: Thank you all very much for coming tonight and I hope that the next hour-and-a-half with Sherbanu Sacoor, who came to England about a year ago from Southern Africa, is going to be educative and illuminating.

This is the first of the thematic seminars, or workshops/discussions, that we’ve done under the new heading of The Dart Centre Europe for Journalism and Trauma.

This is the second event at the Frontline Club that we’ve done. And many of you are old friends, in various forms, of this discussion.

The focus of Sherbanu’s comments will be mainly South Africa but we have a number of colleagues here who know Zimbabwe very well and we should see it in the context of the wider reporting of Africa and African news.

Many of you know already of Dart’s interest in how emotions, trauma and good journalism relate together. It’s about how we report trauma, how we report extreme emotional distress - which constitutes a very large part of what we do as our core journalistic business - and how we can look after ourselves in the process of doing that.

We have amongst you a mix of journalists, journalism educators, trauma specialists, psychotherapists, representatives of the employer assistance programmes who support journalists in the experience of emotional distress around their journalism.

Sherbanu, over to you for a short while, and after that, let’s open it up to general discussion rather than simply question and answer.

Sherbanu Sacoor: When Mark told me I had to do this, at first I was quite daunted. So why don’t I begin with the frequently asked questions that I was asked when I first arrived in England?

First was, ‘Where are you from?’ and if I said I was from South Africa everyone looked at me and said,’ Well, most of the people there are either black or white, and you’re neither’.

I want to talk about the racial laws in South Africa and how the categorisation of people led to the intense violence. From 1950, South Africans had to be racially classified into three groups: white, black African, or so-called ‘coloured’ – and after 1989, ‘of mixed descent’ - so that doesn’t put me anywhere.

A white person was defined in appearance. A person could not be considered white if one of their parents was non-white. A black person was defined as a member of the African tribal race. A coloured person was neither black or white. So I’m neither black nor white, and until 1989 I belonged to the coloured category.

The Department of Home Affairs was responsible for the classification of the citizenry and also for the severe penalties on protest during the State of Emergency which continued until 1988/9.

Anyone could be detained without trial; there were thousands of individuals who died in custody, and frequently after gruesome acts of torture, as well as those who were tried and sentenced to death, banished, imprisoned for life, like Nelson Mandela.

From 1989 I trained as a clinical psychologist in South Africa and given that I was of coloured descent, or in the category of Indian or Asian, we weren’t allowed to actually be at universities that were then categorised as for whites. So you had to fight to get a place into psychology and the advantage I had, being of coloured descent, was that I was allowed then to work in coloured and black communities, in black hospitals, and understand the impact there of violence and trauma. Violence was a daily occurrence from 1950 up until 1994, and even though we had the change of government after 1989, the most intense violence in South Africa was in the early 1990s to 1994 with necklacing and so on.

The reason I show these pictures is because South Africa is still the same today. Previously disadvantaged communities remain disadvantaged, and therefore when we ask the question, ‘Is South Africa a post-conflict society?’ it’s a difficult one to answer.

There is no single cause of violence in South Africa, and today when we look at what we call the second decade to freedom, the country is still riddled with violence. Even though the political system has changed, the culture of violence in South Africa remains.

Many who lived in South Africa during these difficult times found that the only means of change was using violence. So even though the protests were meant to be peaceful, they would end up violent.

Young people were very involved in fighting apartheid and they had a goal; they belonged somewhere; they belonged to political groups. After 1989, there were no political groups, there was no struggle, as the South Africans would call it, and there were no opportunities for the youth. This led to the emergence of gangs which then become criminal.

With the transition, there was a destruction of social control as well as law and systems of justice. We needed a whole new form of restorative, retributive justice. Even after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, many of the old apartheid police remained in the stations. I worked for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation for the last six years and one of the programmes that we did was looking at police, the custody process and the torture that continued even after 1990, where it was criminals who were now being tortured. That spilt over into the communities.

Today, if you look at crime in South Africa, it has become more intense and sadistic. Criminals might hold families hostage at their homes and torture them for five to six hours before they leave with whatever they needed to take out of the home. These were the kinds of things that we saw over the last six years at the trauma clinic at the centre for Violence and Reconciliation.

There’s still intense poverty, and many of the communities disadvantaged in South Africa during apartheid have continued to be disadvantaged. They are still seeking housing, still seeking employment. There’s HIV Aids and a serious lack of health and social services. Now, access to firearms. One in five people in South Africa carries arms and I’m sure it has now increased to one in three. We are a gun-toting society; we are the Wild West. It’s the only way that people feel that they can protect themselves, and families feel that they have to have guns at home. Those guns are stolen and used by criminals. We have a sub- economy depending on violence.

I was very involved in setting up victim empowerment, and training police in understanding how victims present themselves in relationship to post trauma, as well as training nurses in hospital primary health care. And there is inadequate support for victims of crime. Although the South African government has put together a green paper on a victim empowerment programme –- it’s still not enough.

And then there are the social, psychological factors; many communities that experienced intense oppression under apartheid haven’t had the opportunity to work through that and still suffer the anger. Particularly if you look at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, only fifteen hundred cases were brought forward; more than fifteen thousand had applied, so not every one was heard. And although there have been many TRCs occurring throughout the country, there are still many, many people who haven’t been heard, who haven’t had a voice to talk about how their oppression has been and how it has affected their lives. So, given that, and looking at the contributing factors, one begins to understand the continuing violence in South Africa and continuing criminal violence.

I’ve worked in Indonesia, with warlords who decided to come and work with civil society organisations to change the violence there. It was very important just to listen to how intense their own traumatic stress was, even though they were also perpetrators of crime. Similarly, I’ve worked in Northern Ireland, with both the IRA as well as the Loyalists. I have been to the Maze Prison listening to their trauma, and understanding how they were experiencing the secondary trauma, even though they had been perpetrators of violence.

We have very similar situations in South Africa. So broadly, what I’m trying to emphasis is that no-one is immune to it. If you work with it, and that includes journalists, if you have perpetrated it, there is the ripple effect of trauma on your life.

I’m going to stop there because I’d like to just let people ask questions.

MB: Sherbanu, thank you very much indeed. I’d like to open this out to contributions and general discussion. Sherbanu has raised a number of interesting issues, including the impact of trauma on journalists. But let’s look at the specific experience in South Africa. What is particular about the South African experience of trauma and how that is reported as it feeds into wider perceptions of what’s happening in South Africa? Also, let’s broaden the conversation out to Zimbabwe and the rest of the region. Richard Dowden – you are experienced as a reporter on Southern Africa for a range of British media outlets. What’s your response to what Sherbanu has been saying and how it fits into the wider context?

Richard Dowden: Thanks. I’m still mulling it over. But to just shoot from the hip, as it were – maybe an unfortunate image – some of the worst things you saw sometimes, and what made you angry, was that they didn’t fit into the story. You were often reporting things that weren’t actually making a pennyworth of difference to the injustice.

The stories I remember, that stay in my mind, working not just in South Africa but all over Africa, are where you felt there was actually something being achieved out of all of this. No residue remains of the horror because somehow it seemed to have a purpose. The worst example is now ten years old this year, Rwanda. That’s a very important story that I hope people will do this year – but why did the world miss it then?

But, and this is speaking personally, the question is, ‘Why do people have to know about this?’ It is absolutely horrific,but it can be totally meaningless. The biggest genocide ever and it meant absolutely nothing! And there was in South Africa also this feeling that a lot of the violence did seem so incredibly gratuitous, pointless; didn’t seem to advance ‘the struggle’ that much in any direction other than demeaning humanity. That was the thing that I reacted most strongly to.

Tamara Gordon: My name’s Tamara Gordon. I worked in South Africa in 1996 for a year for the Media Peace Centre, which was doing conflict resolution in a township just outside Johannesburg. We were trying to use the media, which had been seen as a tool of oppression, in a different way; to create peace rather than antagonise, which is how so many journalists, in the way we cover conflicts and the language that we use, can do.

Then I worked for BBC’s Correspondent for several years after, and one of the things I was trying to do there was to get the executive producers to do de-briefing; to train directors such as myself to be able to de-brief their teams in the same way that therapists are de-briefed for secondary trauma.

I’d just like to ask where that’s going because while humour is necessary, to me that’s a way of belittling the intensity of what you’re going through in the field. Humour is not necessarily a very good way of dealing with it. There are two problems. When you’re in South Africa, after a certain length of time you start thinking what’s normal is probably what shouldn’t be normal, but you take it as normal. Then you leave South Africa, as every journalist does, and you come back to the UK, and you come back to the people in the office who haven’t been in the field. You’re out of context and you really have a problem there, and that’s why I think that with the therapy side of things, the team should actually work within themselves – that team out in the field and back at home. Maybe that would be a way forward.

Rodney Pinder, Director, International News Safety Institute INSI: I’d just like to get back to a point that was originally made from the floor. I was Bureau Chief for Reuters in South Africa from 1990 – 1994 when some of the most terrible violence took place in the civil war in the townships. We witnessed some terrible horrors in the townships, not only death but also some awful mutilations; the gratuitous violence that was mentioned; the horrible methods of killing, which I think are probably unfamiliar even today to most journalists because then it was up close and personal. This wasn’t tank fire or artillery fire or even rifles most of the time, it was pangas and knives and a lot of witchcraft came into it in the mutilations. There were some pretty horrible scenes.

Now, a lot of the correspondents at that time and particularly photographers had huge problems with alcohol and drugs, and we buried more than one because of these problems at the time. What I’d be interested in exploring is that at the time we had no word; the word trauma never crossed our lips, we had never heard of PTSD; families were left to get on with it themselves. How should we better deal with this sort of thing now and are we any better at it now? Not only in terms of the journalists but also in terms of the families at home who often bear the brunt of the journalistic trauma and stress?

SS: I think we can answer both questions together. It’s interesting because the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation started work in 1989 and we worked with a number of journalists who had come through individual trauma counselling, who also worked with the Institute of Advanced Journalism in South Africa setting together a self-care programme for journalists. I think it’s very important that we need to begin to first have awareness around what is the symptomatic picture of trauma and secondary trauma in order to begin to normalise it; to understand that this is normal reaction to an abnormal event.

As the lady has mentioned, South Africans are beginning to normalise crime and that’s frightening. Crime isn’t a normal event in one’s life. It’s an abnormal event and similarly journalists and conflict societies will begin to see it becoming an everyday part of life. But the impact it has on your life and the life of your family is one that needs to be understood. How does it affect relationships? With family and with colleagues? To begin to have a kind of peer understanding, so that rather than finding yourself having to find the space and the time to go to someone you train within the journalist communities, individuals that will understand and be able to listen.

We have done a number of these programmes for the police community, as I mentioned, as well as health practitioners. Particularly working with the police they wouldn’t understand the whole notion of soft skills, as it’s called. ‘Counselling is too soft for us’; so it’s having to create this space within the police for them to be able to talk to each other, and it’s the same for journalists. We actually did some work with Reuters in South Africa, to try and find a way where there’s a space to begin to understand what each individual is going through.

MB: In answer to your question, Tamara, the key, it seems to me and in the context of what the Dart Centre is trying to do, is to create a language and a space among journalists themselves so that the key aspects of support come from within the journalistic community. These are the lessons that we see from the police, from the army, from the Marines, and so on. I wonder, Caroline Neil from the BBC, head of the High Risk team there, would you like to just talk a little bit about what the BBC’s doing. Caroline was in the military and a trainer in hostile environments until summer last year and has been with the BBC since then.

Caroline Neil, Head of High Risk Team, BBC: Mark started off our BBC stress and trauma project last year before the Iraq war, which got us through that war. What we’ve done now is put a further year’s project in place. The aim is to take the message out to the whole of the BBC which, as you can imagine, is quite a few people... We’re going to start at the top and try to give the managers an awareness package of the sorts of issues that they should be aware of and then we’re going to try and cascade it down.

We’re going in part for a sheep-dip approach. We’re trying to hit as many people as we can to start with, to make them aware of the problem. And then, obviously, we’re going to take some key areas like Newsgathering, some of the current affairs programmes and hopefully give them a little bit more training. At the moment we’re going to bring Mark in for a year to try and make us self-sufficient so that we have, at the end of the year, enough people trained up so that we can take this forward ourselves and keep it going once the money runs out.

This is really a sort of training in briefing and debriefing, pre-programme and post programme, for some of the programme-orientated type of scenarios and then for the people who’ve actually suffered specific incidents where there are key issues where we need professionals in. There, obviously, we have a counselling service to which we can direct them. But the main idea is to get managers trained up so that we can get people to debrief properly. And a lot of the problems or issues we may be able to solve which, in many of the programmes, doesn’t happen at the moment because everybody is just rush, rush, rush the whole time. Tina Carr (Rory Peck Trust): Very interesting to hear what the BBC are doing, Caroline, very interesting indeed.

What I’d like to know is, as you know our community are freelancers and a lot of the freelancers who were out for the BBC in the Iraq War were actually very much covered by the BBC, almost as if they were staff. But for those who weren’t, there doesn’t appear to be much of a safety net, or anything. So I’d like to ask if there is anybody here who has got knowledge or experience of freelance work - not only journalists but media workers of any kind - who they know have been unable to get the help they need; who’ve not been able to work any more after the experience. Basically, we’re looking to see whether we can set up some kind of scheme to help them. So please, do let us know if you know anybody like that.

MB: Kate Nowlan, from Counselling in Companies, can I perhaps bring you in at this point. There are three main Employee Assistance Programmes involved with us a this point: BUPA (formerly PEC), Counselling in Companies and Focus. Kate, you work with Amnesty International amongst others. BUPA work with the BBC and ITN and BSKYB and Focus work with Reuters.

I’ve been talking with all three about having an informal service which freelancers can turn to. Payment has to be worked out by individuals with the therapist or counsellor, but Kate, you’ve got your own very powerful, personal experience of Southern Africa and trauma in Southern Africa. Could you perhaps address both of those points? The nuts and bolts issue of how the needs of freelancers might, in some way be addressed. But also your specific experiences of this in South Africa itself. Kate Nowlan (Counselling in Companies): Thanks Mark. He kind of lands these things on one, doesn’t he? Yes, I was very interested in this notion of freelancers because the trouble is that with the BBC, it’s an organisation, and I’m very aware of all sorts of people outside organisations. We provide therapeutic and practical support 24 hours a day to anybody who signs up with us. I can talk about the details with anybody who’s interested afterwards. It’s just a kind of common sense approach to something being there which is completely confidential, which is not to do with the BBC, which is not to do with anything but is your telephone number at any time of night or day.

Now we’re having an interesting debate with Amnesty International, who are one of our clients, about providing overseas cover in Costa Rica, Senegal or whatever. Well, I don’t feel very happy about that unless I go out to Costa Rica myself, or Senegal and actually vet who you’re going to go to. Looking on a Hong Kong web site, I’m not very happy with what comes up under counselling psychotherapy.

So, it can be dodgy, but I think there are ways of putting quite informal support in place that then does a sort of catch-all when people come back. The important thing for EAP provision is that people need to be robust enough to work with journalists who are not used to counselling; anyway, that’s a different issue...

I’m particularly interested in trauma from my own experience in South Africa. I work in Cape Town, not in Johannesburg, and my work there has been with the carers. I’m really interested to hear about the police because I’ve had contact with the police and I cannot even see them talking about counselling! At least the kind of police I was involved with, so I take my hat off to you, Sherbanu; I think you’ve done an amazing job. But actually, really, my interest in compassion fatigue, burnout and secondary traumatisation, came from being invited, first of all, to lead a clergy conference there; because clergy, like journalists, are very unprotected. Their houses are open 24 hours a day and they will be, often, the first people who are called onto the scene who have to bury entire families or whatever. And not having been in South Africa for 25 years and then returning to work with educators, psychoanalysts, clergy and journalists and corporates and see the extent of secondary traumatisation was seriously shocking. So it’s brilliant that things are happening.

MB: Richard Miron.

Richard Miron, BBC and freelance journalist: I wanted to ask a question and maybe raise an observation, which was, what is the definition of the difference between trauma and stress? Because I think a lot of journalists go into conflict zones or stressful situations where it’s difficult day-to-day. I think one of the most debilitating aspects can be fear; not the fear that one necessarily witnesses but possibly the anxiety about what one may be going into. How does one define or divine between these two things? And how does one deal with it?

SS: It’s a very important question. Trauma is the reaction to an event. It’s an event that occurs and the symptoms are post the event, whereas stress is something that occurs in our lives daily. But there are high levels of stress, and stress that is not good and which creates anxiety and fear has to be dealt with in a different manner. So when we look at trauma and we look at secondary trauma, they are different because they are reactions to an event that has occurred. And then there’s what we have termed in South Africa as continuous traumatic stress where there are repeated events of trauma or repeated exposure to traumatic events.

Kate Nowlan: These definitions are very difficult. But it seems to me that journalists, particularly, can go to hostile environment after hostile environment and suddenly something triggers it. I remember my first meeting with Dart when one of the journalists said, you know, you go so far, you go so far and then that is it. You can do no more. But maybe you don’t need to worry about the definition.

Sheena McDonald: I’m Sheena McDonald and I’m a freelance journalist. I want to ask Sherbanu a question and to contextualise. I’ve reported from South Africa, but not since 1999 and 2000; and my partner was the BBC’s man in South Africa on two occasions; three years from ’91-’94 and again in the year 2000.

It’s a slight dogleg in the discussion, but on the fifth of January I was chairing a discussion in Edinburgh and one of the people on the panel was Sandy McCall-Smith. Now, Sandy McColl-Smith, in the last few years has built an extraordinary reputation for himself by writing about a lady detective in Botswana; and he’s therefore introduced Botswana to the wider world. He’s got fan clubs in America and so on and so forth.

In the course of the discussion he read a bit from his latest work, which is not published yet, and it just touches on, grazes on, it surfs on the notion of HIV-Aids and he said that’s as far as I’m going to go. I’m not talking about it in my novel because, he said, ‘there’s so much bad news comes out of Southern Africa that I would like to communicate some good news about Southern Africa which is, the nature and character of the people.’ And he went into some detail on that and everyone in the audience respected what he said.

So what I would like to ask Sherbanu, given that she’s said South Africa is in a transitional state – you specified South Africa rather than Southern Africa – and you said that violence is now a much more intensified language of communication than it was even back in the ‘90s and the ‘80s and the ‘70s. How do you see this transitional period resolving itself, and what do you think western journalists might do to aid the acceleration of that transition?

One good news story I did do was on how Cape Town opera is now recruiting lots of chorus members from the township choirs, and that’s fantastic and we shot some of Rigoletto and it was exotic and spectacular and very well sung. But inevitably, they wanted ‘the vulnerability of farmers’ story and this was a long time ago, it was back in’98.

Anyway, my question is, what should we, the few journalists among the assembly, be doing to improve things?

SS: That’s quite a big question, but I have a very small answer. You’ve answered it, actually; this is exactly what Nelson Mandela said; ‘Why is it that journalists in South Africa choose to report only the bad news?’ What about all of the good things we’ve done in the last 10 years?’ And even though I’ve sat here and talked about trauma and violence in South Africa and the current criminal violence in South Africa, I have also been very involved in some of the strategies the government has put forward in eradicating this culture of violence in South Africa. It does seem very little to communities that live there. I’ve chosen to leave; I’ve chosen to live in England now because I’ve been through personal experience of that criminal violence myself. I’ve been hijacked on two occasions, held up at gunpoint and I’d just had enough. Having to work with it and then be exposed to it was just too much and I had to leave. But I know I’m going back and I’m very positive about going back. But again it’s about asking people to think about and look at the positive as well.

Yes, we are a new democracy; we’re still not a full democracy because we have the one party, we don’t have an opposition party that’s going to help us to challenge. But we’ve done a lot more. We’ve got a 40 per cent representation of women in government, which not even the UK has, so we’ve moved much further in terms of democracy.

MB: I’d like to hand over to Phillip Knightley in a moment, author of The First Casualty, which many of you will know well. I just want also to put out the question into the room: To what extent do we need to look at the journalism of trauma in reporting of Southern Africa, and indeed more widely? Is there is not a dimension to the experience that is so far not being sufficiently reported?

I went through a couple of websites and newspapers today preparing for the discussion this evening, and to look at what was being reported at the moment on South Africa. About half of it, I would say, is to do with trauma in some form, or bad news certainly – corruption, genocide, poverty, slavery, violence, conflict – that’s just off the front page of BBC Online at two o’clock this afternoon.

But I was also struck by a piece on trauma in Kashmir – there was a specific piece about the mental scars that the inhabitants of both sides of Kashmir are carrying from their experience of partition; from the experience of conflict ever since. It was a striking piece of journalism and I’ve not seen very much of that kind of sophisticated, thoughtful analysis about Southern Africa. Not just describing symptoms, but looking at what kind of emotional experience people are going through in these areas of conflict and post-conflict, and what needs to be addressed and reported about, to give people the tools to change the drivers of conflict.

Phillip Knightley: I would just like to ask Sherbanu, what is your aim behind the treatment of professional victims of trauma? Is it to enable them to go back and perhaps suffer the same trauma again but this time be de-sensitised and be able to handle it? Or is your aim a common sense one, to say to them, ‘Listen, you don’t have to put yourself in the way of this trauma again. Have you considered a change of career?’

SS: Well, it’s a difficult question because I worked as a counsellor at the trauma clinic, and often you would see somebody who had been a victim of criminal violence who would come in for the first session, the second session and in the third session there’d be a second episode, another event in their lives.

So we don’t actually do a trauma counselling, as such; we try to help people to use the coping mechanisms that they have continued to use over a period of time, and enhance those coping mechanisms to continue in an environment that is riddled with violence. So clients have been able to reintegrate, or been able to see a new sense in life and continue living. Much more has been about continuous stress and helping with the mechanisms.

Jane Daly, Objectiveteam: I work for a small company that currently does high-risk management training for journalists and such-like. I’ve just finished 26 years in the British Army. When I was 18 I can remember seeing photographs of Protestants in Northern Ireland killing two young British army corporals. But the most stressful thing, perhaps, is some sort of personal bereavement that you come across in your own life.

The observation is that journalists as such, are so diverse. But surely you still relate back to not only military and police organisations for their experiences, but even more so to things in the UK like the National Health Service and their nurses and doctors. Because whatever the experiences are, it’s about bringing them together. That’s why you got everybody here this evening.

SS: It’s a very good point. In South Africa we set up what is called the South African Network of Trauma Service Providers, which is not just related to one community but to just about everybody who works with difficult situations or clients who have been traumatised. The European Union gave us 70 million rand to set up the network, and I’ve been a member of the board of this network. It’s has brought together 170 organisations working with trauma in South Africa, under one umbrella. We have now standardised the work being done. Because that’s what happens, the emergence of all these little trauma centres all over the country, and you don’t have a standardised model of working, no-one is talking to each other and you find different things happening. It again contributes to the cycle, because there’s a whole re-victimisation that occurs when different kinds of models are being used and different kinds of help has been used.

So we’ve been very, very fortunate to set up a network and I’ve come to work in England in the UK, in Hackney, where I’m working with transitional populations and diverse communities and ethnic minorities and currently thinking of setting up a network of trauma services within that area. Richard Miron (Freelance Journalist): I’ve just got two questions. One is, surely the journalists among us are not there by accident. Occasionally you do meet someone in a bad situation and you look, and you can see in their eyes they don’t want to be there at all. I remember in one African coup I was covering, a whole lot of lobby correspondents who were covering Neil Kinnock’s visit to Africa peeled off to cover this coup. It was very funny but some of them may have been quite traumatised by what they saw; but the rest of us, surely it isn’t an accident. In some shape or form we seek that sort of experience.

My second question is that, I’m freelance now but those who are lucky enough to work for big corporations have psychotherapist backup and so on - which is exceedingly expensive but very nice. But you leave behind 20 million Somalis who are pretty traumatised; about 16 million Rwandans; how many million South Africans? Angolans? And one of the things that I think of when I get a bit ratty with the kids is, ‘well, those people back there are incredibly patient’.

They suffered and saw things and were astoundingly easy, patient, and they laughed and they sang and they danced and, you know, why should I get so upset? Are you suggesting that there should be some great counselling service all over Somalia and so on, or is there a way that communities have, a non-individualised, inexpensive way of dealing with the sort of traumas that you think we should be dealing with?

SS: The answer to your first question is that psychologists do the same. They seek out work with traumatised clients and they don’t stop till they reach a level of burnout; until they begin to recognise that even though they are attracted to the situation, there has been an impact on their life, and they have to do something to address that or it begins to affect the relationships around them.

And secondly - no. The majority of the South African population does not have access to trauma services. But there’s a resilience in the community that you can actually use and begin to form self-help groups within the community, similarly as you would in any community – the journalist community, the police community. There’s a degree of resilience that you need to enhance, that you need to put together. It doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone has to go and see a counsellor, but it does mean that within the society you’d create a space so the society can help itself. Just taking from the TRC, those 1500 that presented their hearings had to go back to their society after having relived that intense experience of having to talk to the nation about their experiences. What they did was they came back and together we formed what is called ‘Kulumani’.

Kulumani, in Zulu, means to speak out. It’s a self help group that’s set itself up throughout South Africa, where individuals who have given their hearings are now calling together other individuals and sitting together to talk amongst themselves, which is very much an African culture – to get the community and to talk about situations.

MB: I’d like to ask David Loyn and then James Brabazon to come in. David, you’ve done a lot of tremendously powerful reporting about development issues, and we’ve had some good conversations about this agenda and about the role of journalists in going in and doing it because it matters and it can make a difference.

Before I hand over to you, though, I just want to pick up this issue about sending everybody to counselling. This idea was popular in the 1990s, that everybody who’s had a traumatic experience should have counselling.

And I think in a lot of journalism now, after disasters, after a plane crash, for example the Egyptian plane crash just recently, there has been rather undifferentiated, rather uninformed reporting which talks about, ‘all the families are having counselling’.

The message that comes out of the 1990s is that what really matters is resilience, as Sherbanu said. Resilience in the community is mutual help and support, with professional support and expertise and awareness available in the background, which can be brought in to support the natural healing and resilience processes in communities.

This has been the message of New York after 9/11, that the counsellors who went in had relatively little to do because the way the New Yorkers have coped and come out on top again. The Americans have researched this very extensively, and what has made a difference is the resilience of the community. There’s a message there - as Sherbanu says - for South Africa; but certainly also for the journalistic community.

David, and then James.

David Loyn, BBC: I’m David Loyn and I’m a reporter at the BBC and there are a number of things I could say that are entirely disconnected. I think it’s really important that we, as journalists, have discovered that trauma can be dealt with; that there’s possibility of dealing with trauma. There’s a real danger alongside that that we should presume that every time anyone goes and sees something horrible or is frightened, then they should seek counselling. And I think that presumption is slightly creeping in to an industry - many of which are represented here and who I recommend highly to anyone who wants to seek them but shouldn’t necessarily seek them for every time they might get affected. That’s my first observation.

My second observation is that we do bad news because bad things happen. And the idea that we should go to South Africa and celebrate its extraordinary achievements is true and, as Sheena said, she went to South Africa and one-third of the stories she did were positive. I go to Africa and the last time I went to Ethiopia I did a story about a community where a woman whose son had died in the 1984 famine who was now part of an organic farming project and will certainly survive another famine or another drought in the area she was in.

So we do do a lot of positive news, but that shouldn’t stop us from doing a lot of bad news, because bad things happen. And if we ever get into an agenda where we say, ‘We are only looking at good things happening in South Africa’, then we would be making a huge mistake. I think we the BBC, the people I work for, would do South Africa, and the people of the world, a huge disservice.

The third thing I’d say is this. Sherbanu, you went through this narrative from 1948 to now – and the idea that violence got significantly worse in South Africa after democracy is one that I’d not seen laid out quite so starkly before. Perhaps you could talk a little bit about that and whether you think that that was the effect of something that was waiting in the wings and it was only now, that white men weren’t beating black men on the head, that they could actually come out and attack other people; i.e. that once the police repression had finished then that violence would come out. Or whether there was something else, some other factor that happened in the 1990s, which made those things worse.

SS: What was left after 1989 was the intense anger that the community had felt since 1948. And yes, when you say that the oppression has lifted, communities have expressed this anger in various forms, in various situations and through various situations.

A lot of the violence occurring in South Africa is also what we call ‘hidden crimes’ that were there during apartheid, like sexual violence; the rape that was happening in the communities, that hadn’t been reported in the communities, were now emerging; the increase in domestic violence, the increase in family murders after 1989. These were the things that were happening but weren’t as reported because it was clouded by the political violence that was occurring. That was much more in focus than what was happening beyond the political violence.

James Brabazon, Freelance Journalist: Sorry, I feel like a bit of an interloper because I’ve just arrived and I haven’t listened to the presentation or anything. But just to pick up on what I was hearing there. Superficially, it’s nice talking about journalism and trauma in Southern Africa but I also notice how few black faces there are here tonight. This idea of resilience in a community. I just wondered if you could expand on that slightly because it sounds like bullshit to me. Just the idea that people are resilient to trauma, magically, seems a bit strange. Is that because they’ve had experience of lots of trauma and suddenly they get used to it? It just seems a bit odd to me because the communities that I’ve worked in or lived in for long periods of time, who’ve experienced extreme trauma, don’t seem any more or less resilient to traumatic experiences than anyone else.

And saying that Southern African communities - presumably that means black communities, I don’t know - are sort of more resilient to trauma than anyone else sounds a little bit like, ‘Isn’t it amazing how different people deal with different things according to their social or racial condition!’ I’d be very worried about that if that was the message.

Frankly speaking, it seems to me that the people I’ve worked with, and given my age and experience that’s very few people over a very few number of years, seem to react to trauma in a very uniform way. That is, they don’t like it and it affects them.

SS: When we talk about resilience, we talk about a degree of resilience, James. The communities have survived. Yes, they do experience the traumatic stress, they do go through the symptomatic picture as everyone else, but the communities have coping mechanisms; that’s what we use, as psychologists. We enhance them, rather than break them down, by saying to them, ‘Well, you’re experiencing the symptoms, let’s talk about reintegration.’

There is no reintegration in this society because this society is just continuously experiencing this trauma. So it’s about enhancing the coping mechanisms and there is a degree of resilience that communities have that can continue coping with … .

JB: I’m not sure about this. My Nan coped with the Blitz, but my grandfather never got over it, with nightmares for the rest of his life. What does resilience actually mean to a person that’s been injured? What does that actually mean for a community or for, more actually, an individual whose trying to deal with trauma in his life? What does resilience actually mean? That is what I’m interested in. Does it mean that you can write off a community because they’re, sort of, all right dealing with it? Or does it mean you take certain individuals and you help them?

SS: It does not mean writing off the community. It actually means looking at how the community has survived and coped; what have they used? What are the mechanisms they’ve currently used to cope in this situation? How have they continued living in that environment where there is continuous stress and still survived? And by helping them, empowering them by acknowledging the coping mechanisms.

Your Nan used to have resilience; your grandfather didn’t, okay? But when she had resilience, what was she doing to actually cope and understand the situation? How did she continue to survive having had the same experience as your grandfather? What was it that she did different that she managed to survive the situation? How did she cope with the nightmares; how did she cope with the flashbacks of the dreams? She may have had these symptoms but she found a way to cope through them. That’s the difference.

It’s not that everybody has the resilience. Of course some people don’t! They would have full-blown PTSD or very direct force traumatic stress symptoms, which you have to understand. But there’s a degree of resilience in the community that you have to understand. If we had to diagnose the entire South African population with post traumatic stress disorder, boy, we’d have a huge problem! And we wouldn’t have enough services to actually help. We’d actually be putting the communities at a disadvantage; dis-empowering them, and labelling them.

TG: James, could I just add to that? When I was living out in Johannesburg in ’96, my mother, who is a therapist, came out to visit me, and one of the remarks that she made, as a therapist, was that there was a culture among the black population, actually, where people talked to each other. The white chattering middle classes of England might need to go to therapists but in Africa – and I put my anthropologist hat on, because that’s my training as well – there are certain cultures which do actually deal with trauma differently and may have better mechanisms. Which is not to say that they don’t need as much help but do actually draw on what each culture has, which is what I hear you say. They pull out those and use what they have best for as much as they can.

But that isn’t actually what I was waiting to say. In answer to Tina’s question and to start it with a bit of good news, can I just say that it’s fantastic to hear what Caroline’s saying the BBC is doing. And as a freelance journalist as well, I’d like to say there’s still a long way to go. I think - trying to look for a solution instead of just criticising - that we need a bridge between therapists and journalists, because when you asked your question about how freelance journalists are reacting in the field, I remember being on a job in Johannesburg and getting a call from the BBC office and being asked to travel across Johannesburg in the middle of the night because I hadn’t signed the hostile environment form. I’d been on the course but I hadn’t done the form and I said to them, ‘I hope you realise that by me travelling through Johannesburg in the middle of the night now, I am likely to put myself through a lot more, … .’

No, that had nothing to do with it. It was just to do with the paperwork. The other thing is what I found on a hostile environments course which I found very shocking and which I’d love to see if we could improve as well. This culture of bravado, which is what I think we really have to deal with – you talk about a culture of violence - but being a woman, I’ve especially experienced within this overseas work; it’s the culture of bravado. You’re not allowed to say you need counselling. You’re not allowed to say you need a therapist. On the hostile environments course we were put through a fake hijacking incident and for a girl who had been in Rwanda, it was as if she’d been re-traumatised. Now that was not encouraging.

There was half-an-hour on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the course then, and there were four-and-a-half days of playing gunfights and this, that and the other. So all I’m saying is it’s great to see things have improved but there’s a long way to go.

MB: I’m aware that things are getting quite interesting but we’ve only got about another five minutes to go and I’m particularly keen to encourage those who haven’t said anything yet, or would like to say something before the evening is over.

Melanie Anstey: I’m Melanie Anstey, Rory Peck Trust, freelance documentary film maker and wife of a war correspondent. On the English versus the African trauma attitudes, I’ve a friend who’s a senior social worker who was working in Dunblane and basically, they set up a drop-in centre. And it’s very interesting to have the combination of the expertise of psychologists on the one hand, providing for a community that knows better than psychologists what their particular type of trauma is and it’s a dialogue and I think that works pretty well, whatever community you come from.

I think possibly from people who have suffered the same things and, as you say, have different coping mechanisms, do get some strength as long as there’s also the apparatus to help them deal with or process whatever it is they’re experiencing.

Something which I think is a very simple answer to it is this business of families. Do broadcasters - whether they’re dealing with staff people or freelancers - provide adequate support for families, or do they help families adequately support their spouses male or female, in the field? The answer is no! Categorically, in absolutely no way. Some interesting work is being done, but a lot more could be done, and I don’t think it’s difficult to work out what it is. I think it’s just a question of asking the families; talking to them, researching it, studying it. This whole business of re-entry into the ordinary community for people who work in extreme circumstances, whatever their profession - and we’re lucky enough in Britain to have a more or less ordinary community to re- enter - is very, very important because that is the thing that’s going to recharge somebody’s battery.

Somebody said, ‘Well, if somebody’s traumatised, why send them back out into the field?’ The fact is that by being in the field they have a certain degree of professional experience and capability and it would be a shame to remove somebody every time they came from a place where difficult things were happening, when they have an awful lot to offer. So you have to support them. The, ‘big boys don’t cry’, or even ‘big girls don’t cry’ thing is important, because maybe at home you could help people create an environment where they might feel more comfortable about sharing their emotions.

They don’t need necessarily to talk to a total stranger, however well trained they are; or certainly not their work colleagues, because they’re competing with their work colleagues and you have to take that into consideration if you’re going to build their support networks within their working communities. There’s a lot to be done on all fronts and it’s good to have a forum to air them.

MB: Thank you very much for that. Those are exceptionally important points; the families in particular. Sue Brayne, my wife over there, has done a half-day exploration of the experience of spouses of reporters working in conflict zones and that’s being written up on the web site. We’re intending to take that forward with the organisation One Plus One (click for link) - Richard Dowden’s wife runs that one - and in this forum later this year. So that’s something we’re acutely aware of.

Before we conclude this, there’s just a couple of people I’d like to give the opportunity to speak. Richard Miron would like to say something; but, Bob Schmuhl from the University of Notre Dame in the US, you’re over doing some journalism training with groups, at the moment. I wonder if there’s anything you’d like to say briefly about the perspective from the US. And Angela Clarke of Focus, who joined us halfway through. Focus is the employer assistance programme which works with Reuters and has done very good work in this field.

Robert Schmuhl, University of Notre Dame, USA: Just one point that I would make and I hope doesn’t trouble people. What strikes me is when we talk about what is happening in Southern Africa is how we’re saying that the grossly abnormal is becoming the normal, in terms of behaviour and activity. That certainly has an impact on the way that journalism goes about defining news.

And it leads to the next point, which I think is the reason why we’re all here, which is it will make it that much more traumatic for the journalists in those types of situations. If you’re going to raise the bar, in terms of what is normal and what is abnormal and hence, what is newsworthy, it will make it just that much more demanding and difficult for those who are out there covering the stories. So the work that we’re talking about is important now and will be even more important in the future.

Angela Clarke, Focus EAP: I’ll be brief. I work for a company which provides counselling services to journalists of Reuters. I would just like to say that it’s a good opportunity to hear the views of all concerned – journalists, freelancers and employees of the BBC and others. I certainly agree that it’s not just the journalists but it’s the families and other people. We deal with people who had sons, daughters in different environments, in hostile environments, not just war but people do deal with trauma on a regular basis. I feel that as a psychologist myself, all we can do is to listen; to those who are in journalism and those who are supporting those who are working in the field.

MB: Sherbanu, a final couple of words and then I’ll wrap.

SS: Well, it’s been very enlightening listening to the different experiences that people talked about, and how perceptions of trauma as well as definitions of trauma are talking about resilience; are talking about networks and self help. We need to continue this process. I’d just like to go back once more to James and say it’s been very interesting there. I’m setting up a psycho-social health programme for Iraq at the moment, and the one thing I’ve been told is, ‘Don’t bring the western ideology of trauma counselling to us, please. Try and look at the community and look at what they’re asking for before going in and starting to impose a whole training programme and trauma counselling and try to understand the needs of the community before you establish any form of training’.

MB: Sherbanu, thanks. A couple of quick, final thoughts. The nature of the debate is that there are no easy conclusions. We’ve talked about the story, we’ve talked about Southern Africa; less about Zimbabwe than it needs, but we can come back to it. We’ve talked about the journalists - which can become very general - but I hope some useful things have been said and heard here. I’ve certainly heard a lot of very useful information – including the message to the therapists who are with us that the support that journalists must be robust and good and of a sort that will encourage journalists who recognise that professional help can be a help sometimes.

The Frontline Club, for those of you that don’t know it, is open till later. You’re welcome to stay on and the bar is open downstairs and Vaughan Smith and his colleagues will be very keen indeed for you to go and enjoy that. The Dart Centre process is just as much about you talking to each other and conversation and telling each other stories, as it is about formal presentations, web sites and teaching and so on.

It’s been very good to have you all here. We’ve got a couple more events coming up. On February 10th we’ll be talking about Soham. There are a limited number of places for a day’s exploration of journalism, trauma and personal meaning on March 5th, here. There are a couple of bigger conferences taking place outside the UK as the year unfolds.

Any suggestions that people have for themes and for speakers at evenings like this will be very gratefully taken on board. Dart Europe is beginning to get going and I’ve found tonight extremely instructive and thank you all for coming. And very special thanks to Sherbanu for giving us the focus.