The Dart Centre Europe for Journalism and Trauma, together with the Frontline Club, hosted a discussion in January on trauma and violence in Southern Africa, with guest speaker Sherbanu Sacoor and others from the region. Mike Cane reports on the event. For more, see the full transcript.

Sherbanu Sacoor is all too familiar with violence in South Africa, where she trained and worked as a clinical psychologist. Despite the country's change of government in 1989, "South Africa is still the same today," she said.

The culture of violence remains, as do the same disadvantaged communities. One in five people, maybe even one in three, she estimated, carry a firearm.

Police brutality has boiled over into sadistic violence in communities, many of which are plagued by poverty, AIDS and a lack of health and social services.

With those issues in mind, a mix of journalists, journalism educators, trauma specialists, psychotherapists and representatives of the employer assistance programs that support journalists met on Jan. 12, 2004, to discuss questions raised within the context of reporting on, and trauma resulting from, ongoing violence in South Africa.

The workshop, moderated by Dart Centre Europe Director Mark Brayne, was the second held at the Frontline Club in London and the first under the direction of Dart Centre Europe.

As an employee of the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation for the last six years, Sacoor, who now lives in London, has worked to bolster support for victims — even for perpetrators — of crime. "No one is immune to it," she said. "If you have perpetrated it, there is a ripple effect of trauma on your life."

Tamara Gordon saw plenty of violence in 1996 outside Johannesburg, where she worked for the Media Peace Center. The group focused on conflict resolution, and specifically tried to use the media, which had been repeatedly applied as a tool of oppression, as a way to foster peace.

In tumultuous South Africa, normalcy was twisted, she said. Conflict was a daily part of life and "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."

Later, while working for BBC's Correspondent, Gordon encouraged her executive producers to create a chain of employee debriefing the same way that therapists are debriefed for secondary trauma. Upon leaving South
Africa, Gordon struggled to transition back into "normal" life in the United Kingdom. She believes that continued support of debriefing programs would make those transitions smoother. "Maybe that would be a way forward." Some of the most disgusting violence in South Africa occurred from 1990-94.

At the time, Rodney Pinder was the South African Bureau Chief for Reuters. "We witnessed some terrible horrors in the townships," he said, "not only death but also some awful mutilations; the gratuitous violence ... the horrible methods of killing."

Pinder, now Director of the International News Safety Institute, noticed that many writers and photographers struggled emotionally and began abusing drugs and alcohol to deal with the wretched images they encountered every
day. Many died of their addictions, he said. Knowing something, anything, about trauma would have helped, he said: " ... 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?"

Sacoor and Brayne addressed the questions. Sacoor presented some important clarifications. Asked to describe the difference between trauma and stress, she said: "Trauma is the reaction to an event. It's an event that occurs (after) the (traumatizing) event, whereas stress is something that occurs in our lives daily" High levels of stress create anxiety and fear and must be dealt with, she said. So trauma and secondary trauma "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."

As for easing journalists' transition back into a normal society, the idea, Brayne said, "is to create a language and a space among journalists themselves so that the key aspects of support come from within the journalistic community."

"Crime isn't a normal event in one's life," Sacoor added. "It's an
abnormal event and similarly journalists and conflict societies will begin to see it becoming an everyday part of life." To move on, we must understand that our fear, anger and depression are normal reactions. Then we must create a comfortable space in which journalists can talk to each other about their trauma, she said.

Last year Brayne worked with Caroline Neil, head of the BBC High Risk Team, to prepare journalists for the Iraq war. This year Brayne will continue spreading awareness of trauma briefing and debriefing "to hit as many people as we can, to make them aware of the problem," Neil said. The BBC hopes to
gain enough trauma training by the end of the year to become
self-sufficient.

For freelance journalists unable to use programs such as the BBC's, services like Counseling in Companies can help. The company provides confidential therapeutic and practical support 24 hours a day (for more on counseling resources, click here).

In South Africa, Sacoor and others have set up the South African Network of Trauma Service Providers. The network is meant to help the community as well as visitors, such as journalists, who live or work in the area and have been traumatized. The network currently includes 170 organizations that have standardized their treatment. The network exists not to force everyone to see a counselor, Sacoor said, but to serve as a tool that the society can use to help itself.