In the next five years US based non-profits are going to be faced with a wave of leadership transitions as baby-boomer executive directors retire. For the smaller and more innovative organizations, this is going to be an absolutely critical set of transitions. At the same time as the mantles are being passed, organizations are going to be faced with an increased need to increase efficiencies and run leaner. This will require the use of partnerships and contract relationships as organizations downsize and operations go online and into the cloud. There are many risks ahead, but the single largest risk for visionary and innovative organizations is that the core visions and values that the executive teams have nurtured over their tenure will be lost or diluted in the upcoming turmoil.
To increase the challenges, there are fewer qualified people to inherit these positions than there are people who are going to be retiring. The good news is that universities have recognized this deficit and are launching extremely innovative programs in social entrepreneurship, human driven design and social change that are graduating people with the raw skills and the creative methods to start to fill the void. Their entry into the work place will increase innovation, with all the problems that disruptive change brings.
The next wave of innovative non-profits will need to run extremely lean, be highly creative, work in partnerships as well as independently, and contract out critical portions of their operations. At the same time, they will have to be rapidly scalable as large influxes of money come their way in pulses.
As executive teams head into retirement, they need to set up their successors with a core set of strategies that are designed to embrace this more turbulent environment and still carry the core visions and values forward.
These next wave non-profits will be able to receive highly evolved strategic input and move it forward. A critical problem is communicating to those partners in ways that carry the vision to them. The best thing that an executive team can do to prepare for this is to engage in a strategic distillation of their expertise into a set of core documents that can communicate their vision in terms of internal accounting, internal and external communications strategies, and scalable growth plans. Without that strategic distillation, those core components discovered through years of work will at the very least be transformed if not lost altogether.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Further Thoughts on the Times' Paywall
There is an inescapable and very simple formula that describes the financial activity of all organizations that do business. It is the income statement for a given period of time:
Anything given away for free costs money to create and distribute. Those costs go directly to the expense side of the formula. But they don't merely offset an equal amount of revenue. The cost of free comes directly out of the net profit of the company on a one to one basis. Here is how that works.
What does all this have to do with the rollout of the New York Times paywall?
Here is where it starts to get interesting.
Net income for the New York Times Company for the past five years is as follows:
2010: $108 million
2009: $20 million
2008: ($58 million)
2007: $209 million
2006: ($543 million)
Despite the recession that started in 2008, the Times' worst year was in 2006. If the recession bottomed out in mid 2008, then the Times has been making slow gains in its overall operating profitability, with a net income of $108 million in 2010.
What this is telling us is that its operations without the paywall are narrowly in the black, returning a modest net income in 2010 of $108 million on revenues of $2.4 billion, or a net profit margin of 4.5%. That is for the entire New York Times Company. The New York Times Media Group, publishers of the New York Times newspaper and NYTimes.com, makes up about 65% of that revenue.
According to the Times this improvement in profitability results from increasing online ad sales and cost cutting and increased efficiency in the print division.
Here's where I think the explanation for the current paywall system may reside. The Times is in the black, but barely. The industry is in flux. Change is already happening. Growth will happen online. The print division is cost cutting, but there are limits to how fast and how far that can go. The opportunity for an increase in net income comes mostly from NYTimes.com. But, whatever happens with NYTimes.com, online advertising needs to be sustained. Loss can come too. Make the paywall too tight and online advertising will drop off as readers fall away. Surges of readership through social media sharing will be constrained.
The middle spot? Make a paywall that is more of a nuisance than a real deterrent. This will keep advertising rates as high as possible through free readership and will begin to migrate concerned and conscientious readers over to a paying online model. Gradually the tightness of the paywall can be adjusted as its financial impacts become more known.
If print revenues can be kept stable, the move to a loose paywall produces a powerful effect. Once the approximately $40 million invested in the paywall's implementation, plus the paywall operational costs are recovered, and any loss in online advertising is offset, online subscription revenues go nearly straight to net profit. Remember, NYTimes.com is already giving the news away for free. Their operations don't have to change for the paywall to take effect. They already produce and distribute the news. All things being equal, production costs don't rise.
It is one of the most unusual rollouts in business history. A company that is in full operational flow suddenly and somewhat loosely begins to charge for a product that it has been giving away for free.
Revenue - Expenses = Net Income
Most income generated in a given period fits under revenue, and most of the money spent for that same period fits under expenses. Complete the formula and you have a sense of the general capacity for an organization to create income. If net income is negative, then the organization obviously can't sustain that business model. If it is positive, then possibilities exist for growth.
Much has been made about notions of 'free' in the new internet economy, and it is certainly an important marketing component that plays to the strengths of digital distribution, but it cannot and should not in the long run be taken out of its context in a process that ultimately has to deliver a reliable revenue stream--a business model in which revenue ultimately exceeds expenses.
Anything given away for free costs money to create and distribute. Those costs go directly to the expense side of the formula. But they don't merely offset an equal amount of revenue. The cost of free comes directly out of the net profit of the company on a one to one basis. Here is how that works.
Let's say hypothetically that the New York Times has a net profit margin of 10% (for 2010 it's actually about 4.5%). That means that for every $100 it spends, it takes in $110 to make a profit of $10. Or we can say that every $110 worth of news sold by the New York Times cost it $100 to make.
Now let's say that the New York Times decides to give away $100 in product. So they make $100 worth of news and give it away for free. Conventional logic says that the Times now has to make $100 in sales to make back that $100 loss. But because zero revenue comes in to offset that $100 expense, the New York Times is actually in the hole for $1000. Here's why. To get the money to make the $100 unit it gave away for free, the Times had to make and sell $1000 worth of news, bringing in with the 10% profit margin $100 in profit. So the $1000 dollars in operating expense brings in $1100 in revenue, and the profit, the $100 balance left over goes to pay for the $100 gift.
Now, the above theoretical example is based on the idea that the Times has a relatively stable operating business model. In this climate that is not the case, and technological advances in digital distribution have destabilized the model to the extent that there is little precedent to demonstrate the actual market value of the content recently being distributed for free.
What does all this have to do with the rollout of the New York Times paywall?
Here is where it starts to get interesting.
Net income for the New York Times Company for the past five years is as follows:
2010: $108 million
2009: $20 million
2008: ($58 million)
2007: $209 million
2006: ($543 million)
Despite the recession that started in 2008, the Times' worst year was in 2006. If the recession bottomed out in mid 2008, then the Times has been making slow gains in its overall operating profitability, with a net income of $108 million in 2010.
What this is telling us is that its operations without the paywall are narrowly in the black, returning a modest net income in 2010 of $108 million on revenues of $2.4 billion, or a net profit margin of 4.5%. That is for the entire New York Times Company. The New York Times Media Group, publishers of the New York Times newspaper and NYTimes.com, makes up about 65% of that revenue.
According to the Times this improvement in profitability results from increasing online ad sales and cost cutting and increased efficiency in the print division.
Here's where I think the explanation for the current paywall system may reside. The Times is in the black, but barely. The industry is in flux. Change is already happening. Growth will happen online. The print division is cost cutting, but there are limits to how fast and how far that can go. The opportunity for an increase in net income comes mostly from NYTimes.com. But, whatever happens with NYTimes.com, online advertising needs to be sustained. Loss can come too. Make the paywall too tight and online advertising will drop off as readers fall away. Surges of readership through social media sharing will be constrained.
The middle spot? Make a paywall that is more of a nuisance than a real deterrent. This will keep advertising rates as high as possible through free readership and will begin to migrate concerned and conscientious readers over to a paying online model. Gradually the tightness of the paywall can be adjusted as its financial impacts become more known.
If print revenues can be kept stable, the move to a loose paywall produces a powerful effect. Once the approximately $40 million invested in the paywall's implementation, plus the paywall operational costs are recovered, and any loss in online advertising is offset, online subscription revenues go nearly straight to net profit. Remember, NYTimes.com is already giving the news away for free. Their operations don't have to change for the paywall to take effect. They already produce and distribute the news. All things being equal, production costs don't rise.
It is one of the most unusual rollouts in business history. A company that is in full operational flow suddenly and somewhat loosely begins to charge for a product that it has been giving away for free.
Friday, March 18, 2011
A Little Bit of Free
In 2009 I made a series of predictions for the year, starting with the prediction that the New York Times would start to charge for it's online access. I was a little short on my time frame, but anyone who understands even the basics of the business of publishing could see the day coming. On March 28, the Times will initiate a pay for use system where users can access 20 pages per four week period for free and then have to pay, starting at $15.00/month.
The outcry against it indicates that the Times online is indeed worth paying for. People are upset because they recognize the value of the content and recognize the cost of being cut off from it. That right there says this will succeed at some level. If the announcement had been met with a collective yawn, it would have been a terrifying signal to the Times' executive team.
To demonstrate the value of the New York Times you can engage in a very simple experiment. Try life without the New York Times online. If it is worth the price, pay for it. If it isn't worth the price, don't.
Journalists and Photojournalists should be applauding this move. It signals an effort by the New York Times to uncouple content creation from direct dependence on online advertising. Without online subscription prices or online newsstand sales, there simply is no other way of generating a predictable online revenue stream. For online pieces there has been a direct one to one expense to advertising income ratio. That means that for every dollar spent on creating and distributing content one dollar has to come in from advertising to break even.
The publishing business model has always depended on three main sources of revenue; subscriptions, newsstand sales, and advertising. This created a more balanced and diverse method of allowing the readership to pay for content. Subscribers built a steady stream of predictable revenue, newsstand sales were driven by the content of individual issues, with sales surging for more popular--or valuable--content, and advertisers paying to pair advertising with the content. Subscription and newsstand sales provide a way for content creation to be recognized as both valuable and sustainable. It is a thing worth paying for, and requiring the audience to pay for it demonstrates its value.
If advertising is the only reliable mechanism for generating revenue, then the real value of content falls through the floor. The inevitable business conclusion in an online advertising only model is that content that is more conducive to advertising gets more lubricant in the system. A truly free model could only sustain itself over time if the content shaped itself around the advertising. In that case the reader is her or himself a product delivered by the publication to the advertisers. By paying for the content, the reader becomes the client again, shifting the scales back towards a balance between serving both the readers and the advertisers.
For that, just a little bit of free sounds about right.
Update: With early reports from the Times subscription rollout in Canada coming in, it seems that there are some very large holes in the paywall. Whether they are intentional or not, this certainly is not shaping up to be a black and white pay-or-don't-access situation. There's a good piece on Nieman Journalism Lab about how four lines of code are all that are needed to disable the content blocking system.
The outcry against it indicates that the Times online is indeed worth paying for. People are upset because they recognize the value of the content and recognize the cost of being cut off from it. That right there says this will succeed at some level. If the announcement had been met with a collective yawn, it would have been a terrifying signal to the Times' executive team.
To demonstrate the value of the New York Times you can engage in a very simple experiment. Try life without the New York Times online. If it is worth the price, pay for it. If it isn't worth the price, don't.
Journalists and Photojournalists should be applauding this move. It signals an effort by the New York Times to uncouple content creation from direct dependence on online advertising. Without online subscription prices or online newsstand sales, there simply is no other way of generating a predictable online revenue stream. For online pieces there has been a direct one to one expense to advertising income ratio. That means that for every dollar spent on creating and distributing content one dollar has to come in from advertising to break even.
The publishing business model has always depended on three main sources of revenue; subscriptions, newsstand sales, and advertising. This created a more balanced and diverse method of allowing the readership to pay for content. Subscribers built a steady stream of predictable revenue, newsstand sales were driven by the content of individual issues, with sales surging for more popular--or valuable--content, and advertisers paying to pair advertising with the content. Subscription and newsstand sales provide a way for content creation to be recognized as both valuable and sustainable. It is a thing worth paying for, and requiring the audience to pay for it demonstrates its value.
If advertising is the only reliable mechanism for generating revenue, then the real value of content falls through the floor. The inevitable business conclusion in an online advertising only model is that content that is more conducive to advertising gets more lubricant in the system. A truly free model could only sustain itself over time if the content shaped itself around the advertising. In that case the reader is her or himself a product delivered by the publication to the advertisers. By paying for the content, the reader becomes the client again, shifting the scales back towards a balance between serving both the readers and the advertisers.
For that, just a little bit of free sounds about right.
Update: With early reports from the Times subscription rollout in Canada coming in, it seems that there are some very large holes in the paywall. Whether they are intentional or not, this certainly is not shaping up to be a black and white pay-or-don't-access situation. There's a good piece on Nieman Journalism Lab about how four lines of code are all that are needed to disable the content blocking system.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Warscape
Reporting on armed conflicts invariably relies on one or more basic storylines that impart sense to the unfolding of events and the roles of actors. Such a narrative usually casts some in the role of victims and others as perpetrators. The most prevalent storyline of violence in the reporting on the warscape of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been rape. Indeed, the DRC has become infamous globally through the reports on the massive scale of sexual violence. While other forms of violence and abuse have also been committed on a massive scale, it is sexual violence that has attracted the lion's share of attention, especially among "outside" observers... Arguably "SGBV (Sexual and Gender Based Violence) tourism" has been added to what has come to be known as "war zone tourism."From the opening paragraph of The Complexity of Violence: A critical analysis of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
Nestled in the middle of that dense and important paragraph is a word of real significance to any efforts in communicating the reality of distant conflicts--warscape.
The word itself does not appear frequently enough to yet merit a definition in wikipedia or any other major online source that I could find, but I think it deserves a significant amount of examination before it does. When used in a social or political context, the authors here and in one other study I could find seem to think of it as denoting the realities of a war, of describing the existence of things beyond the scope of communication. But within word itself lies a key to its own interpretation.
-scape |skeɪp|combining form
denoting a specified type of scene : moonscape.
Critical to understanding depiction and its effects we need to have a clear sense of how removed the authors and the audience might be from the war. To experience a war as a warscape we must approach it from a distance. There can be little warscape for the war fought over and around us. That is too traumatic and chaotic to be combined into form, or any specified type of scene. With enough distance in place, all kinds of influences determine what final form the war might take, and what those media depictions might achieve in the world. As I have said time and again, those influences almost always align themselves along the interests and perspectives of the media makers.
We know from the history of the genre of landscape painting and photography in the west that the media are formed as much by the needs and wants of the audience as they are by any intrinsic truth of the land itself. Ansel Adams' work achieves iconic status in the branding of the western landscape because there is an audience that is highly receptive to his particular vision.
Does it not hold true as well then that the stories of distant wars are not then shaped as much by the needs, desires, and fantasies of the audience as they are the complex realities of distant conflicts? Are we not able to pick and choose the telling of the war that best suits the marketing and dissemination of the news itself? In this way, the warscape becomes the companion to the landscape. It is a vision rooted in distant events and places, but prepared, shaped, packaged, and distributed with the specific intent to meet local needs.
And if warscapes have been formed to respond to market needs, could they not also be formed to achieve results other than popular reception and market share? Could they not be formed to exert influence on political outcomes, on public figures, on groups with power to direct aid and partnerships, negotiate settlements, support solutions? Absolutely they can.
Does it not hold true as well then that the stories of distant wars are not then shaped as much by the needs, desires, and fantasies of the audience as they are the complex realities of distant conflicts? Are we not able to pick and choose the telling of the war that best suits the marketing and dissemination of the news itself? In this way, the warscape becomes the companion to the landscape. It is a vision rooted in distant events and places, but prepared, shaped, packaged, and distributed with the specific intent to meet local needs.
And if warscapes have been formed to respond to market needs, could they not also be formed to achieve results other than popular reception and market share? Could they not be formed to exert influence on political outcomes, on public figures, on groups with power to direct aid and partnerships, negotiate settlements, support solutions? Absolutely they can.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Obama v BP: the Anatomy of a Magazine Cover
Original Photo: Larry Downing/Reuters
On July 5th, in the wee hours of the morning, the New York Times blog Media Decoder ran a post on the editorial retouching of a cover of the June 19 issue of The Economist in which a figure was retouched out of an image to isolate Obama in the frame. By early afternoon, Emma Duncan, the Economist's deputy editor in charge of that specific issue, wrote a response by email that was published to the post. Thanks to the Times and to Duncan for giving us a greater chance to examine the editorial effect of the decisions that led up to the cover. It's an illuminating process.
In her response to the Times, Duncan says, "We removed her not to make a political point, but because the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers." Let's examine that closely.
In the original photograph, Obama is framed against the offshore oil rigs with two figures, Charlotte Randolph and Admiral Allen. Obama stands a full foot taller than Randolph, and appears actively engaged in conversation with her. His hands are on his hips, his head is turned downward to catch her words. Her body language indicates that she is making a point or argument. She is looking up, leaning slightly to the right and forward, towards his line of sight, actively engaging him while he listens and looks at something brightly colored on the beach. The image as a whole details an interaction between two people, within the context of the beach and the oil rig.
In the version run by the Economist, Admiral Allen is cropped out. This has little net effect on either Obama or the overall picture. But the removal of Randolph and the beach changes the context of the image entirely. It removes the purpose for Obama's downward gaze, replacing Randolph and the objects on the beach with the oil rig as the reason for his posture. Rather than actively engaging in a conversation, listening and looking, Obama is framed in isolation, surrounded by water and the image of the oil rig. His gaze is downward, defeated, or at least worn out and alone. Above the image runs the headline "Obama v BP." Next to him runs the text, "The Damage Beyond the Spill." There is nothing to indicate that the damage referred to belongs to anything or anyone else.
The removal of Randolph from the image thoroughly changes the context in which we can interpret Obama's posture and association with the oil rig. In the original, the two are actors on a stage with the subject of their interaction, the oil spill, looming in the background. The exchange in the image occurs in a triangle--Obama and Randolph interacting in the foreground with the oil rig receding to the top of the frame. Their exchange creates a foreground drama that establishes the distance between them and the offshore rig on the horizon. With Randolph removed, Obama is cast into a direct one to one relationship with the rig, his posture directly motivated by its now looming presence. Perhaps most significant is that his fellow actor in this diorama has been erased, leaving his body language to be attributed directly to the rig. It is a complete restructuring of the meaning of the image.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Photography and Sexual Violence
This spring I wrote a media policy document for HEAL Africa, a Congolese led program based in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, that provides evidence-based holistic medical and psychosocial healing for the survivors of a decade of war in Eastern Congo. HEAL Africa's Heal My People program is achieving incredible results in treating survivors of the systematic sexual violence that has been waged on the local population. Heal My People works to walk survivors through a process of physical and psychological recovery and then integrate them into communities where they are welcomed and embraced as equal and valued members. Below is an adapted version of that text.
Ethics, Issues and Responsibilities in Depicting Survivors of Sexual Violence
By Aric Mayer
June 2010
Survivors of rape and gender-based violence contribute their names, faces and stories to media productions at considerable personal risk. Rape is a trauma with a high potential for stigmatization that is easily facilitated with internet based mass media. Media producers have an obligation to do everything possible to do no harm, while minimizing potential for harm and maximizing the potential for good.
With the recent revolutions in media technology, humanitarian agencies are finding themselves in positions with increased pressure to publish their own stories and produce their own content. Producers of documentary and journalism media are also increasingly relying on the same humanitarian agencies both for access and information. These opportunities and responsibilities are creating new possibilities for agencies to integrate their media strategies into their overall organizational goals.
What follows is an introductory examination of the principal issues and problems that must be addressed from the perspective of an agency whose primary mission is to heal survivors of sexual violence within it’s care, and with an understanding that photography and video are highly evocative media with strong potentials both towards helping and towards exploitation. In each case the potential for harm is explored with the hope of avoiding it in practice. In situations where helping is the goal, the specific outcomes should be carefully targeted and all media strategies built into their service.
Sexual Violence and Identity Disclosure
The issues brought up in photographing rape survivors are complex and potentially harmful to the subjects. The ways that photography, video and film function as representative media, and the economies and markets within which they are funded, produced, distributed, achieve recognition and ultimately widespread public exposure can mirror in some ways the trauma of sexual violence.
The possibilities for increasing the trauma are significant. There is the imposition of another person’s vision upon one’s personage, the loss of control over one’s likeness, the potential for permanent and public association with one’s trauma, the problem of consent when one is asked for it by someone in a position of power, and the commodification of one’s own suffering. This is an effort to address these potentials and mitigate the possibilities for harm.
The Belmont Report
Created and published by the National Institute of Health in the United States, the Belmont Report, in it’s own words, “…is a statement of basic ethical principles and guidelines that should assist in resolving the ethical problems that surround the conduct of research with human subjects.”
The Belmont report offers a set of ethical guidelines that are particularly relevant to media depictions of rape survivors within the context of sexual violence. Because rape is a trauma that carries a high potential for public stigmatization and exploitation, ethical guidelines for research in the behavioral sciences are particularly relevant to any journalistic process of depiction.
Ethics, Issues and Responsibilities in Depicting Survivors of Sexual Violence
By Aric Mayer
June 2010
Survivors of rape and gender-based violence contribute their names, faces and stories to media productions at considerable personal risk. Rape is a trauma with a high potential for stigmatization that is easily facilitated with internet based mass media. Media producers have an obligation to do everything possible to do no harm, while minimizing potential for harm and maximizing the potential for good.
With the recent revolutions in media technology, humanitarian agencies are finding themselves in positions with increased pressure to publish their own stories and produce their own content. Producers of documentary and journalism media are also increasingly relying on the same humanitarian agencies both for access and information. These opportunities and responsibilities are creating new possibilities for agencies to integrate their media strategies into their overall organizational goals.
What follows is an introductory examination of the principal issues and problems that must be addressed from the perspective of an agency whose primary mission is to heal survivors of sexual violence within it’s care, and with an understanding that photography and video are highly evocative media with strong potentials both towards helping and towards exploitation. In each case the potential for harm is explored with the hope of avoiding it in practice. In situations where helping is the goal, the specific outcomes should be carefully targeted and all media strategies built into their service.
Sexual Violence and Identity Disclosure
"Rape is best characterized as torture that uses sex as a weapon. Like a torturer, the rapist uses sexual acts to dominate, humiliate, and terrorize the victim. To deny the role of sexual humiliation in rape is to deny victims the horror of what they have been through. As long as people have any sense of privacy about sexual acts and the human body, rape will, therefore, carry a stigma, not necessarily a stigma that blames the victim for what happened to her, but a stigma that links her name irrevocably with an act of intimate humiliation.
To name [or picture] a rape victim is to guarantee that whenever somebody hears her name [or sees her picture], that somebody will picture her in the act of being sexually tortured. To expose a rape victim to this without her consent is nothing short of punitive."
--Helen Benedict [1]
The issues brought up in photographing rape survivors are complex and potentially harmful to the subjects. The ways that photography, video and film function as representative media, and the economies and markets within which they are funded, produced, distributed, achieve recognition and ultimately widespread public exposure can mirror in some ways the trauma of sexual violence.
The possibilities for increasing the trauma are significant. There is the imposition of another person’s vision upon one’s personage, the loss of control over one’s likeness, the potential for permanent and public association with one’s trauma, the problem of consent when one is asked for it by someone in a position of power, and the commodification of one’s own suffering. This is an effort to address these potentials and mitigate the possibilities for harm.
The Belmont Report
Created and published by the National Institute of Health in the United States, the Belmont Report, in it’s own words, “…is a statement of basic ethical principles and guidelines that should assist in resolving the ethical problems that surround the conduct of research with human subjects.”
The Belmont report offers a set of ethical guidelines that are particularly relevant to media depictions of rape survivors within the context of sexual violence. Because rape is a trauma that carries a high potential for public stigmatization and exploitation, ethical guidelines for research in the behavioral sciences are particularly relevant to any journalistic process of depiction.
Since potential subjects are approached specifically because of their trauma, and media depiction is potentially linked to a permanent and public future association with their trauma, I recommend the application of best practices for behavioral science research to journalistic and documentary research. Below are selected quotes from the report.
Basic Ethical Principles:
Respect for Persons. -- Respect for persons incorporates at least two ethical convictions: first, that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents, and second, that persons with diminished autonomy are entitled to protection. The principle of respect for persons thus divides into two separate moral requirements: the requirement to acknowledge autonomy and the requirement to protect those with diminished autonomy.
Beneficence. -- Persons are treated in an ethical manner not only by respecting their decisions and protecting them from harm, but also by making efforts to secure their well-being. Such treatment falls under the principle of beneficence. The term ”beneficence” is often understood to cover acts of kindness or charity that go beyond strict obligation. In this document, beneficence is understood in a stronger sense, as an obligation. Two general rules have been formulated as complementary expressions of beneficent actions in this sense: (1) do not harm and (2) maximize possible benefits and minimize possible harms.
Justice. -- Who ought to receive the benefits of research and bear its burdens? This is a question of justice, in the sense of ”fairness in distribution” or ”what is deserved.” An injustice occurs when some benefit to which a person is entitled is denied without good reason or when some burden is imposed unduly. Another way of conceiving the principle of justice is that equals ought to be treated equally. However, this statement requires explication. Who is equal and who is unequal? What considerations justify departure from equal distribution? Almost all commentators allow that distinctions based on experience, age, deprivation, competence, merit and position do sometimes constitute criteria justifying differential treatment for certain purposes… the selection of research subjects needs to be scrutinized in order to determine whether some classes (e.g., welfare patients, particular racial and ethnic minorities, or persons confined to institutions) are being systematically selected simply because of their easy availability, their compromised position, or their manipulability, rather than for reasons directly related to the problem being studied.
Informed Consent. -- Respect for persons requires that subjects, to the degree that they are capable, be given the opportunity to choose what shall or shall not happen to them. This opportunity is provided when adequate standards for informed consent are satisfied.
While the importance of informed consent is unquestioned, controversy prevails over the nature and possibility of an informed consent. Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement that the consent process can be analyzed as containing three elements: information, comprehension and voluntariness.
[and in conclusion]:
One special instance of injustice results from the involvement of vulnerable subjects. Certain groups, such as racial minorities, the economically disadvantaged, the very sick, and the institutionalized may continually be sought as research subjects, owing to their ready availability in settings where research is conducted. Given their dependent status and their frequently compromised capacity for free consent, they should be protected against the danger of being involved in research solely for administrative convenience, or because they are easy to manipulate as a result of their illness or socioeconomic condition.
The full text of the Belmont Report can be read here.
Informed Consent
Central to the informed consent process is the necessity for the individual who is considering revealing their identity to understand that there is potential that it may cause them personal harm while hopefully contributing to the overall public good.
One potential for personal harm is immediately clear. Participating increases risk of stigmatization and retaliation. Media should offer a reasonable hope of a benefit that offsets this risk.
Not so clear is how the media may provide that benefit. The basic logic is that if a person contributes their story, their face, their name to a project, they increase the overall level of personal engagement for the story with the broader international audience. The promise is that the story will bring international aid, awareness, political pressure etc. to help the problem, and so the potential for personal stigmatization is offset by the promise of increasing the overall means of addressing the problem. In the best case, that is what should happen.
Unfortunately, in many cases, media serve to reinforce and reproduce western stereotypes and perceptions that Africa and other parts of the world are barbaric, hopeless places that generate horrific human rights problems whose solutions only lie in Western intervention. In this case, one has to wonder if the contributions of the participants have not been in vain. If they take the personal risk to contribute their stories and identities, then the media should drive some sense of good that might come to bear on the problem itself. Notions of how good might be achieved should be incorporated into the very process and form of the media itself, not merely into hoped for or perceived future aid, assistance, rescue or political change. Media strategy is not separate from the overall structural efforts to address the problem.
It is a completely fair question to ask any media producer what their sense of the public good is in each situation and how they will frame the story in light of western prejudices about that part of the world in general. If survivors decide to take the personal risk of participating in media then there should be an understanding of how the media being created will deliver on that promise. And media makers should have a clear sense of responsibility to use these stories in ways the promise the best outcomes for the subjects--who will have to live with the possibility of a lifelong association with the media that are being created.
Ease of Access
Survivors of sexual violence who are being treated in a hospital or program are singularly easy to locate. They exist as a potential representative population that stands in for a wider population that exists in more remote and dangerous areas. This makes them a desirable starting point for journalists and media makers. Care must be taken to keep those who have sought and are receiving medical help from bearing too much of an undue burden in telling their stories, where the intrusion of media makers may interfere with the process of healing.
Protection vs Paternalization
A balanced media policy must take into account the full range of potential benefits and harm from participating in media about sexual violence and war. Anyone who participates in a media project in which their stories are used or their identities are disclosed should have a full understanding of the potential that creates, both for healing and for harm. Patients should be protected, but not paternalized. If they have a clear understanding of what the implications are for disclosing their identities within the context of sexual violence, then they should be free to choose whether or not to participate.
Informed Consent
Central to the informed consent process is the necessity for the individual who is considering revealing their identity to understand that there is potential that it may cause them personal harm while hopefully contributing to the overall public good.
One potential for personal harm is immediately clear. Participating increases risk of stigmatization and retaliation. Media should offer a reasonable hope of a benefit that offsets this risk.
Not so clear is how the media may provide that benefit. The basic logic is that if a person contributes their story, their face, their name to a project, they increase the overall level of personal engagement for the story with the broader international audience. The promise is that the story will bring international aid, awareness, political pressure etc. to help the problem, and so the potential for personal stigmatization is offset by the promise of increasing the overall means of addressing the problem. In the best case, that is what should happen.
Unfortunately, in many cases, media serve to reinforce and reproduce western stereotypes and perceptions that Africa and other parts of the world are barbaric, hopeless places that generate horrific human rights problems whose solutions only lie in Western intervention. In this case, one has to wonder if the contributions of the participants have not been in vain. If they take the personal risk to contribute their stories and identities, then the media should drive some sense of good that might come to bear on the problem itself. Notions of how good might be achieved should be incorporated into the very process and form of the media itself, not merely into hoped for or perceived future aid, assistance, rescue or political change. Media strategy is not separate from the overall structural efforts to address the problem.
It is a completely fair question to ask any media producer what their sense of the public good is in each situation and how they will frame the story in light of western prejudices about that part of the world in general. If survivors decide to take the personal risk of participating in media then there should be an understanding of how the media being created will deliver on that promise. And media makers should have a clear sense of responsibility to use these stories in ways the promise the best outcomes for the subjects--who will have to live with the possibility of a lifelong association with the media that are being created.
Ease of Access
Survivors of sexual violence who are being treated in a hospital or program are singularly easy to locate. They exist as a potential representative population that stands in for a wider population that exists in more remote and dangerous areas. This makes them a desirable starting point for journalists and media makers. Care must be taken to keep those who have sought and are receiving medical help from bearing too much of an undue burden in telling their stories, where the intrusion of media makers may interfere with the process of healing.
Protection vs Paternalization
A balanced media policy must take into account the full range of potential benefits and harm from participating in media about sexual violence and war. Anyone who participates in a media project in which their stories are used or their identities are disclosed should have a full understanding of the potential that creates, both for healing and for harm. Patients should be protected, but not paternalized. If they have a clear understanding of what the implications are for disclosing their identities within the context of sexual violence, then they should be free to choose whether or not to participate.
Over-protection can be a form of paternalizing, which is also a form of subjugation. Empowerment means giving subjects the tools to make their own decisions within their capabilities to do so with full awareness of the potential consequences. Key to that are: an understanding of the issues of depiction within the context of sexual violence, a process of assessing an individual’s capacity to make an informed autonomous decision, protection for those with diminished autonomy, and a clear process of generating informed consent.
The Internet and the Developing World
As we have already seen, the fastest way to bring communication to rural parts of the world is through cell phone services. Remote parts of China, Africa, Asia, the Middle East all rapidly transitioned from near complete isolation to cell phone coverage in a very short period of time. The next wave of access will likely include an internet that can be accessed via cell phone. While we can’t predict exactly how and when it will happen, it is likely that it will happen faster than we expect. A future where nearly everyone with a cell phone has some kind of internet access is imminent.
With it will come a range of new business and social opportunities. Also will come the need to manage one’s internet presence in the face of a whole new platform for disseminating stigmatizing information. Services such as Facebook and Twitter function very well on cell phones, bringing the social web to a much larger group of participants.
Publication on the web is permanent and ubiquitous. It is very hard to undo. Survivors who believe that they are sharing their stories through Western media to remote audiences may find in the near future that they have permanently broadcast their stories throughout their own neighborhoods.
Currently, each woman named a high profile photo essay on rape in Eastern Congo is somewhat permanently fixed in a state of online identity associating her with her trauma. A Google search for all the names included in the essay returns at the top of the search results the articles in which their identities are disclosed as rape victims. This includes minors and children. Because major publications online dominate search rankings, it is possible that this will not change over the course of the lifetimes of these women. So long as those websites and their archives are available online, in the top results returned for their names will be these articles.
As the internets become more essential to the functions of daily life in more rural communities, this may have significant impact on their lives. Should survivors wish to have an online life separate from those associations, it will be very hard to change their online identities. When the social web comes to the rest of the world, and it will definitely come, it will come with all the information ever published online included.
In the West, social media have come to dominate the social structures of upcoming generations, and the evidence is that this will only increase in its sophistication and permanence. It is becoming more and more common that every employer does a simple Google search before hiring a prospective employee. People vet their friends, potential love interests, colleagues, enemies, and virtually anyone they have an interest in by searching for information on them on the web. There is no reason to believe that this will not eventually be a social norm throughout the world.
This raises a serious problem with informed consent. Media makers are protected by signed release forms that in the West are legal protection and indication that a subject has given full consent. And these same release forms are signed and gathered throughout the world as a matter of practice. But how is informed consent possible for a person living in a rural area with limited access to the internet and therefore very little capacity to understand what it is that they are agreeing to? If you ask a rape survivor in the United States, who already participates in the social web, to speak publicly about their trauma, the implications for them are more clear. How do you facilitate an informed consent with someone who has yet to be introduced to the social web, and yet for whom the internet may well be a significant influence in the near future?
Photography and Survivors of Rape
The very act of permanently recording someone's image within the context of being a rape victim can itself be experienced to be a loss of control not unlike the experience of rape. The photographer now owns their images and has the capacity to further contribute to their stigmatization and exploitation.
The key issue here for photography is written right into the language of the medium. We “take” a photograph. There is the understanding that something is fixed and then removed from the situation. For traumatized subjects, this can be a reanimation of their trauma. It can even be a participation in or a reactivation of some of the principle aspects of the trauma: loss of power, loss of control, loss of identity, and becoming the property of another person.
In the United States standard journalism practice is to never show the faces or disclose the names of a rape survivor. If either of those identifying aspects are to be disclosed, the argument must be made that the public’s right to that specific information supercedes the individual need for privacy. That would be an extremely rare occurrence.
Within the ethics of journalism, that is the standard for victim protection. Journalism is a public service that produces a public commodity, and decisions about disclosure are made based on an idea of the public good as well as the popularity and marketability of the information. This allows for a weighing of the issues. How does the individual right to privacy balance against the need for the public to know? Decisions are made with the understanding that public disclosure can do private harm.
For hospitals and public health initiatives, the boundaries and purposes of depiction are different and so the decision process must be handled differently. Since their primary mission is to heal people, the care and concern must be first for the patient and program participant. Only after all the questions regarding their protection are answered can strategies for public disclosure be made. There is no weighing process balancing disclosure versus public good. The rights of the patient must always come first. Only after those rights have been satisfactorily protected can media strategies be created.
For media makers, this is a difficult problem. If you remove depiction of the survivor from the possibilities of telling the story, you remove the very elements that make the story popular. Pressure from media producers will almost always be in the direction of more disclosure. Without it, there is much less chance for award winning work in a market that rewards the commodification of suffering.
Consent, Coercion and Undue Influence
Ariella Azoulay, in The Civil Contract of Photography, questions the ability of someone recently the victim of war and physical violation to give consent to have their photograph taken. For her, even the asking is tantamount to a repeated rape.
With recently and severely traumatized survivors of violence, it is questionable as to how much informed consent is possible. Those who are so close to their trauma as to be unable to talk about it are at a significantly increased risk being unable to give a proper informed consent. They will, however, possibly recognize and experience the loss of control that goes with it. The act of asking for consent can be interpreted as an endorsement of their experience of continued exploitation.
How many women who are so recently severely traumatized and who are now in a program that may be their only hope for safety and healing, have the strength to say 'no' when asked permission by someone in such authority over them? And how many might say 'yes' out of fear or lack of power?
Their right to privacy is intimately connected to their ability to heal. In the case of Congo, where rape is a too common experience, it might be thought that the increased frequency of rape would lessen the potential stigma. Instead it would seem that the opposite is true, and that survivors, rather than being more accepted, are in fact more likely to be thrown out of their homes, villages, and communities into a life of perpetual stigma. The potential stigma is greater. The very act of permanently recording someone's image within the context of being a rape victim could itself be experienced to be a loss of control not unlike the experience of rape.
Likewise, we could also say that a survivor’s right to publicly tell their story may also be connected to their ability to heal. If a survivor actively seeks a voice and platform and a stage on which to tell her story, then it can be built to best serve her needs. That stage should be created based on the terms of her involvement, not on the terms of those who want to use her picture. It is a balancing act.
The Promise of Empowerment
It has been a common sentiment in humanitarian photography and photojournalism that photographing the suffering, dispossessed, and powerless gives them a voice by exposing their condition to the world. To deny them the opportunity to be photographed is to silence their voice and to keep them in the shadows of obscurity. The logic behind this argument makes perfect sense from within a celebrity and advertising saturated culture, and ensures that the media makers continue to have access and control.
In actuality there is little evidence to show that media exposure is intrinsically empowering. If anything it raises risk on the part of the subjects who may have little or no access to a functioning judicial system, police protection, or even basic physical safety.
What is clear though is that compassion and suffering are media commodities that are bought and sold within economies and markets. The currency of exchange can be money (both in the form of for-profit and non-profit support), status, and/or recognition for the makers within our advertising driven media economies.
Whatever the outcome for the subjects, it is certain that the media produced will serve the purposes of the producers. Photographers, filmmakers, and media producers all have intended outcomes in mind, whether they state them up front or not. This is true from the award winning photojournalist to the most casual visitor who just wants a photo souvenir to show friends back home.
With the promise for empowerment, photojournalism and documentary media frequently cross the line into exploitation, leaving the subject fixed permanently in the broader public arena as a victim while the producers of the media are rewarded.
With that said, media can drive or facilitate realized empowering results. But to do so the media strategies must be in service to specific goals. Actual empowerment should be an observable outcome in which the subjects achieve greater influence and control over their own circumstances while having their own rights protected. These are ultimately systemic or political solutions with emotional components. Insofar as media are empowering, they should drive targeted lasting systemic improvement. Media that focus purely on the emotional content of the subject may elicit a strong reaction from the audience but achieve little for the subjects.
When the needs of the photographer or publication supercede the needs and rights of the subject, then the boundary into exploitation has been crossed.
Justice for All Survivors
There is no situation in which a media maker’s ethical obligations to their subjects in the remote parts of the world differ from their ethical obligations to American or Western subjects. When there are any deviations in the ethics of depicting non-Western survivors of sexual violence from Western survivors, the burden is on the creators and the publishers of such work to demonstrate that it is necessary and just. In so far as they cannot, then the non-Western subjects should be afforded the same rights and protections as Western subjects. This is particularly significant in the revealing of identities of minors and children of rape, whose depictions would be protected and prohibited in most western countries, regardless of consent.
Rights Ownership and Repeat Trauma
For all survivors of gender-based violence, a principle function of the trauma was to remove control and ownership of their bodies. For anyone who was taken or kept in any kind of slavery or subjugation this has even greater consequence in the issues of healing. When they are photographed in the context of the trauma another loss of ownership takes place--their image becomes the property of another person. The impact of that will depend on the individual.
The simple act of that exchange--their image being taken and the loss of control that goes with it--can be an extension of the original trauma. This effect will multiply as the social web becomes more and more prevalent throughout the world.
Photography and Healing
Many claims are made about photography’s ability to heal, empower, recontextualize, and otherwise change the circumstances and inner lives of suffering individuals for the better. In each case we have to ask the question, to what end, and how?
From a clinical perspective, many of these claims are suspect at best and are founded on market influences and logics that many of the makers aren’t aware that they are participating in. If the goal in making pictures is to heal trauma survivors specifically, then there have to be systemic goals based on clinical evidence that drives actual realized internal change. The language of empowerment is not enough.
A critical stage in healing from trauma is the metabolization of the trauma within the psyche of the survivor. This occurs through a process and in a protected space within which the survivor is able to explore the trauma in a way that results in ownership and integration. In order for this to happen, many survivors will need to have control of their own story. To have it fixed in the public arena creates risk of loss of control and re-exploitation within the context of the rape. That risk must be balance with the need to speak out against injustice and systemic violence.
Conclusion
Contributing stories and identities to media productions about sexual violence has the potential to be both helpful and harmful. Key to mitigating the potential for harm is a clear process of informed consent, combined with a goal driven media strategy that is in full support of a survivor’s rights and needs as a whole person.
Survivors of gender based violence break down into two basic groups: autonomous individuals who are capable of informed consent, and those with diminished autonomy due to the recency and/or severity of the trauma who need special protection.
Informed consent for autonomous individuals contains three elements; information, comprehension and voluntariness. When the requirements for a fully informed consent are met, media makers have an obligation to mitigate any and all potential harm wherever possible.
Whenever the needs of the makers or the distributors of such media productions supercede the rights and needs of the subjects, the line into exploitation has been crossed.
Publishing names, faces and stories increases the overall reader/viewer engagement with the story. Therefore media pressure will frequently be in the direction of increased disclosure. It also permanently associates a survivor with their trauma in a world where the internet is increasingly available.
Throughout the process, there is never a situation in which the ethical obligations of media makers towards their subjects in the West differ from their subjects elsewhere in the world. Whenever differences emerge, the burden is on the media makers to demonstrate that they are necessary and just.
[1] Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, by Helen Benedict via Poynter Institute.
[2] The Civil Contract of Photography, by Ariella Azoulay.
The Internet and the Developing World
As we have already seen, the fastest way to bring communication to rural parts of the world is through cell phone services. Remote parts of China, Africa, Asia, the Middle East all rapidly transitioned from near complete isolation to cell phone coverage in a very short period of time. The next wave of access will likely include an internet that can be accessed via cell phone. While we can’t predict exactly how and when it will happen, it is likely that it will happen faster than we expect. A future where nearly everyone with a cell phone has some kind of internet access is imminent.
With it will come a range of new business and social opportunities. Also will come the need to manage one’s internet presence in the face of a whole new platform for disseminating stigmatizing information. Services such as Facebook and Twitter function very well on cell phones, bringing the social web to a much larger group of participants.
Publication on the web is permanent and ubiquitous. It is very hard to undo. Survivors who believe that they are sharing their stories through Western media to remote audiences may find in the near future that they have permanently broadcast their stories throughout their own neighborhoods.
Currently, each woman named a high profile photo essay on rape in Eastern Congo is somewhat permanently fixed in a state of online identity associating her with her trauma. A Google search for all the names included in the essay returns at the top of the search results the articles in which their identities are disclosed as rape victims. This includes minors and children. Because major publications online dominate search rankings, it is possible that this will not change over the course of the lifetimes of these women. So long as those websites and their archives are available online, in the top results returned for their names will be these articles.
As the internets become more essential to the functions of daily life in more rural communities, this may have significant impact on their lives. Should survivors wish to have an online life separate from those associations, it will be very hard to change their online identities. When the social web comes to the rest of the world, and it will definitely come, it will come with all the information ever published online included.
In the West, social media have come to dominate the social structures of upcoming generations, and the evidence is that this will only increase in its sophistication and permanence. It is becoming more and more common that every employer does a simple Google search before hiring a prospective employee. People vet their friends, potential love interests, colleagues, enemies, and virtually anyone they have an interest in by searching for information on them on the web. There is no reason to believe that this will not eventually be a social norm throughout the world.
This raises a serious problem with informed consent. Media makers are protected by signed release forms that in the West are legal protection and indication that a subject has given full consent. And these same release forms are signed and gathered throughout the world as a matter of practice. But how is informed consent possible for a person living in a rural area with limited access to the internet and therefore very little capacity to understand what it is that they are agreeing to? If you ask a rape survivor in the United States, who already participates in the social web, to speak publicly about their trauma, the implications for them are more clear. How do you facilitate an informed consent with someone who has yet to be introduced to the social web, and yet for whom the internet may well be a significant influence in the near future?
Photography and Survivors of Rape
The very act of permanently recording someone's image within the context of being a rape victim can itself be experienced to be a loss of control not unlike the experience of rape. The photographer now owns their images and has the capacity to further contribute to their stigmatization and exploitation.
The key issue here for photography is written right into the language of the medium. We “take” a photograph. There is the understanding that something is fixed and then removed from the situation. For traumatized subjects, this can be a reanimation of their trauma. It can even be a participation in or a reactivation of some of the principle aspects of the trauma: loss of power, loss of control, loss of identity, and becoming the property of another person.
In the United States standard journalism practice is to never show the faces or disclose the names of a rape survivor. If either of those identifying aspects are to be disclosed, the argument must be made that the public’s right to that specific information supercedes the individual need for privacy. That would be an extremely rare occurrence.
Within the ethics of journalism, that is the standard for victim protection. Journalism is a public service that produces a public commodity, and decisions about disclosure are made based on an idea of the public good as well as the popularity and marketability of the information. This allows for a weighing of the issues. How does the individual right to privacy balance against the need for the public to know? Decisions are made with the understanding that public disclosure can do private harm.
For hospitals and public health initiatives, the boundaries and purposes of depiction are different and so the decision process must be handled differently. Since their primary mission is to heal people, the care and concern must be first for the patient and program participant. Only after all the questions regarding their protection are answered can strategies for public disclosure be made. There is no weighing process balancing disclosure versus public good. The rights of the patient must always come first. Only after those rights have been satisfactorily protected can media strategies be created.
For media makers, this is a difficult problem. If you remove depiction of the survivor from the possibilities of telling the story, you remove the very elements that make the story popular. Pressure from media producers will almost always be in the direction of more disclosure. Without it, there is much less chance for award winning work in a market that rewards the commodification of suffering.
Consent, Coercion and Undue Influence
Ariella Azoulay, in The Civil Contract of Photography, questions the ability of someone recently the victim of war and physical violation to give consent to have their photograph taken. For her, even the asking is tantamount to a repeated rape.
With recently and severely traumatized survivors of violence, it is questionable as to how much informed consent is possible. Those who are so close to their trauma as to be unable to talk about it are at a significantly increased risk being unable to give a proper informed consent. They will, however, possibly recognize and experience the loss of control that goes with it. The act of asking for consent can be interpreted as an endorsement of their experience of continued exploitation.
How many women who are so recently severely traumatized and who are now in a program that may be their only hope for safety and healing, have the strength to say 'no' when asked permission by someone in such authority over them? And how many might say 'yes' out of fear or lack of power?
Their right to privacy is intimately connected to their ability to heal. In the case of Congo, where rape is a too common experience, it might be thought that the increased frequency of rape would lessen the potential stigma. Instead it would seem that the opposite is true, and that survivors, rather than being more accepted, are in fact more likely to be thrown out of their homes, villages, and communities into a life of perpetual stigma. The potential stigma is greater. The very act of permanently recording someone's image within the context of being a rape victim could itself be experienced to be a loss of control not unlike the experience of rape.
Likewise, we could also say that a survivor’s right to publicly tell their story may also be connected to their ability to heal. If a survivor actively seeks a voice and platform and a stage on which to tell her story, then it can be built to best serve her needs. That stage should be created based on the terms of her involvement, not on the terms of those who want to use her picture. It is a balancing act.
The Promise of Empowerment
It has been a common sentiment in humanitarian photography and photojournalism that photographing the suffering, dispossessed, and powerless gives them a voice by exposing their condition to the world. To deny them the opportunity to be photographed is to silence their voice and to keep them in the shadows of obscurity. The logic behind this argument makes perfect sense from within a celebrity and advertising saturated culture, and ensures that the media makers continue to have access and control.
In actuality there is little evidence to show that media exposure is intrinsically empowering. If anything it raises risk on the part of the subjects who may have little or no access to a functioning judicial system, police protection, or even basic physical safety.
What is clear though is that compassion and suffering are media commodities that are bought and sold within economies and markets. The currency of exchange can be money (both in the form of for-profit and non-profit support), status, and/or recognition for the makers within our advertising driven media economies.
Whatever the outcome for the subjects, it is certain that the media produced will serve the purposes of the producers. Photographers, filmmakers, and media producers all have intended outcomes in mind, whether they state them up front or not. This is true from the award winning photojournalist to the most casual visitor who just wants a photo souvenir to show friends back home.
With the promise for empowerment, photojournalism and documentary media frequently cross the line into exploitation, leaving the subject fixed permanently in the broader public arena as a victim while the producers of the media are rewarded.
With that said, media can drive or facilitate realized empowering results. But to do so the media strategies must be in service to specific goals. Actual empowerment should be an observable outcome in which the subjects achieve greater influence and control over their own circumstances while having their own rights protected. These are ultimately systemic or political solutions with emotional components. Insofar as media are empowering, they should drive targeted lasting systemic improvement. Media that focus purely on the emotional content of the subject may elicit a strong reaction from the audience but achieve little for the subjects.
When the needs of the photographer or publication supercede the needs and rights of the subject, then the boundary into exploitation has been crossed.
Justice for All Survivors
There is no situation in which a media maker’s ethical obligations to their subjects in the remote parts of the world differ from their ethical obligations to American or Western subjects. When there are any deviations in the ethics of depicting non-Western survivors of sexual violence from Western survivors, the burden is on the creators and the publishers of such work to demonstrate that it is necessary and just. In so far as they cannot, then the non-Western subjects should be afforded the same rights and protections as Western subjects. This is particularly significant in the revealing of identities of minors and children of rape, whose depictions would be protected and prohibited in most western countries, regardless of consent.
Rights Ownership and Repeat Trauma
For all survivors of gender-based violence, a principle function of the trauma was to remove control and ownership of their bodies. For anyone who was taken or kept in any kind of slavery or subjugation this has even greater consequence in the issues of healing. When they are photographed in the context of the trauma another loss of ownership takes place--their image becomes the property of another person. The impact of that will depend on the individual.
The simple act of that exchange--their image being taken and the loss of control that goes with it--can be an extension of the original trauma. This effect will multiply as the social web becomes more and more prevalent throughout the world.
Photography and Healing
Many claims are made about photography’s ability to heal, empower, recontextualize, and otherwise change the circumstances and inner lives of suffering individuals for the better. In each case we have to ask the question, to what end, and how?
From a clinical perspective, many of these claims are suspect at best and are founded on market influences and logics that many of the makers aren’t aware that they are participating in. If the goal in making pictures is to heal trauma survivors specifically, then there have to be systemic goals based on clinical evidence that drives actual realized internal change. The language of empowerment is not enough.
A critical stage in healing from trauma is the metabolization of the trauma within the psyche of the survivor. This occurs through a process and in a protected space within which the survivor is able to explore the trauma in a way that results in ownership and integration. In order for this to happen, many survivors will need to have control of their own story. To have it fixed in the public arena creates risk of loss of control and re-exploitation within the context of the rape. That risk must be balance with the need to speak out against injustice and systemic violence.
Conclusion
Contributing stories and identities to media productions about sexual violence has the potential to be both helpful and harmful. Key to mitigating the potential for harm is a clear process of informed consent, combined with a goal driven media strategy that is in full support of a survivor’s rights and needs as a whole person.
Survivors of gender based violence break down into two basic groups: autonomous individuals who are capable of informed consent, and those with diminished autonomy due to the recency and/or severity of the trauma who need special protection.
Informed consent for autonomous individuals contains three elements; information, comprehension and voluntariness. When the requirements for a fully informed consent are met, media makers have an obligation to mitigate any and all potential harm wherever possible.
Whenever the needs of the makers or the distributors of such media productions supercede the rights and needs of the subjects, the line into exploitation has been crossed.
Publishing names, faces and stories increases the overall reader/viewer engagement with the story. Therefore media pressure will frequently be in the direction of increased disclosure. It also permanently associates a survivor with their trauma in a world where the internet is increasingly available.
Throughout the process, there is never a situation in which the ethical obligations of media makers towards their subjects in the West differ from their subjects elsewhere in the world. Whenever differences emerge, the burden is on the media makers to demonstrate that they are necessary and just.
[1] Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, by Helen Benedict via Poynter Institute.
[2] The Civil Contract of Photography, by Ariella Azoulay.
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