Dealing With Vulnerable Interviewees: What You Need to Know
The Association of Foreign Press Correspondents recently spoke with Jo Healey, the author of Trauma Reporting: A Journalist’s Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories. She has over three decades of journalism experience and in addition to being a published author, is now an educator for journalists around the world. In the following interview, Healey explores topics from her book regarding how journalists can best deal with vulnerable interviewees. She summarizes her main tips into six important areas: honesty, acknowledgment, accuracy, consent, control, and compassion. She follows these tips with a candid discussion of her own difficult experiences as a journalist. The following interview provides very important information on a lesser-known area of journalism: how to go about reporting on sensitive subjects.
Jo Healey
Jo Healey is the author of Trauma Reporting: A Journalist’s Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories. In the book, sources and survivors who spoke to journalists at traumatic times share their insight along with news correspondents and documentary makers including Louis Theroux. A journalist for more than thirty years, Jo introduced Trauma Reporting training to BBC News and Current Affairs and factual programming. A keynote speaker and the founder of Trauma Work, Jo trains hundreds of journalists globally on how to best work with victims, survivors, and vulnerable interviewees.
You begin the introductory section of your book Trauma Reporting, published in 2019, with "Do your job, do it well, do not harm." Can you elaborate further on this advice you give to journalists in your book?
As journalists, many of us are regularly working closely with people who are hurting yet still choose to tell us about it. We aren’t trying to hold them to account, but to hear their account and to hear it in the best way we can for them, for us and for our output.
Having trained hundreds of journalists internationally in how best to work with victims and survivors, I know that many fear making things worse for the vulnerable people they interview. Getting the relationship right really matters to them. But many share times when they feel out of their depth, grappling with visceral emotions and human suffering and all the while conscious that they are under pressure to deliver. They have walked away from these interactions feeling discomfited, uncertain, and unsure of why it didn’t go too well or feel too good.
Our journalism culture has been effectively, or not, to practice our skills on the grieving public. Reporters feel and sometimes flounder their way through encounters with people who are going through something so bad that it is newsworthy: working with people who may have lost their homes, their health, their livelihoods, their freedom, their children. They may have been violated, trafficked, recovering from addiction, or any number of other horrors.
The potential for causing harm is significant if reporters unwittingly exacerbate the trauma, such as with harm to the interviewee’s mental health, harm to the journalist’s values, and harm to their employer’s reputation should the situation go horribly wrong.
It is important we get these relationships right from the start. Not just because we are human beings interacting with fellow human beings who are suffering, but also in a competitive journalistic market, we want our contributors to stay with us as their tragic story unfolds, sometimes across many years. There is a simple equation that if you treat people decently, they are more likely to give a better interview and provide more access.
Those individuals, families, victims, and survivors are at the heart of this work. It is about journalists being able to tell the stories that matter, better.
Journalists who want to cover sensitive stories can find guidance in your book. Can you summarize the basic principles of this guidance?
There’s an abundance of tips, steers, and practical hands-on guidance shared in Trauma Reporting. Insight from our interviewees and expertise from news correspondents are also applied to each step of the reporting process, which entails approaching people, establishing professional relationships, interviewing, filming, writing, and following up on their sensitive stories.
To distill some of it down for the trauma reporting training, I coined the acronym HAACCC and you will not go wrong if you apply these key principles. They evolved from the charity Disaster Action who worked with many families over a number of years. These were people and families who had been caught up in nearly thirty global disasters: plane crashes, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and tsunamis. Through the collective feedback of the families and survivors, the charity was able to drill down what made working with journalists a positive experience. It amounted to six key factors:
• Honesty: Be open, honest, and transparent with people right from the start.
• Acknowledgement: Faith’s young son was killed. She chose to speak to reporters and offer invaluable insight through my trauma reporting training. She talks of “the simple ‘sorry’ that makes it so much easier for me to move forward with the report you are doing.”
• Accuracy: Get facts and details right. Inaccuracy will greatly distress.
• Consent: Be clear on what they are agreeing to when they say yes to the interview. It is important to manage expectations carefully.
• Control: What happened to them was out of their control. They can feel helpless and disempowered. Always explain and involve them in the process. Let them know what you may want to ask, listen to their opinions, and give them a choice. Melody was sexually abused as a child and took her step father to court as an adult. He got 18 years and she chose to share her story. She is very involved in my training. She tells journalists, “I need to know what you are doing and why, because people like me had too many years of someone doing things to them without explanation and it wasn’t pleasant. Explaining things makes me feel part of the team. I need to feel safe.”
• Compassion: Treat them with empathy, dignity, courtesy, care, and tact. Give them time and your fullest attention. Listen rather than talk.
Clearly, across the book and across the training sessions, there is much more to it than this. But HAACCC is a good place to start.
Melody told me recently, “As a child victim, I had no power. Being interviewed, I felt I was back as a vulnerable child having to relive it again. Through your training program, I can share with journalists the need to give people like me choice, control, and connection."
What is one of the most traumatic experiences you have encountered in your career as a journalist?
As with many thousands of journalists in newsrooms worldwide, I’ve worked with hundreds of people whose lives were upended, whose emotions were shredded, but who wanted to share. People told me intimate experiences of grief, violation, and loss.
I tend to recall the tiny details they shared off-camera: a mum at her newly buried young son’s grave leaning close to me and whispering how she yearned to push her hands through the soil, grab his body and just hold him. The granny deep in the mining community where I worked, ironing her lace hankies. She was going to need them, she told me. It would be her grandson’s funeral the following morning; he was being buried with full military honours. She wanted to do him proud.
It is endlessly a privilege to be at the heart of people’s stories of trauma, loss, and anguish. Whether covering lost livelihoods and fractured communities as the pits and coalfields folded like dominoes, to covering lost lives.
The people who touch me are the ordinary people who have extraordinarily bad or difficult things happen to them.
One of them was Emma Humphreys. Her story, early in my TV career, had a profound effect personally and professionally. Emma had a brutal home life, spent time in care, and by the time she was 16, she was homeless and selling sex. She moved in with one of the men. He was twice her age and subjected her to extreme physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. One day, panicked with fear that he would rape her yet again, Emma stabbed him once with the knife she had earlier used to cut her own wrists. He died shortly afterwards.
Deeply traumatised, Emma was unable to speak of the violence she’d endured. Without a decent defence, she was given an indefinite sentence for murder. Years later, she made contact with Justice for Women, they started a campaign, and that’s how Emma’s story reached me. After working for newspapers and then radio, I moved to work for BBC TV regional news. I was researching a series of features around domestic violence. Emma’s story caught my eye because the killing had happened in our area.
I vividly remember meeting Emma. She agreed to an interview with me on a day’s release from prison. We met in a park and a campaigner with Justice for Women was with us. Emma was tiny and terrified and, at 24, not much younger than me. We sat in the park, on a bench, and only when she felt ready did we attempt to film her. She was shaking like a leaf but determined finally to have her say, and she did. For the first time, in public and on film, Emma’s story of abuse, violence, terror, and injustice were captured and told.
Her account caused a stir even in the days before social media. The campaign heated up but the legal process was slow. Two and half years after the campaign started and ten years after she had been jailed, Emma’s case reached the court of appeals. It was a baking hot day. Campaigners were out in force, chanting, singing, and brandishing placards. And then came the news they were longing to hear. Emma was free; her murder conviction was overturned.
I stood on the appeal court steps amid the commotion and watched as Emma, tiny and frail but with a megawatt smile, walked tentatively out into the sunshine. Her life was so unlike mine: a childhood filled with fear and abuse, and adulthood in jail. Yet here she was not only walking free and making international headlines but having achieved a change in the law around provocation.
It is people like Emma who inspired me.
What should journalists who interview victims of traumatic events know in advance?
As a profession, journalists are known to be a resilient bunch. We are accustomed to working in stressful environments and under pressure. We are expected to deliver quickly, sometimes through live outside broadcasts. We can turn our pieces around rapidly to reach multiple platforms: radio, online, TV, newspapers. We report from courtrooms and inquests, from marches and protests, from homes, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and war zones, and just about every arena in between. We can be so busy focusing on other people’s experiences, we forget to take a look at our own.
Keeping an eye on ourselves when covering stories of people’s trauma and distress is hugely important. Sometimes it isn’t surprising that particular stories affect us. We may be covering them endlessly. They may be particularly grueling or disturbing, they may resonate with us, or they may simply get to us. I find working with children who are hurting often affects me. As reporters, we dive into tragedy from the outside, delving into the lives of the people impacted and sharing their pain through our pieces. But sometimes, as with the Covid-19 pandemic, we are involved too. We share their pain and we need to be careful.
Ask yourself: am I withdrawn or talking excessively, getting drunk, missing deadlines, avoiding people, struggling to concentrate or to sleep, being argumentative or self-destructive? Am I teary, more sad, angrier, feeling vulnerable, jumpy, or feeling particularly guilty or ashamed?
The most effective form of support is talking to a trusted colleague or someone who understands, soon after covering the event. Put support in place before heading out to a difficult story and encourage others to open up about their day with you.
In my book, we talk about following the principle of Before, During, and After the assignment. This is a very potted version but beforehand, make sure you’re clear on what’s expected, what you need to know, and that your gear is ready and working. During this, try to focus on the job, ground yourself, breathe. Afterwards, you should reach out to good social support.
It is also important to rest, get some vigorous exercise, and reflect, in order to help the body recalibrate back to its equilibrium after being exposed to trauma or extreme stress. Do whatever suits you to help you relax. It may be yoga, it may be meditation, or it may be something completely different. Eat well and stay hydrated.
It is also good practice to be mindful of our own vulnerabilities and experiences when covering other people’s tough emotional stories.
All of this is important not just for our mental wellbeing but also professionally; we need to be in a good place to do justice to the people we are reporting on whose lives have been torn apart.
