Digital Human Rights Investigations: Vicarious Trauma, PTSD, and Tactics for Resilience
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Description
Human rights investigations have often relied heavily on interviewing witnesses and survivors, visiting the sites of abuse, and analysing physical evidence. Now, new technologies, such as the increased availability of cheap mobile phones with cameras and improved network connections, mean that some elements of a human rights investigation—whether about the conflict in Syria, extra-judicial killings in Nigeria, or the conditions in which refugees are forced to live in Australia’s unlawful offshore detention centres in Papua New Guinea—can be carried out by researchers located anywhere in the world, including those far away from the site of abuse. When human rights investigators are removed from zones of violence or conflict, they are generally not targets of physical attack themselves. Yet their work is not risk-free. Investigators may be subjected to digital attacks such as threats, harassment, trolling, phishing, or the intrusion of spyware. And, in the course of their digital fact-finding, investigators can be exposed to significant amounts of distressing and traumatic photographs, video, or other materials, creating a risk that they will experience high levels of stress, compassion fatigue, burn-out, depression, substance abuse disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The work of the digital and open source investigator may include, for example, sifting through a database of hundreds of videos of airstrikes, searching in real time on Twitter for photos showing police beatings during a protest, or closely and repeatedly examining (p. 272) one video of a massacre. Investigators may view large quantities of raw, often bloody and graphic, content in their quest to assess if such content can be turned into evidence for reporting, advocacy, or legal action. Their workdays may include extensive and repeated exposure to ‘intense visual material’, and they may view scores of incidents of abuse each day. Investigators may be exposed largely to traumatic material via digital sources, or such exposure may occur alongside exposure through interviewing, site visits, or personally experiencing insecurity. The considerable risk of psychological distress through secondary experiences of potentially traumatic events has been under-addressed in the human rights field for various reasons. These include the relative recency in which viewing traumatic photos and video has been incorporated in the definition of PTSD; the generally poor response of the human rights field to the mental health risks of advocacy; and the far more rapid growth of fact-finding with online and digital content compared to the strategies designed to counter its ill-effects. In bringing insights from psychology together with experience of the challenges which human rights researchers face in researching with new technologies, the aim of this chapter is twofold: to show that secondary trauma is a real risk for human rights researchers in the digital age; and to introduce human rights researchers and organizations to techniques and methods for mitigating harm and building resilience. In section 1 of this chapter we outline the general criteria, symptoms, and risk factors for PTSD, and discuss the potential link between viewing photos or video of abuse and PTSD. We focus on PTSD because it is one of the most common types of adverse outcomes which can follow exposure to potentially traumatic events. Other mental health issues can arise in the course of human rights work—such as burn-out and depression—and while we discuss techniques aimed at preventing PTSD, the practices outlined may help some people to mitigate the broad range of negative psychological outcomes. In section 2, we discuss why digital and open source investigations pose a unique challenge to the mental health of human rights researchers. In section 3, we share various tactics which investigators can adopt to help prevent, mitigate, and respond to stress related to exposure to traumatic material. Section 4 turns to organizational strategies for working with potentially traumatic material, and section 5 addresses the impact of technological choices on exposure to distressing material, suggesting that developers need to confront and design with the risk of PTSD and other adverse effects in mind.
Source Publication
Digital Witness: Using Open Source Intelligence for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation, and Accountability
Source Editors/Authors
Sam Dubberley, Alexa Koenig, Darragh Murray
Publication Date
2020
Recommended Citation
Dubberley, Sam; Satterthwaite, Margaret L.; Knuckey, Sarah; and Brown, Adam, "Digital Human Rights Investigations: Vicarious Trauma, PTSD, and Tactics for Resilience" (2020). Faculty Chapters. 1787.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1787
