Engagement Journalism in the Context of Global Displacement: It Takes Time
By: Rawan Yaghi
Tags: Impact, Photography, Engagement Journalism, Refugees

Mutiaa Alhaffar chose her Syrian passport as an object of significance. It is how she chose to tell her story.

Mutiaa Alhaffar, a Syrian refugee in Connecticut, said that after an explosion took away her home and injured her and her children, journalists parachuted in and took photos of her children, who suffered permanent physical and psychological injuries from the blast. She said that the experience was unnerving for her children, and that it made them hate photos. After taking the photos, the journalists never spoke to her again. And even after she came to the U.S., Mutiaa recalled how journalists were still only interested in taking photos of her children and writing the story about the explosion in Syria, and no other aspects of her life.

Mutiaa’s story reflects a common power dynamic present in journalistic accounts of refugee lives. In On Her Shoulders, a documentary that follows the journey of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who was abducted by ISIS and was sexually assaulted in captivity, journalists ask Murad to repeat details about her assault over and over again. We see her discomfort and retraumatization on the screen over and over again as journalists point their cameras and microphones at her, and ask highly intrusive and intimate questions. In the documentary, Murad recalls, “I’ve been asked many questions like ‘how did they rape you? How’… This is necessary, yes, very necessary. Some things I’ve been asked, ‘what do you want to do?’ some ask, ‘you’ve become a famous person, what does that mean to you?’ These kinds of questions are not the ones to ask. The things I want to be asked are ‘what is the fate of these girls?’ ‘How old are the girls going through this pain?’ ‘What is the situation of the refugees I visit in the camp?’ …’What must be done so a woman is not a victim of war?’ These are the things I want to be asked more often.” Murad reveals the insensitivity and voyeurism of journalistic methods, where the stories told are not representative of what refugees themselves wish to share

The majority of stories featuring refugees are about tragedy, viewing refugees as passive victims of violence, and reducing political and social struggles to humanitarian issues. Such stories create what John B. Thompson calls a ‘mediated experience’ between refugee subjects and readers, which is ‘made indirectly through the media and based on indirect ‘quasi-interactions.’ This, according to Thompson, renders events that refugees may have experienced to be distant and out of the reach of the reader, who remains a passive viewer of the experience. As a result, the reader takes no action and their feelings of sympathy and helplessness override any of empathy and the need to act.

Marta Szeczepanik argues that though the media is technically capable of providing readers with direct information about refugees’ experiences through registered interviews, these interviews are rarely featured. She attributes this in part to the nature of the news industry, but she also highlights a deeper, more dangerous reason why this might be the case: the“ silencing [of] refugee voices who are seen as first and foremost the subjects of potential political action or intervention.” Marta Szeczepanik also describes how “the universal image (archetype) of refugee may be so strongly embedded in individual and collective consciousness that it becomes difficult to accept any counter-evidence, any story that challenges whom we are used to see as refugees.” As such, readers have a preconceived notion of who a refugee is, and individual stories are lost among a homogenizing narrative of anticipated trauma.

In the course of conducting an engagement project with Arabic-speaking Refugee mothers, I learned how to overcome the difficulty of building trust in a community of refugees and how engagement journalism can achieve that with consistent presence.

On the first of a dozen Zoom meetings I initiated to engage with and listen to Arabic-speaking refugee mothers, the women started it by asking me about myself and why I was doing the project. Knowing that I myself was born a refugee to refugee parents, and knowing I lived in Gaza most of my life, the participants went on to share their stories of refuge and displacement, cry together, and express shared hopes for a better future. As that initial session progressed, I saw that there was a direct correlation between trust and giving as a journalist and receiving from the participants. In later Zoom meetings, the focus of the group was decided upon by the participants: “Issues related to parenting in a western culture”. From this, an engagement photo project was born to explore new ways of self-representation and storytelling, centering Syrian refugee women in the ways that they wished to be seen and the stories they want to pass down to their children.

From many listening exercises and a few failed growth strategies, I learned that this community did not trust many spaces online. For example, I proposed having a Facebook group for the direct participants to grow our community and have it as a space where we address information needs. The Facebook group presented a lot of challenges. First, it was very difficult to get new participants to join and then to engage with the content. In a debrief I had with the three direct participants on Zoom, they said that they themselves felt more comfortable in the Zoom meetings than on the Facebook group.

The Facebook group reached 19 mothers despite trust issues.

The Facebook group tackled sensitive topics like “how do I talk with my teenage child about sex?” which, for a lot of members of the community, can be a taboo, as a lot of them believe sex is only to be discussed at the prospect of marriage. “I can’t trust people. I’ve been through a lot and I can’t trust people I don’t know.” Doha Allaham said in a debriefing meeting. Direct participants confirmed my observations that they and the new Facebook members did not trust each other well enough to engage with such sensitive topics over the Facebook group. One of them commented that, “here [on zoom] I know you and I trust you. It’s a small group. On Facebook, I don’t know who anyone is and what anyone is thinking.” Though trust was very low, the conversion rate was 8.4% when participants invited their friends on Facebook to join the group which informed my growth strategy. It still confirmed that this community cannot easily trust each other or outsiders.

Talking about trauma in a communal setting can be a building connection between members. I learned that consistent presence is key in building that trust. I was wary of asking participants about their experiences in their home country or on the journey to the U.S., and one of the participants asked me not to ask her to talk about it in our Zoom meetings. However, she started talking about it on her own accord. This is something that has also occurred in the work of Jake Keyel, a Doctoral Candidate in the Planning, Governance, and Globalization program in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech. Keyel notes how “certainly in my research, one of the interesting things that I found was that I went into the research not asking any questions about the war in Iraq, about anything that I thought might be re-triggering, because, […] asking people to talk about their trauma, even that can trigger PTSD episodes, it can be re traumatizing […] But a lot of people that I talked to did talk about the war in Iraq, and did talk about their experiences.”

During the Zoom meeting, all the women shared their experiences coming to the U.S. and felt comfortable enough to cry together. I think that brought them together as a community and allowed them to trust each other. Participants expressed how knowing that though they’re different Syrians, coming from different social and ethnic backgrounds, they had similar experiences that they related to each other through. I think the fact I did not force this to happen and that I let it happen naturally was very effective in creating that bond between the women, placing the control in their hands rather than mine. I was there as a connecting and initiating presence but I wanted them to guide the conversation and talk about what they feel comfortable with, rather than being directed by me. They did not share these experiences to be published. They shared them to connect with each other. I let the conversation flow without interruption and that was extremely helpful to the women who just wanted to be together as women and mothers who have lost their home.

Photography, which is a subjective medium in the first place, was an interesting way to explore how the participants wanted to represent themselves as opposed to how the media might portray them. The project asked the women to take self-portraits alongside photos of objects of significant meaning to them. They all chose to focus on their present and the future even if stories from the past influence how and where they live now. When I originally proposed that the mothers take photos of their children and vice versa, Mutiaa chose not to take photos of her children because of their growing discomfort with the medium. The participants saw that self-representation was intentionally their own image without the individual stories of their children. Doha chose an object that was left in Syria and originally belonged to her 28-year-old daughter who is still stranded in Thailand waiting to be resettled in Canada. And Amina chose a machine that she uses every day to make a living for her family.

In brief, building stories and narratives without re-traumatizing subjects required time, commitment, and consistency. It also required a give and take relationship between me as a person and journalist and the participants as a community that was agreeing to let me into their intimate lives and their thoughts. It is essential to ask subjects how they want to represent themselves, especially when they feel like their collective stories and narratives are being hijacked by political or humanitarian entities that choose to portray them as victims.