Photo: Davor Puklavec/Pixsell

As journalists, we always strive to tell the truth in an accurate manner and realize the words we choose affect the impression we leave on our readers, viewers or listeners. Being as fair and accurate as possible is particularly important when it comes to reporting on sexual abuse.

OnMedia’s Sean Sinico looks at responsible ways to report on rape and other forms of intimate partner violence and sexual abuse.

Journalists are used to dealing with a new topic every day when they go to work. Today it’s the city council, tomorrow it’s local business, and who knows what it’ll be the day after that. But when the task is reporting on sexual abuse and the people who’ve suffered it, journalists shouldn’t treat it like any other day at the office.

It’s easy to revictimize a person by making them relive terrible experiences for an interview and then see their lives presented in the media in a manner they didn’t want. Media reports also often make it sound like the crimes committed against the people who experienced abuse were the result of something the survivor or victim did – who they were or were not with, what they said or wore – and some reports can even imply that violent sexual abuse was actually an act of consensual sex or permissible for cultural or societal reasons.

These factors all make reporting on sexual abuse difficult, but they aren’t reasons to ignore a widespread and important issue – the World Health Organization estimates that 35 percent of women worldwide have experienced either intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. Under such circumstances, truthful and accurate reporting showing the devastating effects of rape and other forms of sexual abuse can promote positive social change at the local, national and even international level.

Here’s how you can make sure your work with survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual abuse doesn’t make a too-common problem even worse for the people already living with it.

The interview

Before starting your interview, be clear with the interviewees how what they say will be used, what type of media they will appear in, and ask if their identities need to be protected.

Listen closely to what interviewees say. You don’t want to make sexual assault victims repeat what happened to them unnecessarily. Also make sure you have a good list of open-ended questions that will allow your interviewees to share as much as they are comfortable with. Respect your interviewee’s decision not to answer questions.

The majority of females who have experienced sexual violence tend to be more comfortable with a female interviewer. If that is impossible, it is a good idea to have a female colleague present at the interview.

Never say you know how they feel – even if you have suffered from sexual violence yourself. It is impossible to completely understand another person’s feelings about the violence committed against them.

Extra info: The human rights organization Witness has compiled an excellent guide and set of checklists for interviewing survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. It is also available as a printable and easier-to-read PDF.

The report

Getting it wrong when writing about survivors of violent sexual abuse is easy, and it happens too often. No matter what a person’s previous choices in life, no one deserves to be abused and nothing serves as justification for sexual abuse.

As you write, make sure to keep the following points in in mind:

Rape, intimate partner violence and sexual abuse are always crimes. In your writing, be sure to make it clear who was responsible for the criminal behavior by avoiding the passive voice, which put the focus on the victim. Clearly describe what happened. Instead of “she was abused,” you can write: “an unknown man raped her.”

You’ll need to decide how much detail of your interviewee’s experience to include in your report. It’s up to you to find the balance between providing too detailed a picture and not making the gravity of your interviewee’s experiences clear to readers.

If, during your writing, you find words like “alleged,” “admits,” “confesses,” “was raped,” “was abused,” “unharmed” or “had sex,” then you should double-check to make sure your report is clear about who the victim and who the perpetrator of the crime are. The US-based Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women has a PDF toolkit addressing exactly these phrases and what makes them inaccurate. New England Law also maintains a lengthy list of problematic language used in court documents and serves as an excellent resource of terms you should not use in your writing and suggests better alternatives that focus on the victim’s experience.

Provide context for the crime you’re reporting. Definitions of rape and sexual abuse vary around the world and reliable statistics are often hard to find because victims often do not officially press charges against perpetrators. To get a wider view of the issues, talk to health experts and NGOs to find out how widespread sexual assault is where you are, how people react to it, and how survivors cope. Painting the individual case you’re working as part of a broader social issue can help create greater awareness for sexual assault and also serve to support public health and preventative measures.

If you promised anonymity to your interviewees, make sure that there are no details in your report that allow anyone to identify them.

Consider including steps other victims of intimate personal violence or sexual abuse can take to find help coping with the crimes committed against them. Links to local NGOs and other resources offering support to survivors can help people find assistance they might not have known about.

Consider letting your interviewee read your report before it’s published or broadcast. This will help the interviewee know what to expect when the report is made public and can bring any inaccuracies to light.

More information

This is the place where I’d generally give you links to excellent reporting on sexual abuse. Such examples, however, are difficult to find. In a 2013 interview, Claudia Garcia-Rojas, an editor of the Chicago Taskforce media toolkit linked to above, said she looked at hundreds of articles about rape and sexual assault for positive example and found two, which “weren’t even about rape, they were stories about covering rape.”

My own searches were equally unsatisfying, so instead of positive examples, I’ll ask you to read through the links above – even if you don’t think rape or sexual violence is a topic you’ll have to cover. The tragic spread of sexual violence means at some point in your career – whether you expect it or not – you’re certain to come in contact with a victim of sexual violence, and you owe it to that person to have an idea of how to handle the situation.

If, in addition to the links above, if you’d like more in-depth information on reporting on sexual abuse, check out the Poynter News University course Reporting on Sexual Violence and its 2009 webinar Covering Sexual Assault. The Scottish charity Zero Tolerance has created a PDF document covering in more detail many of the topics addressed in this post.

** For information on where victims of intimate partner violence or sexual abuse can turn to, the HotPeachPages website maintains an international list of abuse and crisis hotlines. 

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Author: Sean Sinico, edited by Kyle James

Image credits: flickr/Lucy Maude Ellis CC:BY-ND; WHO; flickr/Women’s eNews CC:BY, flickr/West Midlands Police CC:BY

Whether your interviewee is being deliberately evasive or has gotten so excited about something else that they have forgotten your question, your job is to get them to respond to the question you asked. Don’t be afraid of interrupting and posing the question again. There are many ways of doing this politely and respectfully.

Ask and ask again

Probably the most famous example of persistent questioning is BBC’s Newsnight reporter Jeremy Paxman who asked former British Home Secretary, Michael Howard, the same question 12 times. While this is a bit over the top, it’s worth watching the interview to see how Paxman keeps asking without seeming rude or bullying. (As background information, Paxman was asking Howard about a report critical of Howard’s handling of the prison service following the escape of several prisoners. Paxman then asked Howard whether he had threatened to overrule Director of Prisons Derek Lewis.)

I have often made use of the very same phrases Paxman’s uses as a way of leading the interview back to the issue at hand.

“I note you are not answering the question, did you threaten to overrule him?”
“I am sorry, I am going to be quite rude but did you threaten to overrule him?”
“With respect, that is not answering the question of whether you threatened to overrule him.”
“With respect, you haven’t answered the question.”

On a similar vain, take a look at this interview conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Mark Colvin with Australia’s then environment minister, Peter Garrett. Colvin asks six times how long Garrett had known about a report outlining problems with the government’s home insulation scheme.

Seek specifics

Many experienced interviewees, especially politicians, are very good at giving general answers or making general accusations. You need to follow up and ask exactly what is meant and get specific examples. Your job as a journalist is not to give people free air time. Rather, it’s to provide information to your listeners.

I once sat in on an interview a reporter did with a Ghanaian politician about his pre-election promises:

Politician: “When I am voted in, the first thing I will do is fix the problem of power outages.”
Journalist: “What else will you do”

WRONG. The politician has said nothing about how he is going to fix the power problem (the biggest issue in Ghana’s last election). Your job is to probe further. The interview should like something like this instead:

Politician: “When I am voted in, the first thing I will do is fix the problem of power outages.”
Journalist: “How exactly do you plan to do that”

Followed up by:
“Do you have an estimate of how much this will cost?”
“If you are voted in, how will your government pay for that?”
“How long will this take?”

I also heard an interview conducted after an incident at a polling booth during elections in Sierra Leone:

Protester: “The police used excessive force and it was the minister’s fault – he wanted to intimidate voters.”
Journalist: “Do you know how many people didn’t vote because of the police action?”

WRONG. Firstly, you need to establish exactly what happened, which is why you are interviewing the protester in the first place.

Protester: “The police used excessive force and it was the minister’s fault – he wanted to intimidate voters.”
Journalist: “What exactly do you mean by excessive force?” or “Can you describe what happened?”

Again, Jeremy Paxman provides a good example. In an interview with minister Barbara Roche, he asked her to substantiate her claim that big firms were threatening to quit London if Ken Livingstone were elected as mayor. Her asks her several times to be more specific.

Understand the answer

As a radio program editor, I once sent out a journalist three times to interview the same expert. The journalist was supposed to be doing a background interview about how hydro-electric power worked. The first two times she came back with the interview, I didn’t understand the expert’s answers because they were too scientific and full of jargon. She didn’t understand his answers either but hadn’t thought to ask him to make his responses more simple “because he was the expert and knew what he was talking about.”

But if you, the journalist, don’t understand, then the majority of your listeners or viewers won’t understand either, which pretty well defeats the purpose of broadcasting something in the first place.

There are a few strategies you can use to get more simple responses. If you don’t understand an answer, come straight out and say so. Depending on the culture you are working in, you can also try a bit of flattery so that the person isn’t offended.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite follow, can you tell me how it works in plain English.”
“I’m sorry, I’m a bit confused here. Can you describe how it works more simply.”
“Some of our listeners don’t have the benefit of your education – can you explain what you mean in simple words.”

Another ways I have gotten people past the jargon is to ask these kinds of questions:

“Imagine you are talking to a room full of children – how would you describe it to them”
“Picture it in your mind and describe it to me”
“Can you give me a specific example of who uses this / how it is used”

Be polite no matter what

At times interviewees  are offended by journalists’ questions. Sometimes their anger is genuine but sometimes it’s a ruse to put journalists off and stop them asking the question again. Don’t buy into this. Take a deep breath, and ask politely again. It’s your job.

Last year, US film director Quentin Tarantino lost his temper an interview with British journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy, at one point telling the Channel 4 news anchor, “I’m shutting your butt down.” Guru-Murthy stayed calm and polite throughout. You can, too.

Written by Kate Hairsine

Emblem of the GDR’s Stasi secret service (photo: flickr/elmada)

Journalists talk to a wide range of people, sometimes even those whose actions we find morally reprehensible. But it’s crucial to stay professional during an interview—even with someone you might consider a monster. As part of our series on hardest interviews, onMedia’s Kyle James remembers his struggle to keep personal feelings from derailing a talk with a former official of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. 

Talking with people with unsavory pasts is never easy, but a part of a reporter’s job. Here in Cambodia, where I’m based, reporters researching the country’s traumatic past often find themselves face-to-face with former Khmer Rouge soldiers or officers. And given the scale of the 1975-1979 genocide, it’s very likely that these same reporters lost close family relatives to members of that regime. In many parts of the world—Sierra Leone, Rwanda, the Balkans, the list is long—journalists sit down with perpetrators of atrocities or their apologists. They are part of the story.

Such conversations are never easy, but it’s important to remain professional, stay neutral and not let your emotions get away with you. Our job as reporters is to get the story. Losing our temper in the middle of an interview could well prevent us from reaching that goal.

That doesn’t mean you don’t ask hard questions. As objective journalists, we let the story do the talking. Indeed, the cold facts can be more damning than our own heated reaction to them.

Stasi officer

Several years ago, while working on a story for DW about the notorious state security service of the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), I scored a coup. I convinced a former high-ranking Stasi officer to meet for an interview.

His point of view would give the story another dimension, since I was also talking to people who had been persecuted by the once-sprawling surveillance agency. I had heard that the former officer, Wolfgang Schmidt, was unrepentant about the Stasi’s actions. I wanted to find out how someone whose employer – and by extension, himself – had intruded upon and ruined the personal and professional lives of so many, could justify his actions.

GDR memorabilia (photo: flickr/PercyGermany)

How do you live with yourself once the organization to which you’ve devoted your life has been so thoroughly discredited? Indeed, according to famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, “The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people.”

While this incident might not be the equivalent of interviewing former Khmer Rouge executioners, I found myself getting fidgety in the elevator up to Schmidt’s apartment in eastern Berlin. My mood wasn’t helped by the fact that I had just taken a tour at the Hohenschönhausen prison, where the Stasi once locked up and interrogated people it saw as threats to its socialist system. Talking to former prisoners and hearing their stories, I had a distinctly bad taste in my mouth when it came to the Stasi. By the time I reached his floor, I was almost angry with the man, who I’d never met, but whom I suspected had a moral compass completely at odds with my own.

Once inside his flat, it was obvious that not only could Schmidt live easily with his past, he was quite proud of it. He worked for the secret service from 1957 until its dissolution in 1990 and his walls were crowded with paraphernalia from both the agency and the former German Democratic Republic.

Stay cool and collected

As we sat down to talk, it became apparent that he had no regrets, no remorse and little understanding of the disdain and hostility former GDR citizens felt toward him and his cohorts. Indeed, he felt he was a victim, not victimizer, and complained about how it had been so difficult for former Stasi employees to find good work after the Berlin Wall had fallen. (You can hear the full story below. The section with Wolfgang Schmidt starts at 7:24.)

I felt something close to disgust as he made these, to my mind, ridiculous logical contortions. And there were more than a few times where I was tempted to say something along the lines of: “You simply cannot be serious. The Stasi were the bad guys, not the citizens you spied on and locked up!”

Of course, I didn’t.

Had I succumbed to the temptation, sure, I might have felt a fleeting moment of satisfaction, but the interview would have probably stopped right there. He would have either asked me to leave or completely shut down.

Hohenschönhausen Prison (photo: flickr/le.poet)

What I was getting from him was, at least I think, his true feelings about the subject, however delusional they might have been. So I just let him talk. I didn’t exactly smile and nod my head in agreement, but I listened to what he had to say respectfully. I kept my tone level and my facial expression neutral, even when I was listening to a level of twisted rationalization that beggared belief.

I did put harder questions to him, but as neutrally as I could. I asked him if he could understand why so many people were so angry as him and his former colleagues. I asked him if he felt his agency had had the right to intrude in the most private aspects of citizens’ lives. Or locking them up in Hohenschönhausen jail simply for wanting to leave the country? I asked him if he would do anything differently if he could.

My job is to get his perspective, not to be ex post facto judge and jury.

In the end, I felt his own words were enough of an indictment. I just needed to get them on tape. Then I let the listeners decide what they thought of the man.

While it was a fascinating interview, and gave me (and hopefully listeners) insight into how some people can justify almost anything, it was tough going. I was relieved to say good-bye and leave this stuffy memorial to a discredited regime.

I hadn’t thought of Wolfgang Schmidt for years, but then in July 2013 he popped up in the news again. In an interview with the McClatchy news service, Schmidt told a reporter he was amazed at the breadth of the domestic spying service in the US under the NSA. “For us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said.

Author: Kyle James

© Soe Than WIN/AFP/Getty Images

The media landscape in Myanmar is rapidly opening up. Last year, the government ended the direct censorship of the country’s media after almost fifty years of some of the most draconian press laws in the world. Privately owned newspapers are flourishing and newspaper stands now feature on many street corners. Reporters Without Borders even talked of “historic progress” in its last report on the country’s media health.

One of the few newspapers which was allowed to be published during Myanmar’s military rule was The Myanmar Times. The paper’s managing director, Zaw Win Than, has seen many changes since he first started working there as a journalist in 2006. DW Akademie’s Nadine Wojcik asked him about the shifts in the media landscape since the military junta ended in 2011.

What have been the changes for you as a journalist?
This biggest change is that there is no more censorship. We used to have to show the censors everything – including ads – ahead of time in order to get approval. They marked stories they didn’t like which meant we couldn’t publish them. If we had, there would have been repercussions. We had so many stories that were well researched and written but we weren’t allowed to print them.

How did you react when you heard that censorship had been dropped?
Everyone, including myself, literally jumped for joy. I never thought it could happen and was amazed when it actually did. Nevertheless, even though we can now write much more freely, we still lean towards self-censorship because we’re not always sure how far we can go. My newspaper has applied for a license allowing us to publish a daily edition, but so far we haven’t received one. We don’t know why that is but the current media law isn’t very transparent. On the other hand many new newspapers are now on the market so we’re definitely on the right path.

How are the newspapers doing financially?
As far as I can tell they’re not doing very well. There’s much more competition now and due to Myanmar’s poor infrastructure it’s difficult to distribute newspapers nationwide. Still, The Myanmar Times itself is doing well and we now have more advertisements than before. This has to do with the fact that we’re a quality newspaper and that we offer both an English- and Myanmar-language edition.

What about training programs for journalists?
There aren’t really any. There is a state journalism program but I’m not impressed. Some of the graduates applied to our newspaper and when we interviewed them they in fact knew very little. What we need at this point are good journalism schools and institutes. But we can now at least take part in external trainings and international organizations have been approaching us. Through this DW Akademie project, for example, I’ve gained a number of new insights.

Zaw Win Than has worked at The Myanmar Times since 2006

In Germany many involved in the print media are afraid of competition coming from the Internet. Is this an issue in Myanmar?
Not at this point. Newspapers are still the main medium partly because there’s limited access to the Internet. In fact only two percent of the population have access and it will take at least another decade before access becomes widespread. However, like many publishing houses in Myanmar, we do have our own website but it’s not our priority.

What are your hopes for Myanmar’s media sector ?
I hope more than anything that we will have a free press and that there will be no censorship at all. Although pre-censorship has disappeared, the Ministry of Information still requires us to send them issues once they’ve been published, and so the ministry retains the right to reprehend us. We also need a transparent media law as soon as possible.  The Lower House recently passed a media law but many journalists and media experts feel it doesn’t go far enough. The bill came directly from the Ministry of Information and was the exact opposite of what the independent press council had suggested. Still, I hope that Myanmar will soon have a transparent media law that truly ensures a free press.

Zaw Win Than visited Germany in October together with 10 other Myanmar journalists as part of a DW Akademie research trip to find out more about ways newspapers are developing different models to deal with the print crisis.

Three years since it was founded, Storyful has attracted some major clients, including ABC, Al Jazeera and the New York Times, and generated hundreds of articles about its innovative take on news gathering – though the company has yet to break even. DW Akademie’s Kate Hairsine talks to Mark Little about why he started up a social media news agency in the first place, his belief in journalism and why he thinks journalists can make great entrepreneurs.

Where did the idea for Storyful come from?

I was a foreign correspondent for the Irish national TV station, RTE. In about 2009, I realized the job being done by professional journalists was increasingly being done by ordinary people, by people with camera phones which enabled them to share pictures and essentially create journalism. I realized that this was the opportunity to join forces with these newly empowered citizens and tell stories about the world. But the problem is as soon as everyone can tell a story, who do you listen to? A hundred hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube every single minute. How do you find the video that actually shapes the great stories of our time? I realized that the only way to do that was to bring professional journalists back in to manage this overabundance of information. They would be the ones that would add context and shape the stories around these incredible images coming from places like Syria. So I thought, “let’s break the old news agency model, let’s start again from scratch” and that’s where Storyful came from.

Weren’t you concerned about leaving your safe job with a national broadcaster to become an entrepreneur?

Some people said to me later they thought I was leaving because I had had a nervous breakdown. I was leaving a well-paid job as the anchorman for the evening news program and it was a nice cushy lifestyle that I easily could have gotten used to. But I imagined my child 20 years later asking me, “what did you do Dad when you had that great idea?” and answering “nothing” – that would have been worse than falling flat on my face trying. I realized I wanted to be able to answer, “I tried”. On the other hand, it was also survival. I wanted to create a sustainable business model for the journalism that inspired me when I was a kid. And if I don’t do it, who else is going to do it? I think we all have a personal responsibility right now not to moan about the problems facing journalism. Instead, let’s do something and create something.

What skills did you bring with you that helped in founding a news agency?

Storyful was conceived so it wasn’t just about news; it is about stories and storytelling. Being Irish, I think we have a particular tradition of storytelling, it is something in my DNA. I had also been a foreign correspondent and I had been self sufficient. I had essentially been an entrepreneur in the field because I had set up the first Washington bureau for my station and I had been on my own in very tough situations. Getting up in front of a group of investors is far less scary when you have been shot at in Afghanistan. These experiences gave me the confidence to just do it. They also gave me a sense of vision. I had spent 20 years believing in journalism and that is a pretty infectious thing.

Where there times that you stood up in front of a group of investors and thought, “oh dear, I wish I knew more about business”?

I can’t count the amount of times that I have sat in rooms full of people who have MBAs and I just shut up because I didn’t know what they were talking about and that is still the case today. But I think one of the great things about being an entrepreneur and a journalist is that they are very complementary. They are both about leadership and about vision. Once you have those skills, you can learn everything else. You can’t learn vision and leadership. They are things that are built into journalism and that is what  makes journalists potentially great entrepreneurs.

Foreign correspondents aren’t renowned for their teamwork though – aren’t they too individualistic to inspire a team?

As a foreign correspondent, you are incredibly driven and egoistical to a certain extent. But at the same time, you have to have certain skills of persuasion to get your team to get in the jeep to follow you to the frontline or get on the plane with you where there is a risk of dying. So I have never felt there’s a contradiction between the two because that is also what business is about – it is about egotistical people with missions who manage to bring people with them.

It’s normal now to see YouTube videos and Twitter photos being used by serious news organizations but this is quite a recent phenomenon. How difficult was it three years ago to find investors for your idea of a social media news agency?

When I was leaving my previous job someone said, “you just said the word tweet on air” as if I had said an expletive. I remember thinking there was an underdeveloped notion of what was going on. It was of course much more difficult to try to raise half a million euro in Ireland in 2009 and 2010 when the country was going off the cliff. But at the same time, investors aren’t looking to imitate what is going on: they are looking for the next new thing. From that point of view, it wasn’t that difficult to persuade people who are by nature disruptive to invest in an idea where there was no market, there was no product, there were no landmarks and no precedent. There was nothing. There was just the sense of vision.

How are you making money?

We have built up a subscription model so we have news organizations around the world who pay us a monthly fee to discover and verify the most valuable content on the social web. This can be big news events but also trends that are catching fire on social media. In the past year, we have also developed a content licensing model. When we find a particularly compelling video that we think has the capacity to attract millions of views, we work in partnership with the uploader to make as much money as possible. We do that by revenue share on platforms such as Yahoo, AOL and MSN. We also do it by selling content though our partners and getting as many views as possible. And finally YouTube themselves have helped us build a business through managing the most compelling videos on their platform.

“Take your time in hiring the right people,” Little says

What kind of mistakes did you make when you first started?

One of the key mistakes you will make is picking the wrong people who don’t necessarily share your vision. People who don’t share your vision should not be on the journey with you and that is something that you don’t realize sometimes until it is too late. I think the other thing I realized was to be true to yourself. I would take decisions because I felt someone with more experience of business was advising me to do it even it didn’t feel right in my gut. All of the mistakes I have made are the things that didn’t feel true to me.

You say it’s important to employ people who share your vision. What kind of people are working for you?

We have 30 people working for us in Dublin, Atlanta (in New York State) and in Hong Kong. The vast majority are journalists. We have some old broadcasters like myself but we tend to find those who are the most adept when they come into Storyful are younger sub-editors who have worked in production, the kind of people who have worked catching mistakes for news organizations or newspapers. They are social media natives, who pay attention to detail and can tell you where the punctuation should go but are also good storytellers. They are the new breed of journalists who are going to thrive –  people who are not afraid of change, who are slightly pedantic, who are innovative but also ambitious and aggressive.

What are you personally getting out of Storyful?

To be honest, the biggest sense of achievement I have right now is not building Storyful but is building the team that built Storyful and inspiring people. I was 41 when I started Storyful. It wasn’t like I was a 15 year old in the basement inventing this technology. I have a wife, I have kids. I mortgaged my house and we lived on nothing. I didn’t get paid for a while and I had been very well paid. I think essentially asking them to come on the journey with me was really difficult. Other people have made sacrifices because they believed in what I told them and at times, they have suffered as well. So on a personal level, now we are three years in, I want to reward the people who believed in me. In addition, I am very proud to be part of a movement that I think will emerge, not from Silicon Valley or New York, but probably from Nairobi or Singapore. And if one person in Kenya or Burma or Brazil sees the example of Storyful and goes and founds a company, that is a better tribute than anything I could have got as a journalist.

Interview: Kate Hairsine