Journalists also need recognition as trauma an counseling

Dewi Anggraeni, Melbourne

It must be a source of consternation to any parent when his or her kid announces that he or she wants to become a journalist.

Most often than not, if you read stories or watch films with journalists as peripheral characters -- barring biographies -- you will see them as a species apart, not in their high morale stance, alas, but in their crassness, cynicism and complete disregard for other people's feelings. Even author J K Rowling depicted a journalist character in one of her Harry Potter books as a self-serving, malicious creator of fabricated truth.

Admittedly there are entertaining moments also in the wider picture, such as when you see them badgering already frazzled politicians who have skeletons in their cupboards. However these may be overshadowed by your outrage when you see them posing the most intrusive and insensitive questions to victims of various sorts of trauma -- from natural disaster to personal vendetta.

How could they be so heartless, so lacking in compassion? You ask. The journalists would defend themselves by saying they have deadlines to meet so that they cannot afford to think of people's sensitivities. Not even their own.

Not even their own! A decidedly telling phrase, which was highlighted during a recent Indonesia-Australia Short-term Training Project run by RMIT International in Melbourne.

It is not often that a group of journalists of various levels of experience stay together for several months and are practically forced to listen to each other's views on any given issue. Journalists are basically solitary workers who are adept at hiding their own less presentable emotions.

Even when they get together, they tend to show each other how tough they are. You must have heard about the one who practically walked away unscathed from an ambush where 15 people had been blown to pieces, and met another who still had one arm in a sling, a battered victim of mistaken identity in an ethnic clash.

Traumatized? Are you kidding? They are tripping over each other when their respective editors call, dishing out yet another dreadful assignment.

The 17 journalists participating in the training project became human, however, when in the sessions on trauma management they were treated to performances by their facilitators. The facilitators played out various roles depicting badgering journalists single-mindedly after newspaper-selling stories, and interviewees, many of whom were so traumatized by horrible experiences that they were no longer aware of the direction of the interviews.

The role-play continued, showing that in reality those inconsiderate journalists were themselves having a hard time trying to fast-track the "assimilation" of their own trauma. Life has to go on, after all. Was it fair, then, to expect them to show sensitivity toward their sources and interviewees, while all the time trying to prevent their own dark emotions from spilling over?

In Australia, journalists have only begun to accept the usefulness, let alone importance, of trauma counseling over the last few years. Before then, while counseling was available, it was regarded as one of the things journalists did after an important assignment, like unpacking.

In an ABC Radio National Media Program on Oct. 22, 2002, news editor Rob Raschke recounted to host Mick O'Regan his experience, then as an ABC Radio National AM correspondent covering South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle in 1992, of how he was not only witness to, but literally caught up in, a massacre. He managed to escape to safety, however, leaving behind some of his equipment.

Raschke recalled that he had received two calls from his employers:

"The first one was 'Thanks for doing the story, but why did it take you two hours to file?' And I said, 'Oh look, I had to get through roadblocks and we had this kid who'd had his leg blown off and we had to get him to the hospital.' And the reply was, 'Well listen pal, you're a correspondent, not a paramedic, so leave that to them next time.'"

The second call told him to come back home for some counselling.

After the sessions on trauma management for journalists, some of the participants in the RMIT training project confessed how unaware they had been of their own pent-up trauma as it was not the norm for journalists to own up to being scared out of their wits, or to in any way reveal their weaknesses.

In a private conversation, participating journalist Djonar Siahaan confided to me that it was during his posting in East Timor that he learnt how gunshot victims often took a long time to die; that he had been, helpless and horrified, in close proximity to individuals who had been shot, including several who had taken bullets in the back of the neck, and watched them struggle to hang on to life before eventually expiring.

If we expect our journalists to have the necessary sensibility when approaching sources in situations of physical and mental devastation, we need to look after their well-being, and not expect them to wipe the smell of death from their nostrils and delete the horrific images from their memories in their eager rush toward the next assignment.

This is particularly crucial in Indonesia as journalists do not have to be foreign correspondents to find themselves in situations where their emotional strength is tested to the limit. And many do not even have the luxury of being able to 'fly home' and get away from the horror as they actually live there.

The welfare of our excellent journalists is just as important as the quality of their writing and their ability to inform the public of newsworthy events.

The writer is a journalist.