Abstract
Journalists bear witness both to horrific acts and the remarkable strength we possess in the face of such events. Journalism practice possesses an unavoidable ethical dimension, not simply due to its role as witness to human strength and weakness but also due to the ease with which journalism is capable of inflicting damage on those it represents. This is a difficult issue for journalists to face. This chapter argues that in some cases journalistic representation inadvertently re-traumatises survivors of mass violence despite its often-laudable intentions. Journalists can also ignore the significance of the places of traumatic memory for survivors. These places often have deep meaning in the difficult and repeated negotiation these people conduct between past and present, memory and forgetting, and trauma and recovery.
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Notes
- 1.
Interview with Maja via Facebook Messenger, recorded with permission, 9 November 2018.
- 2.
A similar point is made by Dawes (2007, p. 7), who suggests that there are two types of people who report stories, those who listen and are content to document storytelling, and those who feel compelled to act on what they see and hear.
- 3.
The Trnopolje camp was established by the military and police authorities of the Bosnian Serb forces, centred on the village of Trnopolje, near Prijedor in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Between 4000 and 7000 inmates (Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats) were detained there at any one time. The camp also operated as a base for the mass deportations of captured persons. Mistreatment of the prisoner population was widespread and notorious. Numerous instances of murder, torture and rape have been recorded.
- 4.
Interview with Fikret Alić, recorded with permission, Kozarac, 7 July 2015.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Google searches of the terms ‘Bosnian atrocity’, ‘Bosnian camps’, ‘Bosnian genocide’ immediately return Fikret’s image. Type in ‘Omarska’, a camp in which Fikret was not even incarcerated, and his image on the front cover of Time magazine appears, as well as taking the third, fourth and fifth spot on the top line of results.
- 8.
See Note 4 above.
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Stevens, T. (2020). Humanitarian Journalism and the Representation of Survivors of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Mass Violence. In: Hubbell, A.L., Akagawa, N., Rojas-Lizana, S., Pohlman, A. (eds) Places of Traumatic Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_10
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