Five Ideas on Meaningful Consent in Trauma Journalism

This post grew out of a journalism controversy, now lifetimes ago in news-years, about coverage of sexual assault. I’ve updated this post so that it’s comprehensible without the details of that particular moment. I’m grateful to global journalism initiative on covering gender violence of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University for nudging me to revise the post into something that speaks beyond the moment in which it was written, and for including this new version in their upcoming volume on covering gender-based violence.

Consent is a cornerstone of journalism. Without consent, we can’t interview people, which is a big part of our job, and very often, we can’t record them, for audio, video, or still photography. Without consent, we’re stuck.

In many kinds of stories, we get (or take) our consent implicitly: When the mayor sets an appointment for a 10-minute interview, we understand that he is consenting, or agreeing, to be interviewed. When protestors fill the town square, we interpret their public presence as consent to be recorded in a wide-angle shot showing the size of the crowd.

In stories featuring survivors of violence, the practices around consent change, or they should. I’ve often heard advocates for the vulnerable call this “informed consent,” but in my fifteen years interviewing and writing about survivors of trauma, I have found this formulation more legalistic than holistic. That is to say, it’s fairly easy to tick the boxes of informed consent and still act in ways a reasonable onlooker would consider unethical. 

I have found it more useful, for me and my sources, to think about what I call meaningful consent. The question behind meaningful consent is: Do I believe this person, whose moment of vulnerability and/or trauma plays a key role in my story, and whose public exposure of the same may create physical and psychological risks for them, understands what it means to share their story with me and my audience, and has freely agreed to do so?

Meaningful consent is not about applying a set of rules; it’s about accounting for context in a trauma-informed manner. I think about meaningful consent as a trauma-informed practice because most situations where meaningful consent is needed involve stories, and sources, dealing with the aftermath of trauma, tragedy, or crisis. The period of aftermath can vary – it may be minutes, months, or years – but the principles of meaningful consent remain the same, and provide overall guidance as you interpret the specificities of your stories, your publication’s resources and needs, etc.

1. Meaningful consent comes from the survivor. In some cases, family members may offer their consent for you to tell someone’s story. In other cases, other professionals – your own “fixer,” a victims’ own lawyer, her employer, an NGO’s protection officer, a prison guard – may offer you permission to do an interview with a victim. In both cases, those permissions may also be necessary to your work, by lowering cultural or administrative barriers to the interview. But no matter the setting, the culture, the language, or the time constraints, that consent is not enough. Consent is not permission: You should never assume you have the consent of a survivor to do an interview because someone else gave you permission to speak to them. No one but the survivor has the power of consent.

2. Meaningful consent is given for specific use. Clarity of purpose is good manners when you’re interviewing a politician. It’s crucial when you’re interviewing a trauma survivor. They should know where their story is appearing, who the primary audience is, and how it will be accessed.

I usually keep a screenshot of the publication I am working for on my smartphone so that, even in remote areas with no Internet, I can show someone what my publication looks like and how their story is likely to look when it runs. I also make sure they understand that the website I’m showing them, or have photographed, is available just as easily to everyone as it was to me just now.

It is our obligation as journalists to make sure people understand what our use cases mean – and to understand that consent is not fungible. Someone who agrees to let me record their voice so that my notes are accurate for print quotation is not tacitly agreeing to let me use that audio recording for a web documentary. In many parts of the world, some media are more dangerous than others. Being quoted by name in a foreign newspaper is understood by many people I have interviewed as much less risky than being interviewed, anonymously, for radio broadcast.

Unless you have explained your purpose and your intended use to a survivor of violence or crisis, you don’t have meaningful consent.

3. Meaningful consent is given at an appropriate time. Traumatic stress changes how the brain functions. In the immediate aftermath of a traumatic incident, survivors may be in shock. Researchers understand that the acute stress of a traumatic incident may last months; post-traumatic stress, which is not inevitable but can be common especially to some forms of violence (e.g., sexual assault), may last longer. Both of these biological states can affect how people perceive and analyze information, including about their own risk.

Sometimes in journalism, we find ourselves present during, or with access to, the immediate aftermath of trauma. Imagine, for example, that we are writing a feature story about 24 hours on the block with a local police officer. Imagine that we have agreed not to use the names of people the police meet but that we can write about what calls they respond to. Imagine that we follow police responding to a domestic violence call and find a woman who’s been beaten by her husband, insists on his arrest, and repeats “This is the last time he’ll do this to me.” Imagine that she insists that you write down her name and her quote: “I want you to tell the whole world that I called the cops on that bastard. Tell the world what a bastard he is.”

We don’t know from this encounter whether this woman is experiencing acute traumatic stress, or whether this is an episode taking place in a period of post-traumatic stress. We know it is likely, and from her behavior we can likely infer, that she is experiencing a surge in fight-or-flight chemicals, signals from the brain to the body of life-threatening danger. We also don’t know whether police will charge or book her abuser, and we have no information about her or his relationship to neighbors, extended family, meaning we lack crucial information for assessing the level of risk that may be brought by the public disclosure she has invited.

We hear affirmation of consent in the words she says, but from this encounter alone we don’t have meaningful consent. Yet.

4. Meaningful consent repeats itself. It shows respect to confirm your consent again at the end of your interview. It shows professionalism to highlight for your interviewee the parts of the interview you think you’re most likely to use – especially if those pieces could make people feel fear, shame, or regret when they see them in the paper or hear them on TV later.

Magazine writers have long lead times and, often, fact-checking processes that reinforce meaningful consent. Spot news journalists have to do this themselves. Very often, we don’t. We think we don’t have time or, if we’re being really truthful, we’re afraid someone may second-guess their choice to tell us the “best” parts of the story. In these moments, we should double-down on meaningful consent practice: When our professional training is at odds with trauma-informed ethics, we can end up with something more like extraction than responsible journalism.

What does that mean in practice? It means, for example, calling the woman you visited with the police a day or two after the arrest of her abuser to re-confirm her decision about going public with her identity and the violence she suffered. It means reminding her that you were present as a journalist and describing what you witnessed. It means talking to her about the how safe she feels, on reflection, about disclosing what happened that night, and about how she thinks about managing the risks of disclosure. And it means removing from the record of things you may permissibly write about quotes, facts, or other information that she may wish you had not seen, heard, or written down.

This is not “whitewashing the truth.” This is adapting journalistic practice to findings from neuroscience, biochemistry, and psychology. In those fields, it is well-understood that brain cannot protect the body and make abstract decisions about media disclosure during or in the aftermath of a life-endangering incident.  

5. Meaningful consent is trauma-informed. The experience of trauma dis-orders someone’s world – pulls time apart, undoes chronology, and undermines trust of fellow human beings. Ethically sound reporting on violence requires reporters to understand and acknowledge those ruptures by going out of their way not to reinforce or replicate them. This requires understanding and reflecting on the ways that trauma changes our usual professional practice.

In general, the rules of journalism assume that the journalist is a disempowered party. In most journalism, the journalist’s work is at odds with the interests of the powerful, to whom the journalist is vulnerable through threats, intimidation, and other forms of influence. Rules like “on/off the record,” attribution, and recording have been developed over decades to help empower journalists in their work of holding the powerful accountable. Tools like freedom of information laws, press conferences, financial disclosures, and even the very expectation that someone will feel pressure to agree to an interview – all of these help journalists fulfill the public’s right to know. They are a toolkit we use to help us extract information from powerful people who, for reasons of self-interest, probably don’t want to give it to us.

Trauma-informed interviewing is not about extraction. In the aftermath of someone’s trauma, the journalist is not the disempowered party. We are in control of the first, and sometimes the only, representation of the worst moments of someone’s life. And that person usually does not have spokespeople, political allies, or rich friends who will call our editors to denounce our coverage. Reporting on trauma situates us as the powerful party, so we must re-situate our rules by re-imagining our practice not as “exposing the truth” but as doing the least harm to the people whose truths we hope to acknowledge, well and sensitively.

Meaningful, or trauma-informed, consent is not about ethics as abstraction. It is about reducing the potential for journalism to cause or further harm. Because of how trauma works on the brain and in the body, it can be risky for survivors to talk to journalists. At the same time, talking to good journalists – to journalists who take care around meaningful consent and employ other crucial, trauma-informed tools, like active listening – can bring a sense of comfort to survivors. The ethics of this practice is not in what we produce in our newspapers or on our airwaves. It’s in the process we use to get there.

• Some of these ideas, along with examples of best practices, are developed in my piece, “The Pornography Trap: How Not to Write About Rape,” which was published in January 2011 in the Columbia Journalism Review.
• The Dart Centre Europe also has a very useful two-page tip sheet, by Gavin Reese, for journalists reporting on sexual violence, reproduced here.
• For a comprehensive look at trauma-informed reporting which also centers the experiences of the people we report on, see Trauma Reporting: A Journalists Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories by Jo Healey (Routledge, 2019).