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Rentschler (2007) mentioned about the trauma training as emotional literacy training and concerns more about victims’ feelings and grief, training journalists to be an emotionally sensitive professional for being better to encourage crime victims participating in the process of news making.
Also, trauma training is not only aiming to journalists but their managers. Trauma training for managers at BBC as Brayne (2004) described, including awareness about trauma; how to report tragedies to public; how to interview trauma victims and some trauma issues in media organizations which a manager should deal with, such as informing the loved ones of a work colleague that he or she has been killed on assignment.
1.2 Trauma and Trauma Literacy
Trauma
Trauma, the etymology of the word can be traced to a Greek word for “wound”. At first it was only refer to the physical wound, and then the psychological trauma could be taken as
“the wound on heart”. Gina Ross in her book, “Beyond the trauma vortex: the media’s role in healing fear, terror and violence ” (2003), put trauma in a broad definition, “trauma as the emotional, biological and psychological impact suffered in response to an actual or perceived threat to one’s life, body, and identity and that stays stuck in the system” (2003: 21). The book discussed news media have become influential on trauma healing and journalists are suffer from the secondhand trauma while covering, and Ross’ definition to “trauma” is more fit in the trauma here I mentioned which is a response to some overwhelming fact.
Literatures from different fields about psychological trauma have accumulated since the 1970s, and a burgeoning awareness about trauma on a societal level also emerged at that time.
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For instance, the broad reaches in different fields and the lasting adverse impact of traumatic events have become topics to be discussed (Courtois & Gold, 2009). Renewed awareness of trauma culminated in the inclusion of the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the dissociative disorders (DDs) in the DSM–III1 in 1980 (Courtois & Gold, 2009).
Literacy
The word “literacy” is used differently in various contexts, the original definition would be the ability to write and read. Scribner and Cole (1981) described literacy in terms of
“socially organized practices make use of a symbol system and a technology for producing and disseminating it” (1981:236). Literacy is not only a matter of knowing how to read and write a particular kind of script. It is also a matter about applying knowledge for some specific purposes in specific contexts. Applying to the health domain, such as “healthy literacy” which is defined in Health People 2010 as: "The degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions". Literacy here incorporates skills to read, listen, analyze, and make decisions, such as the abilities to understand instructions on prescription, medical educational brochures, doctor's directions, and moreover, the ability to apply these skills to health situations.
From obtaining, processing, understanding to applying information acquired, to a more actively and participatory use, Lankshear and Knobel defined literacy as “socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through the medium
1 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, the manual was published in 1980, by the American Psychiatric Association to set forth diagnostic criteria, descriptions and other information to guide the diagnosis of mental disorders, the first to incorporate multiaxial classification, and then was replaced in 1987 by DSM-III-R.
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of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006:
2). In short, literacy makes us to generate and communicate meanings and to invite others make meanings from our texts in turn. Such as “Media literacy”, emphasizes the skills of critical thinking about media messages— applying a process of inquiry to ask critical questions about what you watch, see, listen to, and read.
Trauma literacy
The term “Trauma literacy” once was mentioned in a presentation which was titled
“Becoming trauma literate: A practical training program for educators” by Cait McMahon (2008), the manage director of Dart Center Australasia. The presentation was in conjunction with a documentary “News Media & Trauma: Stories from Australian Media Professionals about Reporting Trauma”, which was originally produced by Dart Center Australasia with Brett McLeod, featured the recounting experiences of Australian journalists about covering traumatic stories.
As McMahon defined in her presentation, trauma literacy incorporates understanding one’s own reactions to trauma and these reactions on others, and also strategies enhance resilience to deal with reactions to trauma on self. Similar to the concept of Emotional literacy, defined by Claude Steiner, as the ability to understand your emotions, the ability to listen to others and empathize with their emotions, and the ability to express emotions productively (Steiner, 2003: 11). It was described as the mutual understanding and ability for emotional problems coping.
Knowledge of possible psychological and physical human responses after experiencing trauma and tragedies helps people to get aware of traumatic impacts on self and on others, and it also helps for finding out better coping strategies to deal with these traumatic impacts. As
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trauma itself is a complex concept and journalists play a role in conveying these tragedies to the public, a skill or a better framework to describe and records tragedies to fit ethical demands is important and often needs constantly reflections. “Trauma literacy” should combine emotional literacy and literacy of telling tragedies, and I used it to discuss possible influence on journalists after covering human tragedies, their awareness of other’s grief and related practice toward covering tragedies.
Earlier than journalists, other professions such emergency workers, social workers, police officers and paramedics these “first responders”2 have noticed they may be injured after exposing to trauma stressors while working. There are some training programs or interventions have been developed for dealing with these injuries. Moreover, their awareness about trauma and its impact are not only limited in a recognition stage, and have been move furtherer to a stage of delivering trainings and workshops as intervention and prevention of work related traumatic stress.
For journalists, even some foreign organizations recognized that journalists are also victims to the ripple effect of covering traumatic events and victims’strongly emotion, urging a shift of organizational culture, and offer more well-down training and intervention programs for journalists. But research on the types of support to assist journalists with the consequences of trauma reporting is limited (Keats & Buchanan, 2009). Moreover, with the advocacy of victim’s right and the concerns about the mental health of journalists, emotional literacy training has been developed among journalists, some researchers also noticed that journalists need emotional literacy training for understand their interviewees and recognizing and coping their own emotion after covering tragedies (Benning, 2006).
2 “First responders” who are the first on the scene of accidents, the term has been “ used as a lingo to describe paramedics, police officers and other emergency personnel who have been classified as possible sufferers of PTSD… ” (Rentschler, 2009:167).