Chapter 1: Make Room for the Most Affected
By Annie Neimand, Ph.D., Ann Christiano, and Lauren Parater
One of the challenges the humanitarian sector faces are the simplistic and sometimes harmful stereotypes shared in stories about refugees by news media and even humanitarian organizations themselves.
In their 2017 summary of research examining dominant themes used in communicating about refugees, Greussing and Boomgaarden identified three:
News media often frame refugees as victims in need of help as a way to build support for humanitarian intervention. In a recent project conducted in partnership with the United Nations Refugee Agency’s Innovation Service, our research team found that the stories shared by humanitarian organizations often use this frame as well.
News media and politicians often use a threat frame that inaccurately emphasizes the potential for terrorism, crime and economic burden to the asylum seekers’ host community associated with refugees. Alex Randall, project manager of the Climate Change and Migration Coalition, found that media coverage of events leading up to the Syrian conflict in 2011 framed people seeking asylum as a threat. He wrote: “Many media reports argued that climate-driven migration into cities created violence between migrants and existing residents that descended into wider conflict. The media reporting tended (wrongly) to present migrants and refugees as a threat to Europe and a source of chaos and violence within Syria. In general, media reports ignored research pointing towards cooperation between migrants and residents in protests against the Syrian regime.”
Lastly, Greussing and Boomgaarden identified the use of the “flood” metaphor to describe movement. They said this metaphor “associates immigration with powerlessness against the magnitude of newly arriving people and the costs or expenses of refugee services… Moreover, these metaphors depict refugees and asylum seekers as anonymous, even dehumanized groups …which further leads to a polarisation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Within this narrative, refugees and asylum seekers are constructed as deviant or alien to the host society, disrupting its cultural identity, language, and values.”
These frames contribute to negative perceptions of displaced persons as a burden or threat to a community. As a result, they have the potential to trigger negative emotional reactions that may incite unfounded prejudice toward people seeking safety. (Abid et al., 2017; Greussing and Boomgaarden, 2017).
Experts believe that communication should avoid these frames as they are counterproductive and inaccurate. Most displaced people stay within their national borders, and this framing takes away the humanity and agency of these communities.
One way to avoid feeding these stereotypes is for the global community to create opportunities and spaces for those affected by the issue to tell their own stories.
A community-led approach to storytelling places those most affected in control of when, where, how, and why their story is told. When those affected do not control their own stories, storytelling can oversimplify complex situations, misrepresent a community or perpetuate a stereotype. People are inherently complex and nuanced.Making space for them to share their experience is more authentic and can lead to more powerful and honest stories.
Research tells us that stories from people affected by climate change or changes in the environment may be seen as more trustworthy than news reports (Wahl-Jorgensen, Williams, and Wardle, 2010). Those stories are more compelling, but they’re also missing. The report ‘Moving Stories: The Voices of People Who Move in the Context of Environmental Change’, produced by the Climate Outreach and Information Network, points out “The voices of people who move in the context of environmental change are absent from the debate about how we address the issue.”
The report includes the voices and context of those affected in a digestible, emotionally driven and informative way. It leads with quotes from people describing the experience that led them to move, and follow with regionally-specific social, economic and political factors that help the reader understand the intersecting and amplifying nature of climate change.
UNHCR’s Innovation Service working with refugees to tell their own stories. Recently, they worked with the Community Technology Empowerment Network-Uganda (CTEN), an organization led by refugees committed to increasing access and improved use of information and communication technology, to write their origin story as a strategy to build support for refugee-led innovation. Doing so, they believe, will help build understanding of what refugee-led innovation looks like, build support for similar projects, and illustrate the ways in which refugees are the source of solutions.
UNHCR Innovation Officer Katie Drew explains, “We’ve been trying to unpack the challenge of story ownership, refugee voice and agency in our communications work over the past year, in an attempt to counter the prevailing narrative of refugees having their stories told for them, by us. Experimenting in this space with CTEN helped us address head-on some of the unspoken complexities of international to local — or ‘insider to outsider’ — power dynamics and learn more about storytelling techniques in different cultures. It’s an area of work we’re definitely keen to continue experimenting with, to find better ways for refugees to author our communications.” The Innovation Service will continue to experiment with CTEN and other communities in the coming months.
As a sector, we need to ensure the voices of those affected are driving the narrative to authentically illustrate the complexity and nuance of displacement in the context of climate change. Doing so will help ensure we do not produce harmful and simplistic narratives.
This special publication is part of a partnership between the UN Refugee Agency and the University of Florida Center for Public Interest Communications. In an effort to move past communication strategies that simply “raise awareness” of an issue, this partnership aims to connect those working in the humanitarian sector with applicable insights from behavioral, cognitive and social science to make a lasting difference on the issues that matter most.
Thank you to Alex Randall, Erica Bower and Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat for their time and insight for this project.
This special report shares how we can apply behavioral, cognitive and social science to build understanding and support for complex issues. We focused on climate change displacement as it is one of the critical and most complex areas of work facing the humanitarian sector — and the entire global community. The special report is divided into five chapters:
Introduction: Communicating the Complexity of Displacement in a Changing Climate
Chapter One: Make Room for the Most Affected
Chapter Two: Use Visual Language
References
- Abid, R. Z., Manan, S. A., & Rahman, Z. A. A. A. (2017). ‘A flood of Syrians has slowed to a trickle’: The use of metaphors in the representation of Syrian refugees in the online media news reports of host and non-host countries. Discourse & Communication, 11(2), 121–140.
- Greussing, E., & Boomgaarden, H. G. (2017). Shifting the refugee narrative? An automated frame analysis of Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43(11), 1749–1774.
- Randall, A. (2016). Syria and Climate Change: did the media get it right?. Climate and Migration Coalition. April, 26.
- Wahl-Jorgensen, K., Williams, A., & Wardle, C. (2010). Audience views on user-generated content: exploring the value of news from the bottom up. Northern Lights: Film & media studies yearbook, 8(1), 177–194.
