What students are teaching us about resiliency and human rights

By Andrea Lampros and Alexa Koenig

When we launched the Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab in fall 2016, we tried to keep our eyes on three priorities: the digital security, physical security, and psycho-social security of the various constituencies implicated in our work.

While each is critical, the responsibility for the psycho-social security of our Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students — who may be as young as 17 — is what often keeps us up at night. The 80 members of our lab spend a minimum of five hours a week (and sometimes much more) analyzing material that can be tough for anyone of any age to process: hospital bombings in Syria, the shooting of Rohingya children, testimonies of rape and torture.

Divided into approximately eight teams, each dealing with a different case or conflict, the students might scour the internet for information about potential war crimes, monitor the social media profiles of alleged perpetrators, or pore over videos to verify details of an atrocity (Does this look like a chemical attack? Can you see military insignia? Can we corroborate the location?).

The responses of our students to this often distressing, user-generated content have ranged from feelings of elation about doing something tangible for human rights to feelings of inadequacy and guilt. We’ve repeatedly heard: “The lab has provided me with a sense of purpose.” We’ve also heard: “I feel guilty when I stop working and then go out with friends” and “I don’t know if I’m having an impact.”

From day-one the lab benefited from the expertise of Sam Dubberley, founder and director of Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps, who initially trained our students in ways to foster resiliency and prevent secondary trauma. He shared his research “Making Secondary Trauma a Primary Issue: A Study of Eyewitness Media” and practical guides with First Draft News as well as supported our efforts to create a comprehensive resiliency program. Sam ensured that every student from the get-go participated in a mandatory two-hour training. We soon realized that a one-time training wasn’t enough and because Sam was based in Berlin, Germany, we had to build off of his insights to develop an in-house program.

In addition to teaching concrete tips and tricks to cultivate resiliency, our program — developed in close partnership with our students — focuses on awareness, community, and impact. The program is constantly evolving based on what we see and hear in the lab as well as existing research on mitigating the risks of secondary trauma.

As the lab begins a new era this year under the direction of Félim McMahan—who has vast experience with resiliency tools and methods from his time as a journalist and at the International Criminal Court—the effort will continue evolving.

Awareness

We begin each semester at the lab with a mandatory resiliency training that outlines some of the key research and responses to the range of reactions to working with user-generated content related to human rights. The training is meant to provide a big picture understanding of secondary trauma as well as practical tips and tools for lessoning its likelihood, such as turning off sound when looking at graphic content or minimizing screens. Drawing on Sam Dubberley’s work, we emphasize that this training is the beginning of an ongoing practice of resiliency.

Beyond the technical strategies, at the heart of the training is an effort to foster an awareness of the risks and nature of secondary trauma as well as on an individual level. We ask each lab member to consider their emotional and physical baseline. Do you normally eat this much junk food or drink this much alcohol? Do you normally sleep 10 hours a night? Is it common for you to wake up at night and have a hard time going back to sleep? How many hours per week do you normally exercise? Do you usually have nightmares?

Of course, with high-achieving Berkeley students who have hectic schedules, and a stress that pulses through the weeks of the semester, it can be hard to tease out the lab’s particular effect. But that’s why we begin by asking: what’s normal for you?

It’s often hard for new students to know how they will respond to traumatic content until they actually work with it. As a result, we’ve implemented a mid-semester resiliency check-in at the team level, where smaller group conversations allow for greater openness and are rooted in the content of each particular group.

Taking a cue from Sam’s research, we have continued to emphasize that we don’t all react the same way to the same content. For example, some people are particularly distressed by cruelty to children, while others may find sexual violence most upsetting. These reactions may vary from person to person and can change over the stages of life. It’s also hard to know in advance whether working on issues related to a country with which one has a personal affiliation will be particularly meaningful and empowering, or politically or emotionally difficult. As a result, we’ve implemented a policy whereby students can change their project for emotional reasons at any time, no questions asked.

Community

Two of our students hung a sign in the lab that speaks to the underlying collaboration and sense of community we try to cultivate: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

To this end, students are paired within their teams and spend the semester working collaboratively. Partnerships strengthen open source investigations because students can bounce ideas off ideas off each other and challenge each others’ potential biases and assumptions. In terms of resiliency, these partnerships create the first line of support, giving students an opportunity to note each other’s emotional capacity and to raise a flag for additional support from HRC staff or university counselors, if needed.

This spring, we appointed a student “resiliency manager,” Nisha Srinivasa, and created a six-student resiliency team to carry out peer-to-peer counseling. These student leaders were trained in “active listening” and held weekly office hours for fellow lab students to drop-in to discuss the lab or anything else on their minds.

Unfortunately, in our first semester, no students dropped into the sessions held over ten weeks. We realize this result is probably not because students are all perfectly at ease with this difficult work and are speculating that they might have been deterred by our lack of a confidential, inviting space at the law school for the sessions. Held in an ever-changing array of law school classrooms and offices, the set up was less-than ideal. Next year, we will move into a house on campus that has a dedicated, welcoming space for students to meet and relax.

In spring 2018, we also appointed our first “community officer” — undergraduate lab member Mazelle Etessami — to develop and carry out community-building efforts. Drawing from her experience with other student clubs, she immediately implemented a “family structure.” Veteran students “married” other veteran students and “couples” adopted “children” (the new students). These “families” were asked to meet outside of lab sessions to get to know one another. She built social events into the last 15 minutes of our weekly lab class time, providing tea, cookies, and opportunities for students on different teams to meet each other. We held a movie night, showing a film about the White Helmets in Syria (in retrospect, thinking something like Toy Story might have been better) and held an end-of-semester celebration of graduates at a nearby restaurant. We offered sweatshirts, water bottles, and stickers featuring the Human Rights Center logo to help build identity and cohesion within the lab and the center.

Impact

Finally, we attempted — with varying degrees of success — to focus on impact. Research on secondary trauma suggests that a sense of meaning and purpose can guard against feelings of hopelessness when facing the aftermath of grave crimes. Unlike other types of human rights work where investigators are on the ground and benefit from real-time relationships with victims and families as well as each other, open source investigations are physically removed from the survivors. The human connection — and proof of impact — is diminished.

According to psychiatrist and researcher Metin Başoğlu, anxiety comes from a sense of helplessness, while depression stems from hopelessness. Therefore, we asked our partner organizations to let us know when lab members’ work had impact in order to cultivate the sense of control and counter emotional distress. For example, this semester Amnesty International publicly highlighted the work of our Digital Verification Corps team in their reports, enabling the students to see the fruits of their labor. An Amnesty press release on Afrin in Syria, for example, publicy recognized the DVC’s contributions and Amnesty researchers in Iraq sent students a thank you video.

However, we often work on confidential projects that require discretion about our role, making public recognition impossible. We also work on long-term projects, such as verifying videos from Syria, that may have limited impact for years to come.

In such cases, we are increasingly strengthening collaboration between clients and students. This spring, the Syrian Archive’s Jeff Deutch and Niko Para came to Berkeley for a week to meet with students and develop a joint project. Upon their return to Berlin, they checked in with the Syria team students by Skype once a week. Similarly, our partners at the Center for Justice and Accountability hosted the students for a reportback on the research and offered feedback. Students say these connections helped.

Ultimately, though, when impact or an end-game is elusive, students express discomfort. For example, one student charged with looking at the Facebook profiles of alleged perpetrators (in a confidential case related to the Middle East) said it often feels invasive to explore the complex and nuanced lives (complete with photos of family and sports and music) of possible perpetrators — especially when the investigation ultimately suggests they are not perpetrators. Others said it feels pointless to look through hundreds of graphic videos of atrocity without any clear outcome in sight.

What’s been most illuminating in this resiliency work is seeing, anecdotally at least, that the students are less affected by graphic violence than by issues of ethics and the complexity of the human condition.

One student recently noted that it’s extremely difficult to look at social media profiles of actual perpetrators and grapple with the fact that they are complex people and not simply monsters — that they have homes and pets and favorite sports teams; that they love and are loved.

In this same vein, a student working on our Myanmar team said that the most difficult part for her emotionally has been coming to terms with the fact that Aung Sang Suu Kyi, Burma’s Nobel Laureate leader, has been complicit in possible crimes against humanity.

As Primo Levi pointed out decades ago in his classic writing on the Holocaust — the Gray Zone — it can be heart-wrenching and complicated to realize that heroes are not solely heroes and villains are not simply villains.

And so we go back to seeing resiliency as a process that must respond in real-time to real needs, adding tools to our toolkit and knowing that none of us can actually, ever be fully “resilient.” On this front and many others related to open source investigations, the students remain our best teachers.