When trauma becomes trope

Humanitarian journalism is a moral calling to document human suffering. But in practice, it’s an ethically murky undertaking

People displaced by fighting in the village of Shora, 25 km South of Mosul, approaching an Iraqi army checkpoint outside Qayyarah, Iraq, October 2016. Photo by Ivor Prickett/UNHCR/Panos Pictures

is a journalist and a visiting assistant professor of Media Ethics and Journalism at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US. She is the author of With Ash On Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State (2017). She is based in the UK.

Edited byAlizeh Kohari

Last spring, I stood outside the town hall in Manchester, my home city, attempting to speak to a man living in a tent, a migrant from Eritrea. I was there as a journalist, trying to understand the spike in homelessness among refugees in the United Kingdom. I’d previously been a foreign correspondent in Iraq and the wider region; in the years since I’d returned home, millions, including refugees from those countries, had attempted a similar journey as the man now sussing me out, deciding whether he would speak with me.

Another man, his tent pitched by a statue commemorating Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, scolded the photographer I was with. ‘Get away from here,’ he warned. We faced off, commuters rushing past us. Like many cities, Manchester is a study in contradictions: sky-rise apartments and homeless encampments, Michelin-starred restaurants and food banks, nice suburbs and child poverty.

The photographer and I scrambled to explain who we were and why we were there. We discussed the news and how it is made. Left unsaid was the implicit, if increasingly quixotic, promise of journalism, and of humanitarian journalism in particular: if suffering is witnessed and documented, someone somewhere with some ounce of power will do something about it.

Turning away from the man by the statue, I asked the other man why he came to the UK. We began enacting a familiar journalistic tableau: the Global North reporter trying to understand and narrate, the Global South migrant offering snapshots of his life. This is the point where I would’ve recounted the content of those snapshots: the harrowing journey, the devastation left behind, the indignities upon arrival. But this is not a piece of humanitarian journalism, where all too often suffering is the narrative endpoint.

Humanitarian journalism – a loosely defined genre, one that the communication scholars Mel Bunce, Martin Scott and Kate Wright in 2019 describe as ‘factual accounts about crises and issues that affect human welfare’ – has often been undertaken as a moral calling. Those who have typically practised it enter the crisis zone – war, famine, floods, genocide – as high-minded, meaning-making emissaries of power, transcribing pain into a legible narrative for what was historically an audience somewhere far away in the metropole.

The relationship between reported suffering and meaningful change has always been slippery – while a free press has always had influence on policymaking in representative democracies, it is not so easy to disentangle cause and effect. More recently, however, this relationship appears utterly severed. ‘Silence at the first massacre was shameful; by the second and the third, it had become routine,’ was how the translator Sondos Sabra decried international intransigence over the Israeli campaign of mass murder and genocide in Gaza. ‘What can one call this but a resounding collapse of morality?’ Rendered increasingly precarious in a shrinking media ecosystem, the journalists I know are sadder and more cynical than ever. The suffering being broadcast from Gaza, by Palestinian journalists, for well over two years has not compelled leaders to hold back weapons shipments, even as protesters fill the street. ‘I can’t think of one media outlet that I trust and that I feel is having enough of an impact,’ a fellow journalist, a 30-something reporter who has covered the ongoing trials at Guantánamo over the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, as well as police brutality in the United States, told me recently, while considering covering a story of national significance. ‘I just don’t believe in it in the same way anymore.’

It was as a reporter in Iraq that I began questioning the logic of humanitarian journalism – not just if it could exert meaningful pressure on politicians and policymakers, but whether it was adding to the problems it sought to address. Returning to Manchester, teaching students how to write feature stories – a lede to hook the reader, pull at her heartstrings, boxed-off sections for ‘colour’ and ‘quotes’ – my disquiet deepened at the stylistic and political limitations of the form. Humanitarian journalism offers up traumatic narratives in exchange for political rights in an unequal world – a strangely unhumanitarian idea. Its instincts are religious, its gaze downward, its politics unclear. Is there a better way to write about the horrors of the world?

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Humanitarian journalism evolved in tandem with empire. In the 19th century, the telegraph and camera were revolutionising communication while the seeds were being sown of the humanitarian system we know today – ‘a semi-permanent, international arrangement of institutions and actors who coordinate their efforts to address human suffering’, as Bunce and colleagues put it. During the Crimean War (1853-56), reports published in The Times by William Howard Russell, often described as the first war correspondence, shocked readers in the UK, spurring large charitable donations and inspiring Florence Nightingale’s turn to wartime nursing.

The Great Famine in India (1876-78). Courtesy the Wellcome Collection/Wikimedia

Meanwhile, in 1876, famine raged through large parts of south and southwestern British-administered India; as millions died, engravings based on photographs of their emaciated bodies were published in British papers, prompting widespread outrage. This crisis, the historian Christina Twomey has argued, introduced the practice of displaying shocking images to ‘evidence’ bodily suffering and deprivation in order to precipitate humanitarian action. ‘Atrocity,’ Twomey writes, ‘first emerged as a focus of public discourse at the end of the 18th century, an era scholars have associated with cultures of sentimentality that articulated new understandings of suffering and the body and thereby prompted a wave of humanitarian action and a new fascination with pain …’ While the Madras famine wasn’t framed as an atrocity – although Nightingale, Twomey notes, compared British inaction as morally equivalent to brutish behaviour by other powers elsewhere – it ‘enabled members of the extended British world to demonstrate a particular kind of empire loyalty that distinguished them as a civilised, white community from a vulnerable, racial other: “their wretchedness,” as one editorial put it, “is our opportunity”.’

For suffering to matter, for it to be news, it has helped if the pain being documented is politically convenient

More than a century later, televised coverage of another famine – in Ethiopia, first shown in October 1984 – had a similar impact on Western charity. Communication theorists have since coined a term to describe a related phenomenon: the CNN effect, the theory that 24-hour real-time news coverage of humanitarian crises or conflicts drives foreign policy and intervention by shaping public opinion. The CNN effect might always have been overstated, however. One often-invoked example is the famine in Somalia in 1992, the result of drought and civil war, in which US forces ultimately intervened to facilitate the safe delivery of aid on the ground. But the media scholar Steven Livingston has argued that news coverage of Somalia in the West skyrocketed only after this intervention – not because conditions had worsened, but because Americans were there. (The same is true for the Rwandan genocide in 1994, where research shows that coverage came on the heels of humanitarian intervention.)

Meaningful action often results from a complex calculus of financial interests, geopolitics and other variables. This is true of journalistic coverage itself, which, as Scott, Bunce and Wright note in 2023, primarily reflects the geopolitical significance of a crisis, rather than the number of people affected. Before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, for instance, the armed conflict in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions – in which around 3.4 million people in eastern Ukraine required assistance – was the second least-reported humanitarian crisis in the world. In 2018, I was interviewing residents in bombed-out villages near what was then known as the ‘contact line’; travelling on the backroads of the region, I saw deserted hotels and shops blurring into fields of sunflowers. Following full-scale invasion by Russia, Scott and colleagues write, 35 per cent of all global news coverage mentioned Ukraine. For suffering to matter, for it to be news, for something to be done about it, it has historically helped if the pain being documented is politically convenient – a betrayal of the promise and ideal of humanitarian journalism.

There was that boy, slender and bent almost double, one afternoon nine years ago in the Nineveh Plains north of Mosul. He’d been captured by ISIS, but the group was by then in retreat, corralled into smaller and smaller pockets of Iraq and Syria by the US-led coalition’s aerial and ground offensives. Traumatised, the boy didn’t speak much; as his uncle recounted the story of his capture and escape, I sketched his hunched posture in the margins of my notebook. We sat in their small cinderblock house; up on the hill raged a gas flare, a sign that oil was being extracted. A welfare officer hovered nearby, from a UN agency that would soon escort the boy to a wealthier and ostensibly safer country in the West.

Like many of my forebears in humanitarian journalism, I too am British and middle class. I entered journalism as a way to become a writer and observe historic events, uncover wrongdoing, speak to people, and exit the suburbs. By the time I became a foreign correspondent, the media ecosystem was already fractured and flailing. Among the reporters I lived and worked alongside in Iraqi Kurdistan, the dividing line was between the freelancers who lived where we worked and the staffers who flew in and out. Very few media organisations now have foreign bureaus; the milieu satirised in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop (1938) – mostly men, typically from Western capitals, reporting on tragedies in far-flung places for major newspapers – doesn’t really exist anymore. Scoop was based on Waugh’s own experience as a Daily Mail correspondent in Ethiopia on the eve of invasion by Mussolini.

Humanitarian reporting is now also commonly carried out by journalists who are from the countries on which they are reporting – this change has as much to do with structural and budgetary reasons as representational ones – or from a wider variety of countries than the colonial powers of yore. But while certain demographic aspects of the profession may have changed, the oddities of the form have not.

That interview, of the boy and his uncle in Iraq, was illustrative of both how humanitarian journalism is different today, and how it isn’t. An NGO had commissioned the story: as the budgets of newspapers and other media outfits have shrunk, the communication departments of nonprofits will often fund or facilitate coverage of humanitarian issues, blurring the line between journalism and aid work. The boy’s story fit neatly into the humanitarian frame and there was no question of the genocidal violence that he and his community, the Yezidis, had endured at the hands of ISIS. The US president Barack Obama had invoked the Yezidis’ suffering, along with the looming threat to Iraqi Kurdistan, when he initiated airstrikes in the region in the summer of 2014. In other words, it was the sort of story that was legible to Western audiences and aligned with Western foreign policy goals, as well as the goals of humanitarian organisations, towards the protection, dignity and rights of migrants and refugees.

The chronicle of abjection is at the heart of the problem with humanitarian journalism

But while the truth and righteousness of the boy’s tale was indisputable, the interplay between the NGO, myself as the journalist, and the rich, Western country where the boy would arrive and where my writing would be read was an uncomfortable one – not because his relocation wasn’t a good thing but because the form of first-person testimony offered up for the story too-closely resembled the formal expectations of the immigration interview. In Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling (2025), the writer Marina Warner wrestles with the ethical murkiness of such narratives: ‘refugees are asked to repeat their stories verbatim, and they struggle to meet the terms of admission as they do so. This procedure boxes them into a chronicle of abjection and closes down the possibility of an alternative ground to selfhood.’

The chronicle of abjection is at the heart of the problem with humanitarian journalism. While covering, for instance, the turning-away of migrant boats in the Mediterranean and sexual violence against Yezidi women, I have often wondered how it might be possible to report without asking people in difficult circumstances to relive their personal horrors. Those recounted tragedies are then weighed against the unspoken criteria of narrative worth: Will the reader empathise? More often than not, this frame creates perverse incentives for all parties involved. When I was reporting for my book on mass enslavement of Yezidi women and massacres of Yezidi men, I heard stories of ISIS fighters eating Yezidi babies. I could not corroborate these stories but thought they could be an expression of the unimaginable depravity that the community had endured and the frustration survivors felt at receiving neither justice nor rescue. Similar hyperbolism emerged in Israel after 7 October 2023: stories about beheaded babies that were soon debunked, when the real facts were terrible enough.

Stories of trauma are politically malleable. As Susan Sontag wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), photographs of war are ‘a species of rhetoric’. Wars are fought in defence of some people who have been victimised and traumatised, but not all of them, and more people are then killed and maimed in those wars. Journalists sit uneasily – and knowingly – on this faultline, digging through the rubble for facts, hoping their efforts will lead to accountability and justice rather than become fodder for further violence. In the years since I published my book With Ash on Their Faces (2017), there has been a smattering of convictions for ISIS crimes against Yezidis. This may not have been the case without widespread coverage of those atrocities, some of which was sensational and inaccurate.

But the subjects of that coverage were undoubtedly negatively affected. One study of Yezidi women’s views on how journalists covered their suffering found that most felt pressured to share their stories. In the absence of any real humanitarian intervention, they also felt deeply betrayed by the reporters who had once frequented their towns and villages. ‘They just take our information and our stories and they just leave,’ one young woman told the researchers. ‘No one helps us, no one talks to us, no one gives [us] anything.’

In the humanitarian world, the sense that people don’t care about, or are bored of, the suffering of others is called ‘compassion fatigue’. Stories of horror and tragedy begin to blur into one another, producing a sense of unreality and a lack of urgency. Compassion fatigue is a kind of social silence, and one vector towards political inaction. As far as journalism is concerned, it is also a problem of form: when trauma becomes a trope, tragedy reads as formula, even though the events described may be real. This narrative need has created a cult of the ‘human story’, giving primacy to subjective emotional experience.

In Sanctuary, Warner likens such narratives to ‘what the Dutch call the ego-document … [which] is in itself restrictive and a conventional form: most tellers of these tales necessarily present themselves as integers, obeying the tradition of the genre, which requires them to present themselves as such, rather than as kindred spirits in a group.’ The excessive individuation is rooted in ‘a certain concept of the person, one that keeps personal freedom distinct from a vision of society as an ecosystem … like mushrooms and trees, mutually interdependent and interconnected …’ Instead of restricting the human spirit to a single genre, Warner proposes a writing that moves beyond the subjective I to the collective We.

I recently asked generative AI to describe my writing style. Vivid, empathetic and grounded in the lived experiences of people on the margins of conflict, it said. Blends detailed reporting with intimate narrative, often focusing on the human cost of war, displacement and survival, especially among women. What I recognise here, apart from the fawning of the bot, is the sentimental tone prevalent in the form.

Much of humanitarian journalism operates in two registers: pity or idealisation. The former, I think, is a psychological defence for the journalist, distracting from their own status and class insecurities while echoing the historical colonial origins of the form. (This tendency is scathingly, if somewhat unfairly, depicted in Charles Dickens’s 1853 novel Bleak House, where Mrs Jellyby spends her time writing letters about the dispossessed and the needy in Africa while neglecting her own children.) But the latter – treating the traumatised subject as all-knowing and ultimately righteous – is equally unhelpful. Writing that puts the dispossessed on a pedestal, treating the experience of trauma as an essential innocence, ignores complex matrices of culture, politics and conflict. (Moreover, this tone is easily replicated by AI, meaning it is clichéd and reproducible, further degrading its impact.)

‘Contra the old expression,’ notes the philosopher Olúfémi O Táíwò, ‘pain – whether borne of oppression or not – is a poor teacher. Suffering is partial, short-sighted, and self-absorbed. We shouldn’t have a politics that expects different …’ The instinct to ennoble or ‘humanise’ certain groups as a direct response to their historical dehumanisation is also, as Mohammed El-Kurd argues in Perfect Victims, and the Politics of Appeal (2025), an exercise in ‘ceaseless infantilisation’. For the reader or the viewer – the ‘spectator’ – to be able to sympathise with the Palestinian, for instance, ‘they must first sanitise and subdue him, sever him from his origin story, rendering him utterly displaced and effaced,’ El-Kurd writes. ‘We sanctify our victims in our testimonials and eulogies, adoring them with commiserating anecdotes. We hamper them with innocence.’

Rights and dignity come before trauma, not after or because of it

Like pity, idealisation prevents genuine engagement because neither requires equality between the observer and the observed. It recruits us to an emotional landscape but doesn’t necessarily question the forces that created it. It also prevents the possibility that two people, meeting as equals, could change one another.

How might we move past the emotional frame of humanitarian journalism? A more radical frame of writing would start from the point that rights and dignity come before trauma, not after or because of it. It might mean writing that is stranger and less formulaic, that sloughs off sentimentality, that does not allow agony to equal authority. It might also mean lowering the stakes of the genre to include everyday crises that are part of normal life and the everyday life lived in extremis. It would mean ensuring that humanitarianism is no longer a byword for far-flung crises but a means to highlight the interconnectedness of the world we live in today. While reporting on homelessness among refugees in Manchester, I met a community worker who deftly drew links between the unhoused in the city, domestic asylum procedures, and the government’s foreign policies. Perhaps we need a humanitarian journalism that explicates these connections, rather than smuggling in such ‘systems stories’ (as we in the profession call it) through quirky characters or strange events.

In the 1930s, as the British government of Neville Chamberlain was pursuing a policy of appeasement toward Hitler, the reporter Claud Cockburn left The Times and founded The Week, a newsletter that documented the rise of fascism in Europe for an English audience. Eschewing establishment journalism for a more adversarial style, The Week published prescient stories about growing repression in Germany. One report, from August 1933, documented the shuttering of a Jewish-owned bookshop in Berlin as, one by one, orders were cancelled and the owner forced to emigrate – a story that in hindsight is dwarfed by the horrors just a few years down the line, but that took its subjects seriously before the worst had happened to them. Cockburn didn’t believe in the axiom that journalists should speak truth to power; he knew that the powerful didn’t want to hear the truth. ‘Much more effective, he believed,’ writes Patrick Cockburn in his biography of his muckraking father, Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied (2024), ‘is to tell the truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance.’

Perhaps the style of news I’m critiquing is already on its deathbed, as media consumption becomes more concentrated and mediated by private platforms, newsrooms are held hostage by tech billionaires, and the aid world is ripped apart by deep funding cuts. But the beauty of journalism is that, at its best, it continues to attract people who give a shit about people not like them. We think other people matter, that their stories can help us understand the world. This supersedes all the knotty questions of form and narrative, objectivity and ethics. But we can’t communicate the problems of the world with the same tools as before.

This is the mandate for humanitarian journalists in the 21st century: to respond to horror by putting something new in the world, to create a shift in meaning. ‘Language, too, forces the air from the lungs,’ writes Omar El Akkad in One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This (2025), an account of his disillusionment with journalism and the gap between the West’s ‘lofty ideals and its bloodstained reality’. Perhaps we can begin writing without the false ceremony of neutrality; perhaps we can write that war and death aren’t the only kinds of violence; perhaps we can write without reducing trauma to a currency bartered for rights. Perhaps we can write to quicken the pace of the living, before it’s too late.

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