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Post Election Violence Trauma Counseling for Journalists
Related to country: Kenya

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Background

Covering a violent conflict can create serious health problems for journalists and photographers who often find themselves in the frontline of the events to get the images and the stories. Thus, they often experience or witness traumatizing incidents and many of them will struggle to cope with the impact.
In the unprecedented wave of politically motivated violence that was triggered after the disputed December 27 presidential election, Kenyan media practitioners found themselves at the heart of the events and witnessed firsthand gross abuses of human rights – more than 1,000 Kenyans have been killed and over 500,000 have been displaced by the crisis. Such disturbing images can take a toll on any human being irrespective of the community they come from.
The gruesome images may haunt them for the rest of their lives and may threaten their mental well-being if the problem is not adequately addressed through trauma counseling sessions. Evidence gathered and symptoms reported among Kenyan media practitioners have ranged from anxiety and depression to emotional numbness and substance abuse. The fact that the post traumatic stress is threatening the sanity of the workplace in several media houses is another cause for alarm.

Recommendations

Providing counseling for reporters having witnessed some of the worst things that can happen to humanity with no equipment to protect themselves and no tools to handle the emotional shock was identified as one of the most imminent and crucial needs for support to Kenyan media practitioners.

According to the Nairobi Round Table Recommendations (February 2008), which identify the challenges that media practitioners and media houses have been facing prior to, during and after the December 27 2007, Presidential Election, “journalists and media practitioners are traumatized but are lacking counseling to deal with the post violence trauma and the self denial.”

Post-Election Trauma Counseling

The Kenya Association of Photographers, Illustrators and Designers (KAPIDE) has been carrying out the post-election trauma counseling sessions in close cooperation with the Kenya Correspondents Association and the Kenya Union of Journalists. The counseling sessions have already taken place in Nairobi, Nakuru, Eldoret and Kisumu. The Mombasa session kicks off tomorrow(10th-11th May)

May 9, 2008 | 3:43 AM Comments  0 comments

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