Three recent articles bring up thoughtful questions about the ethics of telling other people’s stories.

Two of the articles are interviews with Amy Hill, director of programs with Berkeley-based Center for Digital Storytelling and co-founder of Silence Speaks, “an international digital storytelling initiative offering a safe, supportive environment for telling and sharing stories that all too often remain unspoken.” Specifically:

Silence Speaks has been committed to fostering individual and collective healing and justice by nurturing the production of personal media narratives and bringing these narratives into carefully considered public spaces. [from Margaret Rhee interview, referenced below]

and from Aspen Baker interview, referenced below, Silence Speaks …

supports the telling and witnessing of stories that all too often remain unspoken — of surviving and thriving in the wake of violence and abuse, armed conflict, or displacement … of challenging stigma or marginalization related to health and sexuality.

The articles focus on storytelling for social change, as well as journalistic storytelling. Both express concern for the people whose stories are told for the sake of journalism and social change.

In Storytellers Front and Center: A HASTAC Bog Interview with ‘Silence Speaks’ Amy Hill by Margaret Rhee, Hill says: “All too often, media enthusiasts are inclined to focus in on the excitement of production and content rather than on the impact of and benefit to participating in media creation on those who are sharing stories.”

Anyone who seeks to tell stories about painful situations could benefit from Hill’s knowledge. “I have learned volumes about what it can mean to bring a very sensitive, usually private story into public spheres,” she says in Rhee’s interview, “and how to best ensure that the workshop experience and subsequent experiences of sharing stories with broader audiences is a positive one, for the storyteller. For me, one bottom line is building trusting relationships with workshop participants before, during, and after they create their stories. When they know their personal experiences are being respected, honored, and valued as tools for change, locally and/or globally, they are much more likely to feel comfortable sharing their stories.”

In fact, the other interview, The Expert Teacher: When Stigma is Part of the Story; Aspen Baker Interviews Amy Hill, notes that Hill “specialize[s] in the ethical implications of producing and sharing sensitive personal narratives and in modifying digital storytelling methods to accommodate multiple languages and scarce technology resources.”

A key ethical question (from the Baker interview) for Hill is: “Who benefits from the proliferation of narratives of suffering and sorrow, online? Is it the storytellers themselves? Or is it journalists and media outlets, always on the lookout for a story that sells?”

Jina Moore, a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs, echoes this ethical dilemma in the third article, Reporters and Rape II: Readers’ trust and trauma stories (which Aspen Baker commented on, citing the Amy Hill interview). Moore interviewed a Rwandan genocide survivor who had experienced brutal violence: “There are times when we also have to recognize that these stories belong first to someone else. I decided not to press. I was telling a story, yes, but it was her story, and this was one part of that story I felt I had no business asking for if she didn’t want to give it to me.”

I recall my days as a journalist with a bit of shame as I reflect on this question of who benefits. In those days, I felt that a story about programs that brought companion animals to visit nursing-home residents were always good as heart-tuggers. At least in that case, the stories I exploited were not extremely sensitive and painful. More shameful was my notion — fortunately never implemented — that a story about a terminally ill teenager was a good idea.

Another question is — Who should play the leadership role in telling stories about issues? Hill’s response (from the Baker interview): “We focus on projects that position storytellers as leaders in speaking out about issues that affect their health and well-being.” I am intrigued by this idea of storytellers as leaders.

Hill doesn’t believe in pushing suffering people to tell their stories. “I believe that most people choose to tell their stories, even if the telling is emotionally challenging, when they are ready,” she says in the Baker interview.

Sometimes heated rhetoric, much of it from political and religious corners, has profound effects on people’s comfort in telling their stories. Hill, who has worked with abortion stories, notes in the baker interview that “the intensity of the abortion wars in the U.S. seems to have kept most women who have had abortion from feeling safe or comfortable speaking out.” Further …

It seems to me that those on both sides of this war who lament women’s lack of willingness to share their individual stories are failing to see what a monumental request they are making of such women. They seem to view stories as fodder for their battles, as commodities that will assist them in winning, in “owning” the discourse around abortion, rather than considering what it would like to put their own most personal struggles and life decisions out on the table, for all the world to see.

These interviews with Hill yielded other interesting observations beyond ethics:

• In the Baker interview, Hill notes: “I am interested in critically examining the ways in which the process of sharing and listening to stories can lead to specific changes across multiple levels of human experience and influence,” while in the Rhee interview, she observes that through these digital projects at individual, organizational, and community levels, but “funders are generally reluctant to provide resources for evaluating the impact of media projects, so we have been unable to do any formal documentation of change.”
• In the same interview, she asserts that sharing these stories tends to be more effective on a small, local scale than via mass Internet distribution. “I prefer to focus on mechanisms for sharing stories with local audiences, where they have the potential to really make a difference — as tools for training and eduation, or prompts for community dialogue and discussion,” she says.