Vulnerable People
Who are the people that society has begun to call vulnerable
and where are they? Vulnerable is such a complex and overused word that when I
did the research for my class presentation on vulnerable people everyone one
and every text had a different definition.
Google defines being vulnerable as being susceptible to
physical or emotional attack or harm. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary describes
vulnerability as being easily hurt or harmed physically, mentally, or
emotionally and follows with open to attack, harm or damage. If these are
accurate definitions of vulnerability than are we not all at least a bit
vulnerable and if this is the case than who do journalists consider to be
vulnerable?
I decided to ask a few journalism students who they
considered to be vulnerable people. The answers were generally not all that
surprising. It started with the victims of a large tragedy and continued to
people such as veterans; one person did surprise me when she said victims of
divorce. Does this mean that journalists have perhaps a different view of who
is vulnerable or do journalists just treat everyone as vulnerable?
Although I may seemingly be asking more questions than
giving more answers, journalists hold a different code of ethics than those of
an every day doctor or mathematician. It is a journalist’s job to get news to
the people of the world and sometimes this takes huge ethical decisions between
when it is acceptable to get the story first and act later and vice versa.
Most journalists are not trained to help in situations that
they are put into. They are usually prepared for what they believe is coming,
but a lot of the time that is not even enough once they truly see how things
are in the field and this is where we find a bias.
People will often choose the vulnerable to be individuals
who have it worse than they could handle. The young girl that described divorce
as vulnerability had never been married and her parents had been married for
over 25 years. She explained how she saw divorce as something tragic and
alarmingly too common in our society.
In order to quickly summarize, I believe that vulnerability
comes down to the individual and their past, present perhaps even future
thoughts. In some bizarre way it even seems that being vulnerable is normal and
necessarily a bad thing, it just means that you are human.
Here are some additional site in which I got a better view of vulnerable people:
http://jessdenham.net/2013/03/10/journalists-interviewing-vulnerable-people/
http://socialmedia.kirklees.gov.uk/guidelines/children-young-people-and-vulnerable-adults/
C. Jakob LeMaistre
I don't like the idea of casting anyone as vulnerable. If we as a journalist decide if someone is vulnerable or not, we are being unfair to our subjects. I found the survey results offensive. According to the survey's results, people who are vulnerable include pregnant women, minorities, and people who are disabled. I think a good way to lose respect would be to treat individuals as if they are vulnerable. We need to be honest and ask the hard questions. On a personal level, anytime I've been through a tragedy I'd rather talk to the straight shooters, not the ones offering up their pity.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I don't agree with this approach at all. I'm still not even sure what "vulnerable" means in this context. As a journalist, I think there very few people who would qualify as vulnerable, and therefore, would require me to ask questions in a different way. Or not at all.
ReplyDeletePerhaps an accident victim hanging out of a broken car window. Maybe not the best time for an interview. A woman giving birth? Maybe she can tell me what that's like later. (Or maybe not? Who knows? If I set it up ahead of time? That would be amazing.) I think very young children or people with certain types of developmental disabilities might also require a certain tact.
Other than that, I strive not to treat anybody differently when it comes to telling stories. If they don't want to talk to me, then they can set those boundaries. I'm not there to be their friend. I'm there to learn, ask questions, and understand a story as best I can