As someone who lives abroad, my life is told through a series of social media posts for friends and family back home. There are only so many hours in the day, so I’m not able to catch up with everyone regularly. When I started working with a small nonprofit supporting refugees, I was blown away by the support I received from my personal network. But when I traveled to Athens, Greece to work in the field for the first time, rather than words of encouragement from back home I was faced with disappointment that I wasn’t posting pictures from the trip.
People were excited about what I was doing and I was excited that they wanted to hear about my experience. We did have professional photographers with us who captured some of the moments for organizational purposes, but my friends and family were hungry for more. Where was the blog post? Where were the pictures I took?
When it comes to working with vulnerable groups, such as refugees, it is vital to be mindful about the consequences a small action, such as posting a picture online, can have. This is something I’ve had to stress repeatedly both personally and professionally. Working for the organization, we were constantly trying to strike the perfect balance of creating a personal connection that would drive donations while protecting the dignity of the people we were working with.
What harm can a single photo on a social media account do? We can never fully understand what people have been through or why they left home. Many of the people I met in Athens still have family in their home countries. Publicizing a person’s image or story in a way that makes them identifiable could put their loved ones at risk. This is a very real problem I was exposed to firsthand when one of our organization’s beneficiaries had a family member in Afghanistan attacked in response to something that was posted online.
The refugee camp we were working at in Athens had a strict no photography policy. Even if they didn’t have this policy, not taking pictures is simply the decent thing to do. Sometimes, people forget that refugee camps are actually where real people live–people who are not a tourist attraction–and no one wants a camera stuck in their face while they’re going about their day-to-day lives. As Forced Migration Review points out in its photo policy, people don’t want to be forever identifiable in a situation that highlights a low point in their lives. Would you want someone to come into your house, take a picture of you on your worst day, and then splash it around the internet?
While we’re at it, let’s talk about consent. Consent matters in all circumstances. As an organization, we championed the fact that we received informed consent from all the people that were photographed, but what does that really mean? You can tell people why you want to take their picture and what you plan to use it for, but unless you make it clear that countless people around the world could potentially see it for years to come, is it really informed? When it comes to this, it’s best to leave it to the professionals who are trained to capture the stories of displaced people in a culturally sensitive way.
Though privacy is a concern for all of us, violating it can have very grave consequences for those who have fled violence. In the UNHCR’s “Reporting on Refugees: Guidance By and For Journalists” document, a clear statement hammers this point home: “It’s important for editors, reporters, sub-editors and photographers to realise that, when we get it wrong, people suffer directly.” Simple negligence could hurt the people we were there to help.
I met the most incredible people working with refugees in Greece and I’m happy to share my experience, but only offline. The last thing I would want is to make life more difficult for people who have already been through so much. These lessons don’t only apply to refugees, but to anyone met while traveling. When it comes to protecting the privacy of other people, it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
