Covering the Tsunami

In recent years, journalists have become more aware of the emotional aspects of the stories they cover, particularly in the aftermath of tragedy. Nowadays, says David Loyn, the BBC's developing world correspondent, "We get alongside people; we have sympathy with them; we empathise with them."

This approach has led to better coverage of tragedy and disaster, and it allows the audience to reach a fuller understanding of the experience of victims and survivors. But it can come at a cost to journalists. Loyn, who covered the tsunami aftermath in Indonesia, questions whether such emotional engagement is a good thing after all. "I would make a plea for disengaged journalism," he says. "We need to keep ourselves intact. We're faced with daily horror and a thousand dilemmas."

Speaking to a group of journalists, mental health professionals and aid workers during a recent discussion at the Frontline Club in London, Loyn described the scale of destruction he found in Aceh. "The BBC took over a house-which turned out to be a brothel, actually-in Aceh," Loyn said. "You saw Andrew North's pictures of the way that bodies were coming out of the mud"—photos taken by North, the BBC's Kabul correspondent, were shown before the Frontline discussion began—"One day as they were going out to the car, just before I arrived, they realised that there was a baby in the rubbish outside the front of the house. Now, what do you do with a dead baby if it's in the rubbish? As it turned out they left it to be burnt in the fire. Everybody in the house was seared by that experience."

The overwhelming number of people affected by the Tsunami meant that engaging personally with individual survivors was difficult. "I've never been anywhere like it," he said. "I've covered several earthquakes and it is easily the worst thing I've ever seen happen to a community anywhere. Nobody there was left untouched. Everybody you met had lost somebody or had had some experience during the Tsunami itself. Now all of us as individuals want to help the individual in the place that we are, and all of us do occasionally take the wounded soldier to the hospital or help an individual. But if you've got a city where there is that much effect, then actually remaining disengaged is quite a good thing. It's unprofessional to help everybody."

The advantage of "disengaged reporting," Loyn said, is that it allows "the story to tell itself." He described an experience reporting in Uganda last year: "I was reporting on the child soldiers being brought out of the bush in this dreadful war in Uganda. The sight of child soldiers fresh, as it were, from the bush coming in to a rehabilitation camp where they were greeted and welcomed by reforming child soldiers was too much for me. I had to go behind the barn and weep for a while. I would have been useless if I'd been weeping on television but sometimes you have to take it away and then come back and report the story."

A shoulder to cry on

Loyn noted a controversial report by BBC correspondent Ben Brown, who Loyn referred to as "the apotheosis of the disengaged reporter." In the report, Brown appeared on an Aceh beach, walking alongside a woman who had lost her husband and four children in the tsunami. As Brown spoke with her through an off-camera interpreter, she started to weep and put her head on Brown's shoulder. Brown, looking slightly uncomfortable, put his arm around her and carried on filming the segment. "Should he have carried on doing what he did?" Loyn asked, speaking at the Frontline Club. "Should he have pushed her off? Should he have not used the footage afterwards?"

"I'd argue that I like to see that engagement," CNN's Nick Wrenn said. "The Ben Brown incident really brought it home to me—just the raw emotion of it. And it is an emotional experience, and I think sometimes you have to engage. To me that was one of the most powerful packages that I saw out of all the broadcasters."

Laura Conrad, of Save the Children, also approved of Brown's report. "You saw Ben Brown's piece then and the woman was clearly distressed," Conrad said. "But she had some understanding of who Ben Brown was and what she was asking him for."

However, Conrad noted that what is okay for adults is not necessarily appropriate for children. "At one point, with Ben Brown and with another BBC World Service radio reporter, I did have to step in as they were continually pressing children on what their experiences of the Tsunami was," she said. "So I'm all for engagement, I'm all for showing the distress, that's really important, but there are limits. And for children there has to be really appropriate engagement."

Terrible scenes

"Before the Tsunami, we knew quite a lot of reporters in Banda Aceh, particularly those who were helping us cover the Separatist Movement there," said Menuk Suwondo, the head of BBC Indonesian Service. "So when the Tsunami happened, we didn't know the magnitude of the disaster, and our first instinct was trying to get hold of those people. But of course, until the fourth day we didn't realise that, actually, none of them were alive. I've never experienced covering something so bad that so affected the whole team."

Priyath Liyanage, head of the BBC Sinhala section, was in Colombo, Sri Lanka, when the tsunami hit: "I was totally in shock and didn't do much work because we were looking for people we knew." Liyanage spoke about the story of "Baby 81." "It is a classic example of the facts not getting in the way of the good story because—there's no story at all," Liyanage said. "The Baby 81 story was a non-story right from the beginning. But what happened was that only one couple, who were the parents, actually came up to take the baby as parents. All the other couples offered to look after the baby because it was such a wonderful lucky baby, so they wanted to have him.

"But one of the agencies got the story, saying eight couples are claiming the baby as its biological parents. Because of the media pressure, the DNA was ordered by the judge who, before that, had actually handed the baby to the couple. But because of the media frenzy it became a big world story, nobody wanted to know the truth. Even within the BBC we were trying to get the story right saying, 'Well, this is what happened but,' . it was such a good story, why spoil it? That was the attitude; that happens all the time. And that is a real tragedy for journalism. I think it's a really good example for journalism training. Everybody knew, journalists on the ground, we knew by the second day that the story was a non-story but nobody wanted to hear anything."

Jonathan Steele, of The Guardian, was also in Sri Lanka—on vacation visiting family—when the tsunami struck. "On the second day, the morning after, I was in a little place called Panadura where the mortuary of the hospital was completely overcome and they only had refrigerators for about eight bodies and the other bodies were just lying on the grass," Steele said. "And you had these terrible scenes where people were coming either knowing that their child, or husband or wife was there but they hadn't yet seen them because the bodies had been swept away. They'd just been told that the bodies had been brought to the mortuary and they had to come and identify them and the Police were sitting there and very correctly producing death certificates and so on.

"Or, in some cases people were coming not knowing for sure whether their loved one might be lying there. They suddenly get the shock of discovering that, yes indeed, they are there. It was really quite a traumatic—if I can use that word—experience to be in that small group of people, perhaps a hundred people and there were about 40 bodies lying there and people would come and then go and so on."

'Get back to normal!'

In the early days and weeks after a disaster such as the tsunami, formal psychological interventions with survivors are less valuable than attending to basic physical needs. Bill Yule, a clinical psychologist who traveled to Sri Lanka after the tsunami with the UK-Sri Lanka Trauma Group, said that, when dealing with the trauma of children, instead of trauma counseling (which carries the risk of retraumatizing the children), the best advice is: "Get back to normal! Get the schools up and running as soon as possible even if that meant not in the school buildings; even if that meant without much by the way of equipment."

Yule also emphasized "the need is for accurate information and then needing to coordinate the offers of help"—needs that the news media can help meet. He noted that Sri Lanka did not have a national plan to deal with a disaster of that scale. "I wish they'd read the Lancet on the fourth of December, just a few weeks beforehand," Yule said. "A marvellous chapter there by R.F. Mollica and colleagues on Mental Health in Complex Emergencies, advising what was needed to be done; what they should have on the shelf ready to put into action, what training was needed. It wasn't there so what you had were a small number of highly qualified mental health professionals used to dealing in either drug therapy or individual detailed therapy, faced with thousands of people and frankly, not skilled and not knowing what to do."

Transcript of the Frontline Discussion

Mark Brayne, Dart Centre:

A very warm welcome to you all. Thank you for coming in such impressive numbers. We're particularly delighted to have so many from both journalism and the mental health area and also one or two colleagues from aid agencies who have interesting things to share with journalists ...

David Loyn, BBC developing world correspondent:

... Engage. I want to talk a little bit about asking some questions about how we do what we do. I use that word because we all like the sound of engaging. We as human beings engage with each other. We as journalists go to places we want to meet people. It brings with it all kinds of emotionally literate words and we all like to think we're emotionally literate.

Part of Dart's work, I think, and part of the reason why Dart is working and the need for Dart is there, is that there are a lot more people in journalism nowadays who do want to see stories in a way as human beings rather than in previous years.

There's the famous Martin Bell (former BBC correspondent) line, 'I don't need trauma counselling. I can just go to the bar with the soldiers after the war.' But nowadays I think we all need to engage with things and it sounds nice and it's got all sorts of good things. We get alongside people, we have sympathy with them, we empathise with them. But I wonder whether that's right. The opposite feels rather cold, disengaging from situations. But I would make a plea for disengaged journalism. We need to keep ourselves intact. We're faced with daily horror and a thousand dilemmas.

The BBC took over a house—which turned out to be a brothel, actually—in Aceh. One day as people were coming over—you saw Andrew North's pictures of the way that bodies were coming out of the mud—one day as they were going out to the car, just before I arrived, they realised that there was a baby in the rubbish outside the front of the house. Now, what do you do with a dead baby if it's in the rubbish? As it turned out they left it to be burnt in the fire. Everybody in the house was seared by that experience.

Aceh was an immensely stark place, as we've heard from Ben Brown's report; half of the town had gone. I've never been anywhere like it. I've covered several earthquakes and it is easily the worst thing I've ever seen happen to a community anywhere. Nobody there was left untouched. Everybody you met had lost somebody or had had some experience during the Tsunami itself. Now all of us as individuals want to help the individual in the place that we are, and all of us do occasionally take the wounded soldier to the hospital or help an individual. But if you've got a city where there is that much effect, then actually remaining disengaged is quite a good thing. It's unprofessional to help everybody.

The worst kind of aid workers are aid workers who try and help individuals. It's not what we're there for. At the end of the day, the journalists who were there, managed to harness the largest ever humanitarian response in the history of humanitarian responses. So that's what we were there for. It was a very simple one for people to give money to after Christmas. There was no war, there was no conflict, there were none of the usual things that people say, 'Well, I'm not going to give money to Dafur because obviously it's another caused conflict', 'Why doesn't the international community get involved,' 'Why are we left with sorting out Africa's problems again?'

The Tsunami was quite different. The graphic nature of the images and the high quality of the reporting—Sky News in particular, I think were outstanding, the BBC were good, some newspaper reporting was fantastic—led to that unprecedented response from this country and this country led the world. Our business is to tell the story, to find out what's going on and people can react as they will. Now I have enormous respect for cameramen and reporters who put their kit down at the end of the day and then go back and help the family. That's happened in a number of conflicts that I've been in. But not while you're actually working.

So I'm rather a fan of disengaged reporting. Ben Brown is the apotheosis of the disengaged reporter—and I admire that in many ways. There are many qualities to it: you remain detached, cool, professional, disengaged. All of these things allow the story to tell itself. Actually Ben Brown's piece—a number of aid workers had seen Ben's piece with the woman weeping on his shoulder. It was quite a controversy among them. Should he really have let it happen? Should he have done what he did? Or should he just have hugged her and put the camera down? I think the consensus among aid workers who were there, and there are some in this room, was that perhaps Ben should have just put the microphone down and put the camera down and hugged her and not broadcast the confrontation between them, because it put him out of his role as an actor, as a guide, as somebody who's guiding people through the situation, and into his role, suddenly, as a human being. And he felt quite uncomfortable doing it.

He wrote quite a moving piece in the newspaper about his discomfort in that situation. The discomfort was because the professional guide [Ben Brown], who was actually acting—he was doing a piece to camera on the beach in his pressed chinos—finds suddenly there's this woman weeping on his shoulder. It was a difficult dilemma for him. Should he have carried on doing what he did? Should he have pushed her off? Should he have not used the footage afterwards? I think that's a question we could raise.

Very swiftly, moving on. Back to 'engaging.' I just wanted to open some thoughts up about engaging in things. Just thinking about this word—and obviously we always engage brain before engaging mouth—that's important. We engage with our emotions or our soul or our heart and I think the business of this is a heart and soul business not a head business. Sometimes I am overcome in places where I am, with the situation. The last time I was in tears was in Africa last year in Uganda. I was reporting on the child soldiers being brought out of the bush in this dreadful war in Uganda. The sight of child soldiers fresh, as it were, from the bush coming in to a rehabilitation camp where they were greeted and welcomed by reforming child soldiers was too much for me. I had to go behind the barn and weep for a while. I would have been useless if I'd been weeping on television but sometimes you have to take it away and then come back and report the story.

The other thing that we do, the other 'engagement' word. The military talk about engaging with the enemy; when you engage with the enemy you're shooting at them and they're shooting at you so people get hurt. So I wonder whether engagement necessarily means that you do get hurt and that might have some psychological value.

The final engagement of value, of course, is engaging with yourself. It is incredibly easy to lose touch with your own humanity in these places. You are jet-lagged, away from home, under enormous pressure to deliver. Worrying in Aceh whether the water you're showering in has human remains in it; worrying whether the water you're cleaning your teeth with—the basic elements of life are suddenly right up on the front. If you walk out at night, are you going to be bitten by a mosquito, which might carry dengue fever? You're working alongside a makeshift team. Paul Mongey who's at the back of the room, was with me as a cameraman—he was with me in Bam last year—very good in these situations. But you're probably up too late at night, probably smoking and drinking too much and you end up, therefore, asking questions like the famous, 'Has anyone here been raped and speaks English?' You end up losing your own humanity.

... It's not all bad. There are extraordinary, good human stories in these situations; extraordinary examples of generosity. In among all the bodies in a refugee camp, I found a family who'd lost a baby. They saw a teenage girl walking into the refugee camp one day with a small baby in her arms and brought her into their tent and she was living with them as a family. Now to see that grandfather with that baby was one of the most moving and profound things that I saw in my time in Aceh.

Mark Brayne:

... Bill Yule, clinical psychologist, you've been working in this field since [the sinking of] The Herald of Free Enterprise [in 1987] and particularly with children. Just before you start I want to quote Frank Ochberg the founder of the Dart Centre in the States, a psychiatrist of some renown. He's just been in Sri Lanka and sent me an e-mail the other day, saying, 'The initial impact was, as we all learnt, terrifying. A month later the progress is remarkable. This culture, particularly the fishermen in relatively poor coastal residences, is not showing signs of mental illness. Most are Buddhists seeking homes and fishing boats, and a return to normalcy. Life in the camps wouldn't suit me but appears to be well tolerated by them. I saw grief but little depression and no PTSD.' Frank was quite surprised to find that. Bill?

Bill Yule:

... Well, what was I doing out there a couple of weeks ago? For the last eight years I've belonged to a group that is based around the Institute of Psychiatry where we have a lot of expatriate Sri Lankan mental health workers. Eight years ago we formed the UK-Sri Lanka trauma group to try to raise awareness about the trauma that was caused by the civil war. So we've all been going out there, back and forth in those eight years. I feel I've got a little bit more credibility and so on than just a Tsunami tourist of whom there are far too many.

When I saw it on Boxing Day it was just overwhelming. In the early dispatches that we saw on television it wasn't quite clear how bad it was, and then it got worse and worse. About ten o'clock that night I was ringing round from my parents-in-law's house in Suffolk trying to find out what was going on and what we should be doing. A couple of days later those of us from the executive group met in London, having been asked by our colleagues in Colombo to give the government there some quick advice. They were wanting simple dos and don'ts; they were unprepared.

So the sorts of things that we advised them initially was: it was perfectly normal for people to be upset. There were a large number of deaths; it was perfectly normal for people to be grieving in a variety of ways given the range of religions in Sri Lanka and they should be supported through that. But, in order to achieve normalcy and so on with the kids—get back to normal! Get the schools up and running as soon as possible even if that meant not in the school buildings; even if that meant without much by the way of equipment. Indeed, that's what they tried to do.

The other one, which was informed by what our American cousins keep calling 9/11 was, I'm afraid, not to let other kids keep watching your output on the television screen without being properly supervised. We know from research studies that in America, and indeed in the UK, the kids who had unsupervised access to television kept watching those planes flying into the towers and they became very distressed and needed a lot of help. So we warned in Sri Lanka, 'don't let kids have access to television'. I don't know yet what the outcome was other than one or two individual cases we met when I was out in Colombo, where indeed some kids did watch and got terribly upset and worried.

I suppose the other thing we spoke about was the need for accurate information as quickly as possible. In any disaster rumour gets going and it's vital that people understand what's happening. Now that went, in my view, a bit too far because about the second week the Minister of Education said, 'Right, we should include teaching about Tsunamis in schools.' So straight off they start teaching about bloody Tsunamis. But here you are trying to get the kids to understand that it's not going to happen and there are the rumours that there's another one coming in five minutes. All over the area there were—not quite riots but—people panicking, and here they are starting teaching it in schools. So they got the timing a wee bit wrong.

But the need is for accurate information and then needing to coordinate the offers of help. Sri Lanka, like most of those other countries affected, did not have a national plan to deal with disaster ready to go rolling. I wish they'd read the Lancet on the fourth of December, just a few weeks beforehand. A marvellous chapter there by R.F. Mollica and colleagues on Mental Health in Complex Emergencies, advising what was needed to be done; what they should have on the shelf ready to put into action, what training was needed. It wasn't there so what you had were a small number of highly qualified mental health professionals used to dealing in either drug therapy or individual detailed therapy, faced with thousands of people and frankly, not skilled and not knowing what to do.

So there was this big debate going on between intensive individual works versus psychosocial work to reach thousands. On the 1st of January, this Scot did something that was totally culturally unknown: I went to a meeting and I stayed sober for it. This was a meeting at the High Commission here in London and the poor Commissioner there was absolutely overburdened with offers of help. The Commission was packed from floor to ceiling—I wish someone had taken a photograph of it—with boxes of pots and pans. The great thing about these things, partly due to all of you, is that there is altruism left in this world but it's altruism that was misplaced. I remember one local BBC programme, which was looking at some Tamils in one part of London, and they were bewailing the fact that they'd collected all these goodies but how do they get them out there?

What the High Commissioner was pointing out was that after Sri Lankan Airlines had flown things out for free for the first few days it was costing something like six hundred pounds a ton and this was for things that were perfectly easily available in Sri Lanka. If they'd sent the money they could have been bought there and helped the local economy.

Instead what happens is there's a lot of disgruntlement, a lot of argument and a little bit of politicking about. In this case, the Tamils not getting the support they needed, and so on. You just have to be careful. The fact that something like this happens doesn't automatically cure the old wounds.

So again, to my own impressions. It wasn't until a couple of days before I was asked to go out to Sri Lanka that I was aware—and this was a journalist who wrote in the Independent about the phenomenon -of the two waves. The screens were full of both professional and amateur videos showing theses hellish waves breaking over. There were five people in Sri Lanka clinging on to a bus and then being drowned and . as if that was all that was happening. But of course, what I now know is that there was, if you like, a warning wave which then receded and people saw—in Colombo Bay they saw—World War Two ships that had been sunk there, that they hadn't seen for years. They saw fish and reefs and so on and a lot of people rushed down to the beach to see this amazing phenomenon, Then the big one came twenty minutes later and that was that.

I wasn't aware of that. I wasn't aware that it was the first three to five hundred metres from the beach that were devastated and the rest of the infrastructure was there. So the people who were rushing in having seen things on their television screen, thinking that everyone had gone and they were the saviours and so on, were causing all sorts of chaos because they weren't slotting in to anything.

We saw yesterday the two US ex-presidents in Sri Lanka being guided around. There they were visiting a child trauma counselling session—fantastic television because we saw all these lovely kiddies' drawings. The trouble is not only is there limited evidence that that actually helps the kids, as opposed to re-traumatising them, we've actually got evidence from our work in Mostar that it does no good whatsoever. There are better things to do. That, of course, has got the seal of approval now and I do worry. So the whole issue of what images, and what questions, and what to camera, might help, and what is traumatising, is something that really, I hope, we'll be able to talk about.

Mark Brayne:

... Let's open this out now to questions, observations, comments and experiences focusing first of all if we can, for the next twenty-five minutes or so, on the journalism.

Bill has raised some questions about the story that was reported and how well that was reported in terms of generating the effort and the support. Also I just wonder about the reporting of the trauma and the support and the interventions; how much do journalists understand, or how little do journalists understand what it is that they're witnessing?

Jonathan Steele, you were out there, you were caught there; you were in Sri Lanka when it happened. How did you experience the journalism of it?

Jonathan Steele:

I work for the Guardian. It was a very odd thing because I was in Sri Lanka on holiday visiting family and so I was on the scene earlier than many other people and it raised the whole issue of TV cameras or print? It's not an issue, I think, you've discussed too much in the whole issue of intrusiveness. I mean, how intrusive is a TV camera?

If it weren't for the images, which you rightly pointed out, David, there wouldn't have been all this money coming forward, so, that was great. On the other hand, on the ground, TV cameras can be extremely intrusive and really quite unpleasant for people. I was struck by this because I suddenly realised when I was there on the first evening after it happened and the second day and the third day that, almost for the first time in my life, I was on a major story where there weren't any TV cameras. It was quite unusual to be in this enormous event and there were no TV people. And what I mean by that is, the kind of TV people who are often really, to be crude about it, quite brutal, quite cold, very disengaged; too disengaged, tramping over people pushing them aside to get the best shot and all that kind of thing.

So for the consumer of the images it was terrific because they do have these close-ups of grieving people and people desperately hunting through rubble to see if their family member is there and so on. But when the camera is actually doing that to the person it really can be quite difficult and different. So I found that my thing was to try and become invisible. I know that's completely stupid because I look quite different from anybody else but on the second day, the morning after, I was in a little place called Panadura where the mortuary of the hospital was completely overcome and they only had refrigerators for about eight bodies and the other bodies were just lying on the grass. And you had these terrible scenes where people were coming either knowing that their child, or husband or wife was there but they hadn't yet seen them because the bodies had been swept away. They'd just been told that the bodies had been brought to the mortuary and they had to come and identify them and the Police were sitting there and very correctly producing death certificates and so on.

Or in some cases people were coming not knowing for sure whether their loved one might be lying there. They suddenly get the shock of discovering that, yes indeed, they are there. It was really quite a traumatic—if I can use that word—experience to be in that small group of people, perhaps a hundred people and there were about 40 bodies lying there and people would come and then go and so on.

But I found I didn't want to get close-ups. I just wanted to stand in the crowd at the back and quietly take in the mood and the atmosphere and people's emotions and be as unobtrusive as possible. And I felt I could do that and I didn't feel any antagonism towards potential colleagues who might have been there. I suddenly realised that what was extraordinary about this event was the sound— because it was basically a silent thing, as you can imagine. People not sure what they were going to see, and what they did see was pretty grim so there was this silence and then every so often somebody would see a dead loved one and they'd break out into a great shriek and a wail and sobbing and so on.

And then the most incredible sound was when there was a young couple trying to find their two-year old daughter. She had been put into the refrigerated cabinet and so you got the noise of the thing being opened, like a giant refrigerator—you know the noise your refrigerator makes when you shut it, a kind of rubbery clunk—and the sight of this couple coming forward very hesitantly. The door being opened, seeing the little girl dead and then the shriek and the wail and then this 'clunk' as the door shuts as they were led away. It was all about sound; silence and sound and I'm not sure that TV could have captured that.

David Loyn:

Well, isn't radio a wonderful medium? That's a characteristically moving account, Jonathan, and all I can say is that yes, television changes the events it records. All of us, (it happened to me in Aceh), have been in situations where people have said, 'Our misery is only validated by this experience of being on the BBC,' or whatever. I paraphrase horribly, but there is sometimes a validation that is psychologically valuable. There are people here who are far more qualified than me might tell me that I'm wrong, particularly in wars. If a misery happens and we put it on television, then they didn't die in vain. Now, clearly there's a slightly different dynamic here—major international disaster—but I go back to my first point that they wouldn't have new roads if we hadn't been there.

I absolutely hear you and I think there are other ways of telling the story . and online . and it sounds like a wonderful radio event the way you describe it.

Mark Brayne:

Can I come to Paul Mongey, David's cameraman mentioned earlier? Paul, this question of the images and intrusiveness. You've covered a lot of pretty distressing stories in your time—how did you experience this?

Paul Mongey:

Well I found that in a twelve-month period it started off with covering Bam and ended up with a month in Iraq covering bombs and other things like that, ending up with the Tsunami. When we went in we were the second crew to go in and to follow up stories. Not mass bodies or major issues, just families, find people who are still looking, people who were re-building. We didn't see a lot of horrific things. Every day there were a thousand bodies found; the smell was horrible—it was thirty degrees Celsius—it was difficult to work in.

But a few months before that I was working in Moscow and Beslan happened. Myself and Damian Grammaticus, the correspondent, went down on Day One to Beslan. On the plane going down we met a father who was working in Moscow and his kids were in school, staying with their grandparents and he said, 'Yes, come along, follow us.' So we get in the car and drive through the Caucasus at one o'clock in the morning with the usual road blocks and other issues to get there and they were kind enough to put us up. A friend of the family moved out and we took it over. It became the BBC house with eight of us sharing a room and everything that entails.

And following the people around and following the stories. When you're there it's very difficult to understand how people see it back home—the ten o'clock piece; two and a half, three minutes of what's taken place that day. And the day was going on and we were hearing rumours from Moscow saying, 'No, they will not storm,' 'No, there will not be any problems, we will not do another theatre siege, everything is safe.' And the locals tended to believe that, I think. And what we found when we followed different people was that they were all very worried that a storming would take place and they would lose their children; they had no control.

Outside, around the school we had perimeters of Russian Special Forces, Russian Police, local police, local militia and there didn't seem to be an established command and control between everybody. We went to interview a family whose kids were released the day before and they were across town and we went over to them and knocked on the door and the FSB—the local KGB—answered the door and basically told us to go away; that they were talking to them, that there would be no chance that we could talk. So we figured we'd come back in four or five hours time, maybe, and we could follow the happy story of some kids getting out. As we turned back to where the BBC house was, just across the street from the community centre, all the commotion broke out.

The first explosion happened, people started screaming, old women pass you by—right in your face. Your first impression is to pick up your camera and news gather what's taking place in front of you. My correspondent's reaction was to run that way towards the school; my reaction was, 'No, no, we go this way and get our flak jackets and helmets before we start running to where all the noise is coming from.' In a situation like that everyone runs away from the noise; news gatherers run towards it.

In this situation, everyone was running towards the noise—parents, fathers with their own weapons wearing little handkerchiefs on their sleeves but yet dressed in khaki, were running towards this noise and the barriers and borders were breaking down. As you were running along, Damian and other correspondents were on mobile phones doing live reports to BBC World Service or Sky News. There's no control and there's commotion and you're getting what you can as you get to the point and as you get closer and closer—over four hours in this heat—we were feeding tapes back. You're looking out for yourself and you're looking out for your colleagues and you're watching where you're going and you're grabbing what you can but in the back of my mind I kept thinking, 'I've got no water, I'm running out of water,' and it's hot and it's difficult and you don't know how far you're going to go and whether you'll get stuck in the next location you go to.

We made our way up to a T-junction, a main road that led into the school area. I remember the firemen were filling up because the school was on fire and the buildings were on fire and they were filling up their fire truck under fire. Every so often you'd feel the whistle of the odd bullet go over your head and because there was commotion we didn't know if it was a father who was just mis-shooting or whether it was the special forces. It was coming through the school and down the lane and it was just a difficult situation with no control. We were outside a main gate where they were shepherding out all the kids. They were all running out carrying them on stretchers and they were just making this pile in the corner with blankets and covers, of children and school teachers that didn't make it and people were just going up and picking up and looking.

But I think the main problem we had at the end of the day, when we went back to cutting the story, was they said, 'Can you go to the school and get some families; get some reaction?' And you know as you're sitting in the car that you're going to go to a highly emotional, fired up environment. And we got there and there some fifty, sixty families in a small room—about a quarter of the size of this room—and they said, through my translator, 'You have to film what's in the room.' There were fifteen dead children in a variety of situations. I said, 'I can't film that; it wouldn't be shown, it wouldn't be fair, I can't do it.' After a lot of negotiation they got heated and into arguments and I said, 'OK. I will film it but it will never get shown.' I went towards it and a soldier came up with a gun; 'no filming!' The crowd got very angry and there was a bit of a minor fight and a bit of thumping and we left.

Mark Brayne:

Very briefly Paul, I wonder how that compares with your experience in the Tsunami where it was all over and you were dealing purely with the immediacy of the grief; not the disaster itself but the aftermath?

Paul Mongey:

The grief seemed much less in Aceh, two and a half weeks after. Especially when Eid passed. I think when Eid passed, we found this huge change in people's attitude and a psychology of just getting on with life.

David Loyn:

Yes, I think Eid was a real landmark. The thing that really struck me, a week before that when that school opened, there were only five children in every class that were still alive. Classes of thirty or forty before and these parents were meeting each other and saying, 'God, I didn't know you were still alive.' Everybody you spoke to would suddenly burst into tears; that was three weeks on. Do you remember the headmaster? We interviewed the headmaster and he was just tearing up all the way through the interview; the emotion was very raw even still.

Mark Brayne:

On the journalism, would anyone else like to come in? Nick Wrenn, from CNN.

Nick Wren:

Just a couple of quick points. I think it's very easy to beat up on TV news. I was the suit stuck back in London doing the editing but talking to the guy who headed up our coverage in Aceh pretty much from the 27th. He was there about a month, he came back and said he couldn't think of one incident when people had actually come up and said, 'This is intrusive. Go away!' And I think to me that was a contrast between that situation and what I'd heard from Beslan, where there were issues of, 'Get the camera away! Get the camera away!'

A quick point about emotions and the way that the journalism is expressing the story and the Ben Brown issue. I'd argue that I like to see that engagement. The Ben Brown incident really brought it home to me just the raw emotion of it. And it is an emotional experience, and I think sometimes you have to engage. To me that was one of the most powerful packages that I saw out of all the broadcasters.

A final point was about our friends Bush Senior and Clinton. I think it would be wrong to blame TV journalism, or even the ex-Presidents for that. They're damned if they do and they're damned if they don't. If they'd stayed away they would have taken flak. The fact is, that's what they were asked to do and that's what they did and I think it's legitimate to cover that.

Mark Brayne:

Martyn Broughton from Medicine Sans Frontieres.

Martyn Broughton:

I just thought that one of the interesting things we hadn't mentioned yet was the relationship with the audience. Because journalism is always about the reader or the watcher. In this particular disaster I think that the connection between the emotion that was being almost demanded by the viewers and the readers back home and the response of the journalism in the field was quite noticeable. It was more than a permission; it was a requirement that the journalists should get that extra dimension of feeling, and an exposure of what people had been through in the disaster, so that people at home could vicariously experience it themselves. I think a lot of the journalism was clearly informed by this wish to make a difference for the people they were reporting on so that something could be done, because people at home were giving money as a result of the journalism. So it was a kind of closed circle that there was a wish for it to be shown and exposed and the journalists were responding to that.

Now I'm not sure that that was altogether a good thing. Obviously, many of the motives involved were good. But do people think that that was something that is going to be pursued in other circumstances? I think in many ways the reporting, the way the whole story played out in public is in many ways less complicated morally than many other circumstances where people have been hurt. So there was a kind of clean tale about what has happened to very obvious victims; an uncomplicated story, there. So in that sense there was a very direct emotional line as well.

But is that what journalists should have been doing? So much involved in the story that they're wanting to show the emotion and to have that effect? So it's a very committed kind of journalism.

Mark Brayne:

Just a reminder—at the BBC, one of the two sets of tapes that I use for training or discussion around this issue is the coverage of Dunblane. Kate Adie's coverage and the ITV coverage, on that same night. One very emotional, one very dry and it's a discussion that has been around for some time. Laura Conrad of Save the Children.

Laura Conrad:

... I was out just a couple of days after the Tsunami in Sri Lanka initially and then over to Banda Aceh and worked with Ben Brown and David. David was as professional as always and I did find myself, quite often, turning into a policewoman because the intrusion for children is multiplied. You saw Ben Brown's piece then and the woman was clearly distressed. But she had some understanding of who Ben Brown was and what she was asking him for. At one point, with Ben Brown and with another BBC World Service radio reporter, I did have to step in as they were continually pressing children on what their experiences of the Tsunami was. So I'm all for engagement, I'm all for showing the distress, that's really important but there are limits. And for children there has to be really appropriate engagement.

The other thing I just wanted to touch on was that there were actually more print journalists than broadcast. But, unless a child was orphaned, they weren't really interested. Being orphaned in the Tsunami is clearly very traumatic; losing a parent and living through the Tsunami is also very traumatic. But, for some, and for me, unless you were a child who had lost both parents and your house and you didn't know where any of your relatives were any more, then you weren't really valid material for the media. Which was a shame. But on the whole they were thoroughly professional journalists all along the way. Those were just my couple of points.

Stuart Turner:

Hi! I'm a psychiatrist involved with disasters for two decades probably. I suppose the issue that I was thinking about and reflecting on as you were talking, particularly in the first presentation, was the change that there has been in disaster reporting over the last two decades, as I've seen it. In the 1980s, if I asked questions it was the job of trying to explain individual emotions in a way that could be understood. Now what I find is that those individual emotions are being explained to me and what I'm doing is saying, 'Just a minute!' Surely the priority is to make sure there's enough money for people and that we support the institutions that Bill was talking about. And I think that's quite a big shift. That the shift has been towards the direct engagement with emotion—I'm not sure that's always the most helpful thing to do. Clearly it can be if it helps the audience give money but I remember in one interview being asked about the value of painting pictures and being very unsure that this was the starting question of an interview. Whereas perhaps there were some bigger issues like how to resource the disaster response that should be dealt with.

David Loyn:

Can I just answer that very quickly? Can I just make the point that it is an absolute sea change. Just to confirm that, if you look at Michael Burke's famous Ethiopia Famine report that I did recently; a twenty-years-on anniversary report in the same village, he doesn't name any of the individuals he talks to. There aren't any individuals, really. It's only several months later that they picked up some people from there and in fact CBS found the first person who was then named, from the famous Ethiopian famine. The whole language of reporting these things has changed. I just go back to my point in the beginning though, is that the engagement is with people's emotion on the ground and I'd just question how much of our engagement, how much we are asked. I thought Andrew Harding was outstanding in this. He looked haggard—it was three o'clock in the morning when he was doing his live piece and it was on the six o'clock news in London—and he had a real feel for just giving the right emotion. All of that 'how I feel' is, I think, a danger.

Stuart Turner:

It seems to me that the risk is that you over-engage. And it may be that it's not a choice between engagement and disengagement. But you've got to think of the possibility of over-engagement with those emotions and the way you portray them. Emotions—I'm going to sell emotions to anybody, they're important but I've got to say there are other issues as well and I think that's the point I was trying to make.

Mark Brayne:

Just before we come to Sarah Davis from the Red Cross and colleagues, I want to turn to Priyath Liyanage, head of the BBC Sinhala section. Also Menuk Suwondo, head of BBC Indonesian Service. Between you, you run the Sinhala and the Indonesian Services at the World Service. Particularly in Indonesia, many of your journalistic colleagues on the ground were experiencing extreme personal loss. Many journalists were killed as well as family lost. Priyath, first to you and then can we get a mic over to Menuk?

Priyath Liyanage:

Yes, when the Tsunami happened I was in Colombo, although I was totally in shock and didn't do much work because we were looking for people we knew. And about these babies and orphans, that was mentioned just now, a classic story was the Baby 81 story that everybody knows. It is a classic example of the facts not getting in the way of the good story because—there's no story at all. The Baby 81 story was a non-story right from the beginning. But what happened was that only one couple, who were the parents, actually came up to take the baby as parents. All the other couples offered to look after the baby because it was such a wonderful lucky baby, so they wanted to have him.

But one of the agencies got the story, saying eight couples are claiming the baby as its biological parents. Because of the media pressure the DNA was ordered by the judge who, before that, had actually handed the baby to the couple. But because of the media frenzy it became a big world story, nobody wanted to know the truth. Even within the BBC we were trying to get the story right saying, 'Well, this is what happened but,' . it was such a good story, why spoil it? That was the attitude; that happens all the time. And that is a real tragedy for journalism. I think it's a really good example for journalism training. Everybody knew, journalists on the ground, we knew by the second day that the story was a non-story but nobody wanted to hear anything.

And there's another thing I experienced. This post-Tsunami scenario, I was going through some of the stuff that was filmed in Sri Lanka recently. I don't even know the colleagues who had done it, I was just helping out. The tapes arrived by courier for me to check the translations. I was going through it and working till about three o'clock in the morning just trying to see the rushes for a documentary about the Tsunami. And there's this guy who's telling the story of how he lost most members of his family and he saw his mother floating by and he never saw her again. His sister he lost, and he was telling this story about twenty different times because either he was not in the sun, the camera angle was not good, etc. And the translator was also at fault for not conveying the emotion of this man to the crew because he obviously didn't speak English and he couldn't convey it. At times he was tearful and the British crew was asking him if he was okay but the translator wasn't really conveying that. He was going through what I thought was real trauma since I understand the language. I know where he comes from and I recognized the community.

We need to get the story right; we need to show it. In the finished film we'll see about two minutes of his clip saying what happened to his family but he was being filmed for about two hours. He was walking around, being led around and saying the same thing over and over again. Then they asked him, 'What do you feel about losing your mother and your sister?' And he said, 'Well, I lost my mother,' and they said, 'Is it a really bad loss for you?' So, we have to get the story, we have to do it but I don't know if anybody has an answer for that.

Watching the Sri Lankan coverage—this had happened in the morning, nobody knew and we were driving to the beach and people stopped us and said,' Go back! Don't go there!' and then watching TV—what they did was just put footage. There was no commentary, no context to it; just showing footage, you know, houses being destroyed etc because I think for the first two days, nobody knew what to do. Nobody was interviewing anybody, nobody was being intrusive. In a way I found it very disturbing watching over and over again, like rushes, but on TV. Probably the TV crews didn't know what to do either.

But then everybody was traumatised. Ten per cent of the population was affected by it in one way or the other. Everybody knew someone who had lost someone and it is the first time something like that has happened in that country. And the latest scenario is people don't want anybody coming to talk to them any more. Now they call them the 'Laptop brigade' in Colombo—these people from the West with laptops coming around asking questions about how their child died. They had told it a hundred times and some of them claimed to be counselling, some of them claimed to be journalists, some of them claimed to be aid workers and there's a whole carnival atmosphere. In some areas you can't get accommodation, you can't get any food. The price of food and accommodation has gone up three times.

I was talking to one of my friends who is working for an international aid organisation and she was saying twenty seven different divisions of her organisation are in Sri Lanka and none of them are talking to each other. They don't know what the hell is going on. So, there is a story about that that somebody should do. It's madness because it's not happening in India and other places like that because they were very cautious about getting help from outside and Sri Lanka is a real story that's going on at the moment. The Baby 81 story is a great example of the madness after the Tsunami ...

Menuk Suwondo:

... Before the Tsunami we knew quite a lot of reporters in Banda Aceh, particularly those who were helping us cover the Separatist Movement there. So when the Tsunami happened we didn't know the magnitude of the disaster and our first instinct was trying to get hold of those people. But of course, until the fourth day we didn't realise that actually, none of them were alive. I've never experienced covering something so bad that so affected the whole team.

I wasn't in Aceh myself but I did cover a similar thing in Eastern India quite a few years ago, a Tsunami as well. But is it the scale of the disaster this time. You knew everyone was affected and my colleagues were so traumatised, especially the fact that they could put faces on those numbers. It's not just two or three hundred thousand died, they knew these people. When we sent our reporters there, it was also difficult for them to separate themselves from what they were reporting. Yes they do report professionally, they tell the story, what is happening, what they see. But then at the end of the day they feel there is something they haven't told that bothers them all night. That is something only they could tell us.

For example, one of my reporters there went to Aceh the day after the Tsunami struck. He went to a refugee camp—not a refugee camp but there were people gathering there—and he was surrounded by a bunch of children who asked him where they can find their parents. He was a young parent with a three year-old girl at home and that bothered him a lot so that a week after in Aceh, he asked, 'Can I have a break?' 'Yes, you can have a break.' So we give him a break and somebody else took over. But when the next journalist came back, he had the same thing.

You know, for these people, it wasn't the first time they cover a thing like that. We send them to Iraq, we send them to other disaster places. Probably they're not as experienced as Ben Brown perhaps. But for me it's how to deal with your reporters who came back from disasters or war with that kind of feelings. How can we support them in order to do their job but at the same time, take into consideration their well-being?

Mark Brayne:

Which is very much what the Dart Centre and I are about; seeking to shift the journalistic culture to one that is more open and understanding and where people can support each other with more awareness and intelligence and information than has been the case so far.

There's so much to say here and there are so many people who'd like to speak. I do want to allow a bit of a space for people to distil down three or four key points that we could take forward from this discussion but Sarah, from the Red Cross, if you could speak just briefly? Sorry to keep things fairly tight. Sarah Davidson from the Red Cross. I'd like also to come to Felicity deZulueta from the Institute of Psychiatry, Simon Lawson and also Jane Gilbert. Jane wrote a very good article, which I thoroughly recommend, in the latest issue of the Counselling and Psychotherapy Journal about how communities respond to trauma and what's appropriate and what's not appropriate in terms of psychological intervention.

This is a big discussion that will be taken forward on March 22nd here, with the launch of the NICE Guidelines on trauma treatment. So could I ask each of you to just briefly make your points. Sarah.

Sarah Davidson:

I wanted to pick up the theme of storytelling. Bill talked earlier about the article in the Lancet and actually we know that telling stories is very helpful and very healing. In fact—I should say I'm a clinical psychologist by trade—and I would say that the role of journalists is not that different in terms of facilitating the healing process. We know for example that it's helpful in terms of making sense of the story.

Bill, you mentioned the second wave. I was in Phuket, in Thailand for a month, for most of January and people were talking about this a lot in terms of it wasn't the first wave, indeed the tide went out and that's when people went to the reef to look for shells, to look for fish and then it was the second wave. The first wave did indeed do lots of damage and people were very upset and very hurt but it was after the second wave that there was the silence and it was very profound and moving hearing that.

But what storytelling does is that it gives us congruence, and that facilitates coping. One of the things the British Red Cross went out to do was to support the British Foreign and Commonwealth office out there. So we were very much tasked with supporting British nationals. One of the roles that we played was to visit the in-patients, people who had been very severely hurt. This kind of storytelling reminds me of a man for whose father it was very, very important that journalists were involved and that he was in the news and that a documentary was made and that, indeed, he was followed up for months afterwards so as not to forget this. He risked losing a leg and it felt really important for that to be in the public consciousness and to be recognised and facilitated.

For other people it wasn't so clear. We were working with the relatives coming over trying to make sense of [body identification]. The goal posts were moving all the time and it was important for them to have privacy and not be constantly asked. Similarly, we were working with volunteers who'd gone out—I mean, I think the points have been made earlier about many people feeling so profoundly moved by the media reports they were seeing, that they flew out to places like Thailand to do what they could. They sent clothes, they sent food and they came out and I think that they were unable to consent to a lot of the things that they were then asked to do.

For example, they were asked to recover bodies, recover body parts, nail down coffins, put people in bags. I think that there's another parallel with what some of the aid workers and journalists see in terms of overt, explicit horror. How much can we consent to and how much are we able to step away and get back in touch with emotions? This is something that we very much felt our role was, to be able to empower people to not do that kind of thing.

And finally, I just wanted to say about people going out there and setting up therapeutic facilities. I don't know if anyone went to the Provincial Hall in Phuket but there were, as well as many, many boards of missing people's photographs, there were various tents. There was the Thai Red Cross who were doing incredibly well, amazingly meeting the needs and responsible for the food aid. But there was also a tent that had 'Trauma Therapy' written up. This was the place where they were receiving relatives and performing trauma therapy! I think somebody told them that it wasn't very helpful to do trauma therapy in such a place at such a time and so the sign changed the following day to 'Brief Trauma Therapy'.

Felicity deZulueta:

I feel very honoured to be amongst you people because of what some of you have been through in your work and not just the Tsunami but other things. I feel very humble and I'm not here as an expert so much as somebody who is trying to think how best journalists can be protected and helped while doing such work.

This issue of engagement. The word needs to be clarified. I think the picture of Ben Brown was a very moving one because he did do his work as well as give an arm to the lady to hold. That was extraordinarily important because he did his job and therefore he maintained his integrity as a journalist. But he did it in a humane way and it's very hard to do that.

Now what we have to bear in mind in all this, let me tell you that those vultures of trauma, they are no good at all. And what Bill was trying to convey was that the best thing we can do is to explain to people what helps in these situations. There are two agendas today: one is what helps those people out there and what helps you as journalists and perhaps we'll start with you as journalists; my son is in fact one. The main thing to remember about trauma—what is this business, anyway? Trauma is defined as the disruption of your attachments to others. It is an event where you're so helpless that you feel you can no longer function as an individual and your links with others disappear.

Now that is what leads to trauma. Therefore, if you bear that in mind, you can think much more clearly about what you should be doing and not doing. In other words, for journalists it's very important that you have a sense that you aren't helpless, that you are doing a job. What is actually important is that some of you don't know how far you have to go and it seems very important that you have guidelines about intrusiveness and what you do in such situations, so that you know how far you should be going and not pushing yourselves to do things that seem very important but actually aren't.

And then, looking after yourselves. I treat torture victims and my service does that all the time. We have to sit with people who've been through horrific businesses but you have to do it professionally and we do it within an hour, believe it or not. Afterwards, we support one another and that's the thing that you really need to find a way of doing. Something both from headquarters and amongst yourselves is the thing, that you do your job and then you have support. You have to find ways of giving each other—other than alcohol and drugs, the usual—actually of validating your own experiencing and being able to share with one another, 'God, this was bloody awful; I feel so screwed up by what happened; that woman that did this and that . ' because it's actually not the traumatic event that drives us to PTSD, it's that response that we get after the event.

I've now seen hundreds of people and when they tell the story, it's not the event, it's not the horrific, it's the feeling of helplessness that then you want an arm. And that's why Ben Brown's picture is beautiful. He models it—he gives the arm while remaining in his job. Now that is what you need to be able to do in your own different ways, is to give that arm. Because the people who get PTSD are the ones who go through an event where there is validation and no arm—metaphorical or physical. And if you can bring that into your organisation and if your headquarters approve and supports you in that and gives it to you on the line, if necessary; if you're on your own that is really what's needed.

Now those of you who are in that area, it is perfectly obvious that if you are in Sri Lanka and you have to do the job of reporting and you yourself are losing members of your family, or facing that, clearly you're going to need a lot more of that support and pulling out of the field if necessary at certain times. There's no way you can do that; no way. So I think that's the kind of thinking I would like people to have.

And of course the psycho-social that Bill hasn't really enunciated, that is useful. What do you actually advise people on top? It is about firming up the support systems of that community. We're not there to go and listen to people, we're there to tell them, 'This is the kind of thing you have to set up', to give the community as much power and as many possibilities to take action so that they do their best. A doing which is knowledgeable and so on.

So really, those are my few thoughts on this matter and I think that if you can remember that attachment is the basis of trauma, the symptoms don't come unless that is ruptured, that makes things much better. And the people who develop PTSD are the more vulnerable ones, the ones who, in earlier life, or perhaps through their own life experiences have had that lack of the right arm at the right moment. And they're the ones who are more vulnerable. But if you give it and you empower people and you validate them—and you all need validation; you've been heroic some of you, from what I've heard today and I bow—that is really what's needed in the system. That's not engagement, it's controlled engagement.

Mark Brayne:

Felicity, thank you very much for that. Briefly, can I go to Jane before Simon? Jane, you wrote very much in this vein in the CPJ. Can I ask you to keep it as brief as you can?

Jane Gilbert:

Well, thank you very much. I'll only say a couple of things. I wasn't asked to come here until yesterday evening and I live in the Lake District and I feel slightly culture-shocked at being in this room, but very honoured that what I wrote in the Journal has been useful to people. I haven't been in Sri Lanka or anywhere. I'm a clinical psychologist as well, but I've done quite a lot of training with groups of different nationalities looking at international mental health. I suppose the only thing I would like to say is that people have to be taken within the context in which they live their lives and the language in which they speak.

I wrote the article as a kind of warning about the mistakes that have been made in the past where counselling has been brought in one -to-one in cultures where, in fact, the notion of one-to-one is completely foreign and doesn't belong. They need to be seen in a social way and I'm delighted—in the bottom of my article I've made some web-links to the latest WHO guidance of responding to emergencies—that they're coming round to supporting social structures such as schools and any kind of traditional religious rituals, that will help people grieve in the context of their culture. And that's why I really wrote the article. I don't think I want to say much more really because we're running out of time so, read the article!

Mark Brayne:

It's great to have you here and I really would recommend reading the article. So, Simon.

Simon Lawson:

Thank you. I'll try and make this as brief as possible. My name is Simon Lawson and I'm both a documentary filmmaker and for the last few years have been working with humanitarian agencies, specifically in the field of conflict transformation mostly in Africa.

It seems to me that all disasters, whether man-made or natural have traumatic effects. What has concerned me and made me come tonight is that over the Tsunami, which is undoubtedly a terrible disaster, in some ways the people from the Tsunami are fortunate to have had the media there because I think the media presence has provided that arm, that support and is going to allow the people affected to move on with money and with media attention.

Hopefully that will keep up over the few years. So if there's been trauma as a result of the media being there I think that is probably a cost to bear and I'd like to illustrate that by a couple of examples.

On January 2nd I flew to Liberia to work for Search for Common Ground—to train reporters, in fact. Now there was an anecdote; Liberia is a country emerging from thirteen years or more of trauma, of two brutal civil wars. There's an anecdote floating around Monrovia about the fishermen who'd been washed up on to the shore by these huge waves. Whether this was a new urban myth or not, it kind of illustrates the feeling that the Liberians wanted a Tsunami.

They wanted a Tsunami because they'd been watching the global saturation, and your audiences are global; look at the effect on your audiences! They'd been watching saturation coverage on BBC World, on CNN, which is available all over the world now whether it's in video clubs or hotels it's there, people see this. So that had led to these stories, 'We had a wave too. Where's the money coming to us?'

David Loyn mentioned Andrew Harding. I was with Andrew Harding in a UN press office in Goma in December 2001 and Andrew was complaining about the fact that he'd come all this way—and he wasn't going to get the pictures; he was going to get frustrated from getting pictures. Any pictures that he got would probably be thrown out by the news desk anyway—to cover a disaster that had killed three million people in the previous two or three years.

Then I saw him on BBC World a couple of months later covering the Goma volcano, which killed—including the people who died looting petrol—about a hundred and forty people. That led to a total media circus—someone else in this room was also there. After a few months they'd all gone away and all the kind of rush-in-and-rush-out NGOs had also gone away, and it was left with the same thing and it's still carrying on ...

Bill Yule:

... There was a marvellous group who were working with an Italian NGO who have been developing what they call narrative exposure therapy. This links in with testimony therapy that came from the dreadful tortures and so on in South Africa and developed from there. They have done one of the few random control trials in Central Africa of adult refugees showing that helping people to tell the story in a particular way had a dramatic effect on their well-being.

To my amazement, I discovered that this same group has been working in Jaffna in Northern Sri Lanka for the last three years and they have been doing random control trials with children. Their book is coming out any day now. It is a fantastic way of doing things. The title is, Narrative Exposure Therapy, and the first author is Frank Neuner, from the University of Konstanz in Germany.

I met up with them in Colombo and they'd taken one of their field workers from Uganda, Patience, and she is black and she was saying to me, 'I wish I'd had one of your cameras rolling'. She was saying that all these people around the world who talk about things being culturally specific and so on and not to use talking therapies with people from other cultures, are actually denying people like her the best treatments available. Because we do have evidence-based treatments like that, like others that worked in different cultures.

There is good evidence now for different ways of working in different cultures.

You were asking about psycho-social. There is a big battle going on between people who are saying that you need to have total community-based interventions building from the bottom. We're not talking about individual therapy, we're not talking about curing everything, we're talking about getting enough social support and emotional support in, to make a difference, to allow people to take advantage of whatever structures there are there, to take advantage of proper supports. And after the Bosnian War, a colleague from the Crisis Centre in Bergen and I got together various groups and we said, 'Right, if this ever happens again, what would we recommend that people do when a disaster has taken away the infrastructure, has killed the mental health workers, what do you do?

What you do is you make sure that the schools get going; that people help the kids as much as possible. You get back to normality; you don't duck the issue of death and grief. In Sri Lanka, like here, people like to think that little kids don't understand about death so they were actually telling kids who had been with their Dad one second, and who was taken away the next, 'Oh, he's gone to Malaysia to work.' Now what that does to the trust in the surviving parent is unthinkable.

So we obviously spent more of our time, while I was there, on death and dying than about PTSD. But nevertheless, back in Norway, when we set up our Children in War Foundation, we devised four sessions of intervention that could be used, we thought, with just kids, to alleviate the distress sufficiently for them to get on with their lives. We refused to publish that until we had some data to show that it was useful.

When I was out in Iran last week, last Friday—I'm still reeling from it—I heard that they'd taken our manual and were using it. I didn't know quite who and how. It turns out that the Director of Mental Health for the whole of Iran had come across it. He had been setting up, in advance, a national intervention for earthquakes. They have them all the time, they had one this morning, and they've used it and to my surprise, not just with kids but with adults as well. In the first seven months they used it in small groups to treat over four thousand people to get some control back in their lives. To get a feeling of control over the horrible things that they're thinking.

Honestly, it was a bizarre and amazing experience last Friday, to be sitting in a shipping container with beautiful Persian rugs and a kerosene lamp. One wondered about that; no chairs and I can't do the lotus position, so it was a bit awkward—and to watch fifteen Iranian women in their black chadors talking about the awful memories they had of the earthquake, seeing their kids dead, hearing other kids whose voices were growing more and more faint as they died. These are the images that have tormented them for months—and then going through the exercises that we set up, sitting in a beautiful spring day in an island off Bergen. They were doing all the exercises and going through a different culture, working out; and they were all saying how helpful it was to reduce the impact of the images, to get the memories into perspective—I was just bowled over.

I didn't mean this to turn into some sort of hard sell or soft sell for our product. (Request from the audience for title) It's called The Recovery Manual and details of it are available on www.childrenandwar.org

David Loyn:

... I haven't got any profound closing thoughts except to say that I did see, in that day I spent in the first day of the primary school, they did exactly what you would recommend. They opened the schools as soon as they could dig them out of the mud in Banda Aceh. We profiled one little eleven-year old who we'd had breakfast with and taken her to school and at the end of the morning, after all the children just talked all morning, we said, 'What are you talking about?' and they said they were all just telling their stories to each other all morning—'What was it like? What was it like for you?'

I'm very struck by what we heard from my Indonesian colleague from World Service about quite how bad we are. Even with all the smugness we have at the BBC about how much we think we've sorted this out and clearly there's much more to do in terms of mental health for journalists in these places. It's so simple in some ways and I think we could do it but we haven't done it yet.

Mark Brayne:

... Thank you all very much indeed and particularly to Bill and to David.

The BBC's Ben Brown on Covering the Tsunami

Rohati's house must have been the first on the seafront, and so it was the first to be destroyed. When we found her, she was running her fingers through the wet sand that now covers the foundations of her house.

Her husband and four children had all been swept away by the tsunami, but she had had the good fortune to be at the market selling vegetables. Or was it a curse? Because now Rohati was convulsed by grief. Like so many of those who survived, she wished she had not.

I suppose we can all imagine losing a loved one but to come back from market one day and find everyone and everything in your life simply washed away—well, to me at least that is incomprehensible. Perhaps that's why we decided to tell her story for our television report that night from Meulaboh, Aceh, the town that had lost a staggering 40,000 people, almost half its population.

We started off by filming Rohati on the beach, beginning with what we in the business call a 'walking shot', the reporter and interviewee strolling along together. But this was no ordinary interview, just as the tsunami is no ordinary news story. She was hysterical with grief, her body jerking and shaking. And as we walked side by side, she suddenly reached out to grab hold of my left arm. Then she pulled me closer and started to sob uncontrollably on my shoulder. A small woman, that was as high as she came.

In my Home Counties public-school sort of way, I was stiff and uncertain how to respond. My awkward body language seemed to tell her: come on woman, don't invade my space, pull yourself together. Didn't she know she was breaking the grammar of television news, where the correspondent—especially the BBC correspondent—can never be seen to 'cross the line'?

Down the years, I have interviewed more victims than I care to remember of wars, famines and disasters. Rohati, though, was the first one to clutch hold of me and let her grief pour out in tears that dampened my immaculately pressed TV shirt.

But then I thought, why the hell shouldn't she? There she was standing all alone on a devastated beach with absolutely nothing and no one in the world. Out of the blue, a man from a faraway land has come to talk to her, and she has seized him like a submerged victim of the tsunami seizes a passing palm tree. I was the only available source of comfort to her.

And so gradually, I felt myself loosen up. Who cares if it ruins my film? Who cares if it ruins my shirt? Who cares if this particular 'walking shot' has gone against convention? Ocean waves that swallow up 150,000 people go against convention, too.

I started to hold her tighter to me, to console her as I would a grieving relative at a funeral in Britain. But now she wailed even louder than before, rubbing her hands up and down her chest with a frenetic energy. My interpreter, Sonny, translated her words for me. 'I have lost my children! How can I live now? What am I to do and where am I to go?'

Sonny, also Indonesian, was not only translating her words, he was sobbing them too. He, unlike me, was not afraid to get caught up in the maelstrom of her grief. And now I could feel my eyes welling up, too, however much I resisted it; however hard I tried to keep my emotions locked up in their corporation straitjacket. In turns I patted her back, then rubbed it, then gently hugged her. But it all seemed so absurdly, pathetically inadequate.

'I'm so sorry for your loss,' I stuttered. 'I hope...' Hope what, for God's sake? That things improve for you? That somehow you just get over the loss of your house and all your possessions, not to men tion the man you loved and the four children you adored?

Finally, after what seems like an eternity, Rohati broke away from me, as if she had realised how entirely useless a grief counsellor I was turning out to be. Later I thrust several hundred thousand rupiah in her hand, which sounds a lot but actually is only a few pounds. And then I was gone from her life, and she from mine.

But I fear the pain etched on Rohati's face will always haunt me, as will the vision of grotesquely bloated bodies lined up at a makeshift morgue in Thailand, the stench of death there so bad it made me want to retch. For many of us in the media, this has been easily the most harrowing story we have ever covered.

Reporters, producers and camera crews out here in Aceh are permanently exhausted, and it's not just because of the punishing time difference with London or the burning Asian sun. No, it is the relentless smell, that smell; the smell of rotting corpses that permeates the air. And also the knowledge that wherever you go here, you may be walking on or over or very near the body of a human being. It's like being in some ghoulish horror show: you never know when a corpse is going to leap out at you next. One of my colleagues stood on an overturned door, and a dead child's hands flopped out. Another noticed dogs sniffing around a pile of rubbish outside our BBC office: on closer inspection he realised that amid the rubbish was the body of a dead baby, riddled with maggots. The tiny corpse had to be burnt.

With relentless deadlines there is not much time to pause or reflect on the daily horror that we witness as soon as we venture into any street in any town or village here. Perhaps it's better if we don't dwell on it too long. But when I met an Australian surgeon in a hospital in Banda Aceh, I realised it's not only journalists who are being emotionally drained here. The doctor told me that he could not stop crying.

It was not the round-the-clock operations—the surgery was the easy part—it was the sight of young orphans in his wards who had lost their parents and siblings and now faced the rest of their lives alone.

The surgeon refused to do an interview with me, on the basis that he would burst into tears the moment he started talking. I felt like telling him he had made the right decision, because, as Rohati could have told him, I'm not much of a shoulder to cry on.