Dataharvest 2024 | The European Investigative Journalism Conference Session: "Dealing with Vulnerable Sources"

May 31, 2024
4:45 - 6:00pm
Mechelen, Belgium
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How do you work with vulnerable sources - people traumatised by war, by having to flee, by facing mortal dangers for themselves and their families? Few journalistic tasks are as important and as ethically and personally challenging as the coverage of migration, modern slavery, and exploitation. Too often, survivors are seen only as victims, when they are actually the key witnesses to major events that are not properly documented in the paper trails that journalists are accustomed to working with. In this session, two experts from the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma will talk about creating a safe environment, building trust while respecting boundaries, including one’s own, and minimising the risk of causing additional harm.

Gavin Rees is Senior Advisor for Training and Innovation at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Since 2008 he has been working as a trauma awareness consultant and trainer for newsrooms, media-support organisations, and journalism schools across Europe as well as internationally. Recently his work has focused on developing new approaches to working safely with traumatic images, dealing with online harassment and working ethically and effectively with victims and survivors of profound human rights abuses, such as forced labour, torture and sexual violence.
Previously, Gavin produced business and political news for US, British and Japanese news channels, and has worked on drama and documentary films for the BBC, Channel 4 and independent film companies. Gavin is a board member of the European Society of Traumatic Stress Studies and the UK Psychological Trauma Society.

Friederike Engst is a psychological psychotherapist (CBT, trauma therapy/EMDR), behavior and communication trainer and has been giving seminars and workshops for a wide range of groups since 2005. After professional positions in science and in prevention in the area of work and health, she began her therapy training in 2015. She works in a psychosomatic clinic for people with trauma and trauma-related disorders in Dresden and specialized in intercultural psychotherapy as well as in trauma and mental health in journalism, since 2018 also working with the Dart Centre Europe (https://dartcenter.org/europe). In addition, she supports journalists with short-term crisis intervention and counseling in stressful and after potentially traumatizing situations as well as in case of overload and exhaustion.
Friederike Engst co-developed the concept of a journalistic peer-support program (https://netzwerkrecherche.org/helpline/) of Netzwerk Recherche in Germany, trains the peer supporters and accompanies them in a supervisory manner. She wants to raise awareness of the topic of psychological stress and mental health in journalism and support people both in their self-care as well as in working with those affected.

Dataharvest – The European Investigative Journalism Conference is a meeting point where networks are established and nurtured, data and documents shared, cross-border projects conceived and teams established. The conference days are all about learning, inspiration and getting some work done.

The conference is like a European editorial meeting: Participants develop story ideas, get together in new networks to work on a common story or sit down with coders and designers to analyze and present a new data set. Editors talk about how to best structure the work process or how to best protect freedom of expression in practice. This is how Dataharvest works. 

Participants range from senior investigative editors and journalists at established media and production companies to freelancers and journalists at non-profit outlets and junior journalists working on agenda setting projects.

What makes Dataharvest, The European Investigative Journalism Conference, unique:

  • It is a working conference, where international teams meet and coordinate. Numerous stories have begun at the Dataharvest conference.
  • It is a learning conference – with systematic training in CAR, digital safety collaborative methods and other relevant skills.
  • It is an innovation conference – with knowledge sharing about new business models and new journalism techniques in a time of dramatic changes in the media world
  • It is a networking conference – because stories don’t stop at the border. We actively stimulate the networking to build new teams for stories and collaborations
  • It is a knowledge sharing conference – where speakers from successful and important journalistic projects and newsrooms give presentations, head workshops and share their experiences.

The very first Dataharvest meetings were held in 2009 and 2010, when a small group of journalists and data developers of the Farmsubsidy.org network met to work with fresh data about the beneficiaries of the EU’s generous farm subsidies. They were organized under the auspices of Farmsubsidy.org, a network working for the transparency of EU farm subsidies.

By 2011, the meeting took its current form and was given the title Dataharvest, open to all interested journalists, 35 at the time. It opened up to groups outside the Farmsubsidy.org community, inviting journalists, transparency experts and coders – all in the field of European, cross-border, collaborative, investigative and data journalism. The working atmosphere from the early years was maintained as the number of participants kept growing.

Dataharvest – The European Investigative Journalism Conference is arranged by Arena for Journalism in Europe and in 2023 attracted around 550 journalists from 51 countries.