The media and children’s rights: how to report without doing any harm?

We often see faces of children and positive or negative details from their lives in TV newscasts, newspapers or on the internet. Certain talk-shows increase their ratings thanks to life stories about child victims, while the authorities – which are supposed to protect children – provide details about them in their very first discussion with a journalist... How journalists can harm children that they are talking about was the topic of the ‘Mass-media and children’s rights’ training, organised by the  Association of Independent Press (API), in partnership with UNICEF Moldova, on 31 July 2021.

The training was attended by 15 journalists – both experienced, and unexperienced – from both banks of the Nistru River, all of them being interested in child-related topics. The trainers Natalia Porubin and Natalia Scurtul provided several examples of journalists presenting information and data that could harm children who were victims of different forms of abuse, as they named the settlement where the abuse occurred, the age of the victim, details concerning their family, or other information that could make it easy to identify the child and lead to revictimization. Based on these examples, the experts and the participants came up with inoffensive formulations that would not harm the child. 

Which situations are negative for children, which are the legal and ethical obligations to be observed by the journalists while covering such situations, how to protect a child from revictimization, under which conditions children can be interviewed – these and other subjects were addressed at the theoretical sessions combined with practical group exercises.

Be it abused children, children at risk or Olympic champions – the journalists must tackle the coverage responsibly. The expert Natalia Porubin, who has an extensive journalistic experience in the social area, reminded the participants that the entire society watches subjects concerning children in negative situations with great interest and compassion. ‘In the pursuit of sensational material or inadvertently, some journalists and publishers develop products that can harm the interests and the psychological health of the child. The worst thing a journalist can do to an abused child is to publish details identifying them. Such situations equal a repeated emotional and psychological abuse that has an immediate negative impact on the child, with long term repercussions. Once they are identified, these children can be subject to additional psychological pressure from classmates, people in the community or from the perpetrator’.

The trainers reminded the participants about the rules for the protection of the rights of the child that must be observed in journalistic work. Thus, the law and the Code of Ethics require us to protect the identity of the child who has had a bad experience. Therefore, we must not provide any details that can, directly or indirectly, help identify the child victim. The journalist must not discriminate the child and their parents on grounds of ethnicity, social status, or disability. One must not specify the ethnicity of the child or of their parents if they are not part of the ethnic majority, and one must not use derogatory language in relation to children and parents. Subjects related to children in negative situations require a comprehensive approach, without trying to make it look sensational, and they also have to be followed-up on after publishing. ‘There are exceptions when, for instance, public interest demands that a child be identified or when the journalist acts with the parents’ or guardians’ consent, in the best interests of the child. However, sometimes, parents or guardians do no understand that they can harm their child, and it is therefore our duty – as journalists – to care about the best interests of the child’, explained Natalia Porubin.

The second expert, Natalia Scurtul, head of Tiraspol MeDiaLog Association, made an overview of how child rights are tackled in the transnistrian press: ‘Our media also publishes subjects on children, however not too many and not too detailed. Usually, the published pieces of news are short and informative, while child-related subjects could be more deeply looked into and covered in pieces of analysis or that are highlighting problems etc. I hope this training will help journalists on the left bank of the Nistru River become more active and write about more complex issues concerning children’s rights. We may claim that we do our job at the highest level and that we report on children without harming them only as long as we observe the quality standards for journalism’.

The participants in this training recognized that they address child-related topics sporadically, in certain circumstances, and focus less on analyses, problems or investigations on such topics. Tatiana Balan, regional reporter at Radio Moldova: ‘In the recent past, I mainly focused on positive subjects about children, but I also covered subjects concerning children at risk. Regardless of the subject, we must do the right thing in relation to our protagonists, and observe their rights. The training helped me “reboot” my knowledge in this area and I even gained some new insights’.

Iulia Vlasiuc, ‘Dobrii Deni’ newspaper, Râbnița: ‘We do not have a particular frequency of publication of child-related subjects. We just cover the cases we find out about or when we try to help out people that contact us. Thanks to the discussions during the training, I realised that sometimes we either overlook or ignore the importance of certain issues. A journalist can hardly estimate the harm they can do to the protagonist. Therefore, the analysis of some specific cases has helped us better understand what are the mistakes that we should avoid, learning from the experience of others. This will help us do our job better and observe children’s rights’.

This training is part of the UN Joint Action to Strengthen Human Rights in the Transnistrian Region of the Republic of Moldova and was the first one of a series of trainings aimed at building male and female journalists’ capacity to cover child-related subjects in line with ethical standards on both banks of Nistru river.

The event was organised by API in partnership with UNICEF Moldova, under the UN ‘UN Joint Action to Strengthen Human Rights in the Transnistrian Region of the Republic of Moldova’ with the financial support of Sweden.