Risk Management
Video‐making and distribution can introduce significant new risks to vulnerable participants and communities, and can intensify other risks.
Risk is defined as:
- exposure to danger
- the possibility of something unpleasant or unwelcome happening
- the possibility of harm as a result of the initiative’s actions.
Risk includes:
- Threat — anything, anyone or any event that can cause a negative effect
- Vulnerability — a flaw or a weakness that can make the threat a reality, or the likelihood that a threat will happen
- Impact — (in this context) the severity of the negative effect
- Capacity — existing strengths that will allow you to minimise the chances of the threat happening.
The risks vary according to context and objectives, but they may be caused by not speaking to participants about options to remain anonymous, or by not planning for the safe storage of footage, or by sending or receiving digital files.
Your initiative may also cause reputational risk to subjects, or the risk of rejection from a community if goals and expectations are not communicated widely. Conversely, if you’re making your goals, strategies and processes open to everyone, you may be opening yourself and your involved community up to risk too.
Below an inspiring impact story from Indonesia about raising awareness for health conditions on remote islands. Because of her role in a short video Rabiah becomes quite famous, as her story caught the attention of the national media. These events lead to Rabiah being made part of a political campaign without her being aware of it. In the impact story you’ll read how they managed the risk of Rabiah losing her reputation.
In high-risk situations, you must develop a coherent risk management plan to minimise dangers to yourself, your team, the communities you work in, and everyone involved in your initiative. You will also need to balance the need for transparency with the need for security.
At the very least, you should ensure you don’t further complicate the issue you are seeking to address with your video initiative.
Understanding and Assessing Your Initiative’s Risk
The first step in Risk Management is understanding the risks of making your initiative. Here are some of the risks you might take when you open up about your initiative too much or not enough:
- Exposing stories and perspectives that are marginalised or hidden may shift power dynamics within communities and societies.
- Working with under-represented communities may cause them to face increased discrimination and prejudice by more dominant groups.
- Capturing stories and struggles may re-traumatise survivors and victims of human rights abuses.
- Working with subjects who should remain anonymous may expose their identity and risk their privacy and security.
It’s important to revisit these risk areas throughout your initiative to keep your assessment current and to better ensure that no harm can come to you and the people involved.
To help you identify and anticipate the risks involved in your film project use the Risk Assessment and Mitigation Tool. After you have filled it out, either alone or together with your team, use it to discuss how you can better look after yourself, your team, your subjects, and the communities you work with.
Taking Action
You have different options in addressing your identified risk, and if other people are sharing the risk, you should involve them in addressing it:
- You can accept the risk because its consequences are minimal.
- You can accept the risk even though it is great, because you decide the benefit to pursuing the issue is more important.
- You can reduce the risk by working on threats, vulnerabilities and capacities.
- You can share the risk by working with other people in the community that are supportive of your initiative.
- You can choose to avoid the risk by stopping your activities or changing your approach to reduce potential threats.
Determining your risk will depend on the context of your initiative. So will the options to address them.
Your tactics will also change over time, so it’s important to consistently assess your risks throughout the duration of your initiative. This impact story from B’Tselem illustrates the difficulties you can expect when making risk assessments in volatile environments.
Risk Management and Informed Consent
Informed consent is a key ethical and legal principle for any activist, citizen journalist and media-maker seeking to create positive social change.
It ensures the safety, security and dignity of participants and interviewees, such as survivors of human rights violations or those suffering from social injustice, so they don’t suffer further abuse or violation or become re-victimised as a result.
It’s necessary to conduct a risk assessment of your Video for Change initiative, so that you’ll be able to clearly inform those who appear in your video (or its credits) of the potential negative consequences of their participation.
What is Informed Consent?
Informed consent is the process of ensuring that a person identified in a video fully understands the purpose and intended use of the recording, as well as any unintended consequences of their participation.
With this information, the person must voluntarily and without external pressure give his or her permission to be identified and for the recording to be used. That decision is not necessarily permanent. Someone who grants consent may revoke the decision due to increased security risks. It is important to respect the fact an individual’s decision around consent may evolve over time.
There are four main elements to informed consent:
Disclosure — The use and purpose of an interview or capturing of image must be fully explained. This helps protect the interviewee’s safety and maintains an honest relationship between interviewer and interviewee.
Voluntariness — The interviewee must voluntarily give their permission for the interview to be used and express whether he or she is willing to be identified by name.
Comprehension — The interviewee, subject or participant must fully comprehend the implications of the interview and the intended distribution, including potential consequences of online distribution. They have the right to revoke their permission for future use of the footage — however, ensure they understand it’s not possible to permanently remove materials from the internet. Provide an example of a worst-case scenario.
Competence — The interviewee must be able to comprehend the likely or possible implications of his or her participation. This is an especially important issue with special populations (e.g., children, people with mental disabilities, people who have suffered significant recent trauma).
Questions to ask when considering informed consent during planning
- Is the participating individual able to give informed consent? Are there barriers to consent such as age or competency?
- If so, has the participating individual given informed consent?
- Has he/she signed a consent form? Or if not using a consent form, are there other records or evidence of consent?
- Will the initiative aims, processes and outcomes change over time? If so, will there be a need to seek consent again?
- Does the individual understand that s/he may be identified?
- Does the individual understand that s/he is giving consent that their image may be exhibited to the public in different domains and forms?
Resources
Security-in-a-Box Everything you need to know about keeping your internet communications secure and safe. This is especially useful for Video for Change initiatives that have a strong technology and component.
Informed Consent Template by Witness. A useful document you can download for free and use.
Ethical Wednesdays: Minimising Risk to Those Filmed An excellent blog-post by Madeleine Bair on how filmmakers can minimise the risks of those filmed.
Safe and Secure: A handbook with issue-checklists containing essential resources on safety and security issues facing documentary filmmakers and where to go to get more information and / or training.
Common Cause focuses on understanding how values and frames can contribute to or work against social change. They have a number of guides and resources to help apply this approach.
Power: A Practical Guide for Facilitating Social Change provides detailed workshop materials to help people analyse power in order to create social change.
Powercube website Learn more about expressions of power
The New Tactics Strategy Toolkit provides useful activities and worksheets to help human rights defenders work more effectively so they can address human rights violations around the world.
Protection Manual for Human Rights Defenders by Frontline Defenders provides further information on ways to tackle risk.
Making a New Reality explores the potential, questions, and ethics of immersive and interactive media for social change.
International Documentary Association is a very thorough blog post that gives an introduction and examples on how to make a budget for a documentary film.
Volunteer Lawyers and Accountants for the Arts connects artists and arts organisations of every discipline with accountants and lawyers who donate their time and expertise to help their clients navigate the complicated world of finance and law. The website offers sample contracts and guidelines that can be used by video-makers.