By Marisa Kwiatkowski, USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism.
How do you know when someone is emotionally ready to be interviewed about a trauma he or she has experienced? What do you do if she wants to back out just before publication? How do you respond to a source’s complex family dynamic when it is affecting the reporting process? How do you protect yourself from becoming emotionally entangled in a story?
While producing a five-part series, “Ashley’s Story,” published in April in The Indianapolis Star as a project for the Center for Health Journalism’s 2017 National Fellowship, my colleagues and I found ourselves navigating these difficult questions, and more. The series explored one woman’s experiences with trauma.
Ashley had been taken from her birth mother when she was 2 years old, sexually abused at 7, used as a political pawn at 8, and abandoned by her adoptive mother at 10. She struggled to fit into a home with five other children. She felt like an outsider as she went through more than a decade of fights, hospitalizations, rape and other sexual encounters with older men. We chronicled her life from the time she was 2 to the present.
It was the most difficult project I’ve ever worked on.
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