But how well do media development programmes factor in the implications of this? Many other professionals - war crimes investigators and mental health professionals, for instance - are trained in trauma awareness. They learn techniques for interviewing people in distress and maintaining their own resilience in the face of the horrors they witness. Few journalists are.

Interviewing a traumatised, and potentially volatile, child soldier safely is no easy task. Similarly complex is the ability to recover an accurate narrative from somebody who has been disorientated by prolonged sexual violence. All this only becomes harder, if - as is often the case - the journalist him or herself has been a victim of past, political violence.

At the heart of the issue is the quality of journalism produced for local consumption. Recently "Conflict-sensitive" approaches have been strong on political awareness and have set out during their programmes to flag the danger of hidden bias and inflammatory language, but less comprehensive at discussing the emotional context local journalists are living in. Perhaps a more trauma-aware approach might make for better, impartial, accurate and insightful journalism?

How, then, do we bring these complicated, emotionally-charged issues into the open; and where might dangers lie?

 

  Elana Newman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Tulsa

 

Bruce Shapiro, Executive Director of the Dart Center