Documenting Violence in Cameroon

Investigations Lab students investigated a video of three women and two children being whipped and beaten by a group of men in Southern Cameroon which began to circulate online on July 17, 2019. This investigation was part of a larger documentation project initiated by the University of Toronto’s “Database of Atrocities on Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis,” which seeks to identify and preserve digital information that shows the greater cyclical pattern of violence shielded and encouraged by obscurity in Cameroon. Sam Dubberley (now of Human Rights Watch) of Amnesty International and The Anglophone Crisis Monitoring Project were additional project partners.

It is hoped that by developing an archive of verified atrocities in Cameroon, human rights practitioners, journalists, and policy experts will be incentivized to produce clearer coverage of the ongoing conflict.

Left: Building damaged by arson of the district hospital in Kumba, Cameroon, February 12, 2019. For the Voice of America story: “Cameroon: in the conflict-ridden Anglophone South West, “even dogs no longer roam.” Image by ME Kindzeka for VOA.