Resilience Resources

Resilience Resouces

Promoting Restoration and Capacity Building for Human Rights Investigators

In partnership with UC Santa Cruz's Research Center for the Americas, we've helped develop a toolkit for human rights investigators that equips them with strategies to increase resilience and identify trauma responses.

The toolkit is a free resource available to everyone.

Students in the Human Rights Investigations Lab talking

Trauma-informed Practice

Awareness about and resiliency to vicarious or secondary trauma is a top priority for UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, and all of our programs. In the course of their work on open source investigations, our students are likely to come in contact with weighty issues, graphic imagery, hate speech, and other kinds of disturbing user-generated content.

Resiliency is taught in our classes, trainings, and lab work as essential to open source training, both for the health of our students and the longevity of their work in the human rights field.

HRC's work in this area began with Amnesty's Sam Dubberley who integrated awareness about secondary trauma into our very first training. We continue to collaborate with Sam, and we integrate research from colleagues at NYU and Columbia as well as others who have studied trauma and resiliency. We listen to our students and alumni who are constantly innovating and seeking better ways of working. Finally, we integrate ideas about wellness and mindfulness from around the world. Our efforts are ever-evolving, but our goal remains to promote wellness, sustainability, ethics, and joy into our global work for human rights and justice.

What is secondary trauma?

An adverse reaction to the emotional residue of exposure to the pain and suffering of trauma survivors.

Symptoms may include:

Not sleeping.
Sleeping too much.
Not eating.
Eating too much (or badly).
Drinking or using drugs in excess.
Not doing normal activities with friends.
Irritability and short temper.
Inability to enjoy normal activities of your life.

What isn’t secondary trauma?

It’s not just an expected emotional response to difficult or challenging material.
It’s not trauma, which is defined as a deeply distressing and disturbing experience or physical injury.
It’s not Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, which is a mental health condition that's triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event.

Quick tips when dealing with user-generated content that may be disturbing

Adjust the window size of the video to make it small
Use post-its to block out graphic material when viewing a video repeatedly
Turn off the sound on videos
Adjust settings in Facebook and Twitter to turn off autoplay
Work with other people
Use warnings. Ask someone what you’re about to see and label graphic material so others have a heads up
Set limits and take breaks
Be mindful of your health outside of the lab