Olga Kravtsova

by Devon Mills, COM 361

Unlike the other students in Professor Roger Simpson's journalism ethics class, Olga Kravtsova is not taking the course to get a UW degree.

Also unlike other students, she did not come from her dorm, apartment or sorority house to attend the class. She came, instead, from Moscow.

Sitting in on Simpson's class is just one of the things Kravtsova, a Russian psychologist, is doing during her time at UW. Kravtsova is here for six months on a Fulbright Scholarship, working with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Her aim is to determine what kinds of trauma journalists experience in their work and to develop literature and programs to help prepare Russian journalists to face that trauma.

Kravtsova's project combines her background in both psychology and journalism. While studying psychology at Moscow State University, Kravtsova found work at a center for rape survivors - the first of its kind in Russia at the time, in the early 1990s.

"I was actually asked once by my schoolteacher, 'How can you counsel rape survivors if you were not raped yourself?'" Kravtsova said. "You know, you don't have to have all the traumas to be a good counselor." She did, however, have one experience that helped her identify with her clients' traumas in counseling.

"When I was finishing university, my father died unexpectedly. It was very, very hard," Kravstova said. "I'm not saying I know how they feel, but you know, I have some idea of how sensitive a traumatized person can be.

"It helps you understand not the specific characteristics of one's trauma but the general feeling that you're different, you're vulnerable, you're sensitive. When you recover ... you never come back to where you were before."

Kravtsova went on to counsel forced migrants at Gratis, a free counseling organization and UN partner in Moscow. Migrants from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and African countries like Angola went to Gratis to speak with Kravtsova about a number of traumas they had experienced.

"They escape from war," she explained. "They are called forced migrants, meaning you don't just choose, 'Oh, I don't want to live here, I want to move to another country.' You are really saving your life."

At the same time, Kravtsova worked for Internews, an organization that trains journalists and supports independent media worldwide.

"I've been working there as an administrative, you know, supporter, accountant - I mean, nothing connected with psychology," Kravtsova said. "And then when I found this project, journalism and trauma, I was so excited that it sort of merges my experience with working with the media organization and also my psychology of trauma."

Kravtsova has been conducting surveys of journalism students and speaking with American journalists to identify what is traumatic in journalists' work. She plans to compare her findings with those of a former colleague, an educator at Moscow State University, who has been doing similar research with Russian students.

She hopes to create materials, like brochures or components for training sessions, to help "teach young people at the university, when they are becoming journalists, [about traumas] that they can and they will encounter. And they will be working with traumas, even if they don't go to war zones."

Simpson, a founding director of the Dart Center at UW, supports Kravtsova's efforts to learn about journalism and trauma.

"She knows journalists," he said. "She's had contacts with journalist organizations in Russia and in other places in Europe. She's very much attuned to what's going on with people who do journalism and have to cover the very messy stuff."

One problem that both Kravtsova and Simpson have encountered in this area is psychological resistance from journalists who reject the idea of needing help in dealing with trauma.

"The thing is - here, as well as in other countries - people don't want to be treated by a mental specialist, you know?" Kravtsova explained. "You don't want to be considered like an abnormal person."

Simpson can identify. "You get all kinds of situations in which journalists are denying that [trauma is] a problem," he said. "Long before [Kravtsova] came, I met with some Russian journalists ... and talked to them, and several of them were very heavily into denial: 'Trauma is not a problem for journalists in Russia' - which means it is a problem for journalists in Russia. And then there are others who recognize it's a problem, but they don't have any way of dealing with it."

This tendency to deny that trauma is a problem is a focus point for both Kravtsova and the Dart Center. Both aim to educate journalism students about how to deal with trauma before they experience it, as a way to prevent denial and troubles that may result from it. Simpson emphasized the importance of trauma programs for students not only at the UW but everywhere.

"The problem is that it needs to be taken back to every part of the globe, not just Russia," he said. "And all across the United States, because there is so little being done to prepare journalism students.

"My hope would be that Olga could return to Russia - even just to Europe - and become an adviser to both news organizations and educators.