That the World May Know

"This one is a book about human rights workers and the world that they inhabit and it captures all the inner tensions that human rights work involves. Many of us who work in the human rights world know how many young people are frustrated with the world of ordinary life and its injustices and how much they want to change things. This book asks what the cost of that desire is. We all expect human rights workers to do good but Dawes shows the dark side of the world of human rights through a series of interviews with Red Cross workers, UN soldiers, refugee intake officials, and young activists. We now live in a world in which we institutionally organise people to go out and stand by terrible events, genocide, famine and they are in many ways bystanders because their mandate does not allow them sometimes to intervene. So human rights workers experience secondary trauma and the book looks at the ways in which different types of workers try and deal with this. It deals with the kinds of narratives that they tell, the way that they move between betrayal and attachment. Basically, human rights work seems to begin with caring for a human being and attachment, looking at what is available to solve this problem and it seems to end with a feeling of betrayal or cynicism. So how do people get up in the morning and carry on doing this work in light of this? What I think is important about this book is that nobody had thought through the cost of having a world full of young people who go out and do this work. These young people, like soldiers too, live off cigarettes, sex and alcohol and the book looks at the impact this life may have on them. It is a short book that is written with a lot of empathy. What leaps out for me particularly is how easy it is for the category of victim, violator and bystander to become interchangeable. So human rights workers who go out into the field and, say, do refugee work, confront people making refugee claims who might be lying. So all of a sudden the victim becomes a deceptive opponent. Then, when agents deny the refugee claim, refugees stalk them, so they become the victims and the refugees the violators! “What leaps out for me particularly is how easy it is for the category of victim, violator and bystander to become interchangeable. ” The book discusses, horrifically at one point, a refugee applicant in Turkey who takes his baby and throws it under a car in front of the human rights worker who wouldn’t give him refugee status. If we draw the world of violence in black and white we tend to miss the complexity of the world we live in. The book also draws attention to a vexing ethical paradox that all human rights workers must face, which is this: whoever puts cruelty first in one’s life and sets out to end it wherever one finds it, also makes himself vulnerable to deep misanthropy. One comes to judge and dislike human beings, even victims, because one sees them as manipulative, whiney or infinitely needy. Confronting one’s own growing misanthropy is one of the most difficult ethical challenges that anybody who works in the field of human rights has to deal with."