Off The Grid with Luke Coleman - Our man in Iraq
I was all set to torch this column this month, farting sparks of blistering anger as I am. However, it’s all shouting into voids, isn’t it? No matter that Stacey Dooley has trivialised the rape and murder of thousands of women with her self-important, ethically bankrupt take on the suffering of the Yazidi community at the hands of ISIS. Some people will have seen it, and regurgitated adjectives ‘brave’, ‘inspiring’ and ‘sad’, because they haven’t seen the story before. Others will commend Dooley for getting that story to an audience otherwise not engaged. Still more will marvel at her horror at seeing dead bodies on the streets of Mosul. Fewer will question why she felt the need to take a survivor back to the scene of where she was raped hundreds of times. Why does Dooley claim that her subject will be asking the questions of the ISIS captive, before jumping in? Jumping in with a sensationalist, leering “tell me how many people you raped, killed?”, before leaving with the parting shot “You don’t scare me.” Of course he fucking doesn’t Stacey, he’s a detainee, who you’re interviewing while he sees an armed guard over your shoulder – he’s not going to hurt you, but he’s sure as shit going to give the answers the guards told him to give, if he doesn’t want a kicking back in his cell. There are standards to be upheld in journalism, and the BBC is rightly expected to uphold the highest of them. If survivors want to confront their abusers – and that ‘if’ is doing the heaviest of lifting – the meeting should be mediated by trained therapists, not a camera, no matter how utterly shit or shiningly brilliant the journalist. Anyway, I thought I’d … what’s that, ed? Just 300 words, you say? Oh.