In the UK there are laws to prevent victims from being named in certain cases (rape and child abuse are prime cases). That is more about protecting the victim from further trauma and/or encouraging the victim to report the crime without fear of their own name being dragged through the media rather than about focussing on the wrongdoing.

I am interested in your idea that in responding to hate crimes the victims should not be in the picture * at all*.

Clearly it is wrong to put the focus on the victim, and making the victim entirely anonymous / invisible takes that to its logical conclusion.

A couple of provisos, though.

One is that sometimes it wouldn’t make sense – you couldn’t discuss a racist attack on a public figure without naming the person, for example. The other is that taking the focus away from the victim in order to shine a light on the wrongdoing should not be done in a way that silences or ignores the victim. The voice and perspective of the person attacked is important because listening to that voice may be what is needed for effective change, and also because having some form of access to the victim’s perspective is the only way for many people to experience empathy, without which it is all too easy for the object of the attack to become just that – an object, a non-person.

Hmm. Thought-provoking.

(And I’m new to the site, so hoi thar!)

Bingo. That’s how I felt too.

Maia, I loved the photos, too. But without a respectful narrative, I felt like a voyeur, unfortunately.

I read that article too
And this one (Telegraph)

The images are undeniably striking and inspiring.

But I did feel distinctly uncomfortable with the way those images are being used, touted as a “primitive” version of Western fashion and making the women and men pictures into exotica, rather than people, suggesting that “they” dress themselves up “for no apparent reason” (in 12 research trips the photographer couldn’t have asked or found out what moves these people to dress up like this? whether it is actually, rather than only apparently, a whim or whether there is some deeper cultural significance or what?)

And some of the articles / comments seemed to be including the *people* in their amazement at how stunning “nature” can be, with the inference that the people in the pictures are “part of nature” in a way that we, the readers, are not.

As SW says, I guess it all comes down to Othering.

“As they paint each other’s bodies and make bold decisions about their outfits(all without the aid of mirrors), it seems that the only thing that motivates them is the sheer fun of creating their looks, and showing them off to other members of the tribe.”

So in my opinion, the article and photos here are quite disrespectful. Not to say that respectful treatments are impossible, but this is NOT it.

What do you think about it??