Interview with David Alexander, Professor in disaster management and emergency response
Posted 11:43 PM by Internal Voices in Labels: 9th Edition
Eva Donelli, intern at UNRIC Brussels, Italian Desk
1) You define resilience as the ability of society to absorb and resist to shocks and pressures caused by disasters or crises. How could the media play a positive role in the emergency preparedness and prevention process? And do you have examples of helpful information campaigns?
Resilience has to be a collective effort and the media, television and radio, are fundamental to the process of offering official communications. A good example of helpful information is “communicating in a crisis” a procedure, a network, that the BBC has set up in the UK after 11 September 2001 to respond quickly and effectively to emergencies.
2) You wrote a long list of misconceptions about disasters. What is the relation between the media influence and the spreading of these false myths?
Unfortunately the relation is very strong because the media are the principal reason why misconceptions about disasters are propagated. There is a particular model of disaster; it's rather a Hollywood style that the mass media tend to love, in which there is a society breakdown followed by violence and military law. There is still a tendency to dramatize disasters and interpret them in ways that has no parallel in reality.
3) After disasters we usually hear from the media about manifestations of antisocial behaviour. To correct this myth could you please explain the so called "therapeutic community"?
Yes. The therapeutic community is an idea discovered or invented by sociologists in the early 1960s during a period of intense social study of disasters. What they found is that there is much more sense of what is good during disasters than in historically normal times. People tend to share things, people tend to help each other, bad things are minimized because there is an overall a common enemy that everyone wants to fight against. There are examples of antisocial behaviour in many or most disasters but they tend to be insignificant, especially when compared with the therapeutic community.
4) In the disaster area not every donation is actually needed. Do you think that a better coordination between the civil protection and the media could help to better explain what can be useful and what is not?
Yes I do. People respond very much to the idea of donating when encouraged by the media. Generally money is the most helpful donation if it doesn't end up in the wrong hands. Indeed in the disasters we tend to have a “converging reaction” and we often have big logistical problems to manage the amount of donations. We receive medicines that are not useful or have passed their expiry date and food which end up moulding in the sun and attracting rats and vermin. The best way to manage disasters is to make a proper needs assessment as soon as possible and put out an appeal also through the mass media for specific items that are genuinely needed.
Another problem is the amount of publicity that an event gets. The Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26 2004 gained public donations of 4,5 billion US dollars. At the same time there were two very serious humanitarian crises in Darfur, and in Sudan, and they could not raise 30 million dollars: that is because people were busy donating to the victims of the Tsunami.
1) You define resilience as the ability of society to absorb and resist to shocks and pressures caused by disasters or crises. How could the media play a positive role in the emergency preparedness and prevention process? And do you have examples of helpful information campaigns?
Resilience has to be a collective effort and the media, television and radio, are fundamental to the process of offering official communications. A good example of helpful information is “communicating in a crisis” a procedure, a network, that the BBC has set up in the UK after 11 September 2001 to respond quickly and effectively to emergencies.
2) You wrote a long list of misconceptions about disasters. What is the relation between the media influence and the spreading of these false myths?
Unfortunately the relation is very strong because the media are the principal reason why misconceptions about disasters are propagated. There is a particular model of disaster; it's rather a Hollywood style that the mass media tend to love, in which there is a society breakdown followed by violence and military law. There is still a tendency to dramatize disasters and interpret them in ways that has no parallel in reality.
3) After disasters we usually hear from the media about manifestations of antisocial behaviour. To correct this myth could you please explain the so called "therapeutic community"?
Yes. The therapeutic community is an idea discovered or invented by sociologists in the early 1960s during a period of intense social study of disasters. What they found is that there is much more sense of what is good during disasters than in historically normal times. People tend to share things, people tend to help each other, bad things are minimized because there is an overall a common enemy that everyone wants to fight against. There are examples of antisocial behaviour in many or most disasters but they tend to be insignificant, especially when compared with the therapeutic community.
4) In the disaster area not every donation is actually needed. Do you think that a better coordination between the civil protection and the media could help to better explain what can be useful and what is not?
Yes I do. People respond very much to the idea of donating when encouraged by the media. Generally money is the most helpful donation if it doesn't end up in the wrong hands. Indeed in the disasters we tend to have a “converging reaction” and we often have big logistical problems to manage the amount of donations. We receive medicines that are not useful or have passed their expiry date and food which end up moulding in the sun and attracting rats and vermin. The best way to manage disasters is to make a proper needs assessment as soon as possible and put out an appeal also through the mass media for specific items that are genuinely needed.
Another problem is the amount of publicity that an event gets. The Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26 2004 gained public donations of 4,5 billion US dollars. At the same time there were two very serious humanitarian crises in Darfur, and in Sudan, and they could not raise 30 million dollars: that is because people were busy donating to the victims of the Tsunami.
0 comment(s) to... “Interview with David Alexander, Professor in disaster management and emergency response”
0 comments:
Post a Comment