Ethical responsibilities to people who are in the stories, but are not the narrators

See here for * legal * dimensions of our responsibilities to non-narrators mentioned during interviews

** Our responsibilities to people discussed in interviews are less clear than our responsibilities to our interview narrators, but for the first year and a half of the project's existence we could mostly push the question to the back of our mind. These issues did not present serious problem most of the time in daily practice, and when they did, to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart speaking about pornography, we thought we knew them [serious ethical problems] when we saw them.

But then we got ready to put interviews up on the web. That raises the stakes.

In some situations, sharing some other person's story, or information about another person, might put that other person at risk of death, physical injury, or incarceration. We should not interview people who we think might share such information -- but we can't always know in advance.

Ambivalence about sharing other people's stories may be reason for delay in donating interviews (this is a gut feeling, not something I know for sure). This ambivalence is lousy, or at least frustrating, for research, but good for the soul. People are mostly not selfish. They/we do recognize that our lives are intimately woven together. They wonder: Is this my story to tell? (Why many of us do not write memoirs or fiction!) They wonder, what will be the effect of me telling this story on someone else?

Boundaries thus far: no interviews with family members/friends of people currently on Death Row; we have asked interview narrator to delete information about ongoing criminal activities of other people.

Personal, subjective, intimate, affective, yes --- but individual?

- Is there such a thing?
- A person's "own" story? Are metaphors of property and ownership useful?
- Is there such a thing as an "individual's" story in a social context? (Can there be such a thing as an individual human story; can there be a person without a social context?) In the context of violence? In the context of the criminal justice system?

When is it ethical to tell someone else's story?

When is it ethical for us to elicit, listen to, transcribe, and/or make available to the public a story told by one person about another?

What about causing emotional pain or embarrassment to others? What about creating conflict or bringing latent conflict out into the open, especially within families? What about one person possibly revealing confidential information about another person, or revealing information about someone else that other people do not know. "Outings" of various sorts. All kinds of unintended consequences.

These are ethical issues; they trouble me (virginia) even though the entire point of our project is to reveal new information, new voices, and new perspectives!

The world is not divided into good guys and bad guys; the oppressors and the oppressed. Violence comes from violence. Abusers learn abuse early.

These stories should make people uncomfortable. Where is the line? Who are we to decide?

University of Incarnate Word (UIW) students Sonia Ramírez and Rosemarie Caldwell gave serious thought to these issues in a very productive conversation on April 22, 2010. If a person is mentioned in an interview, but is not the narrator of that interview, under what circumstances should project restrict information about that person? They came up with three factors to consider in each case:

1. How relevant and important is the information about that person to the core mission of the Texas After Violence Project?

2. What is the likelihood that disclosure of that information could hurt the person?

3. Is the person mentioned in the interview a public figure or not? Someone who appears in a story as the sister or nephew of a narrator is not necessarily a public figure. A District Attorney is a public figure -- and has in fact sought to become a public figure by running for office. We also decided that all lawyers, or any actors in the legal system, are by definition public figures -- because our justice system must be open and transparent. What we didn't get to, however, is the question of when a person becomes a public figure through no deliberate action of her or his own (for instance, being a victim of violence or losing a loved one to a violent act).

These ethical questions and conversations are works in progress!

Sonia Ramírez is vice-president of the Ethics Society at UIW. Rose Caldwell will begin her graduate program in feminist theology at Harvard Divinity School in Fall 2010.