Sometimes, trauma finds you while you’re waiting for it, when your body is tense anticipating its appearance. Your guard is up. Somehow, you soften its blows.

Sometimes, though, trauma finds you when you’re not expecting it. It walks up to you in broad daylight. It leaves its imprint on you at unexpected times, when the last thing on your mind is protecting yourself from its touch. That’s when it can cut the deepest.

As an open source digital investigator, you may be exposed to traumatic content on any given day. Knowing this allows you to take some steps to limit the harm that you may experience by viewing this type of content.

Yet, knowing this does not provide a full defence against exposure because in some cases, you may find yourself deeply impacted in a negative way by content which you never would have expected to hurt you in the first place.

Vicarious Trauma in Open Source Research

There’s been a lot written on vicarious trauma in open source research. That’s the trauma to which digital investigators are liable to be exposed when they view graphic or otherwise distressing content. Vicarious trauma is felt by viewing the suffering of others.

While there are strategies that you can employ to mitigate your exposure to vicarious trauma, it’s impossible to become totally immune to its existence.

As an open source researcher, I’ve seen the worst things that people can do to each other. I’ve seen suffering on a scale and intensity that is beyond the ability for language to describe.

However, in my experience, the sounds and images that have stuck with me the longest aren’t necessarily the most graphic ones. I’ve been brought to tears by sounds and scenes that might seem innocuous at first glance.

In other words, vicarious trauma can be insidious: it can creep up on you unpredictably without you noticing.

Each of our brains is different. The things that we’ve been brought up to believe, our relationships with our parents, our hopes and dreams for the future, and our outlook on the nature of existence all create a unique canvas on which vicarious trauma can leave an equally unique imprint.

I want to share two instances in my life as an open source researcher where I was emotionally impacted by images that I was viewing for work. These images were not graphic, but in both instances brought me to tears. I still think about those images sometimes, and the way that they made me feel.

The Milk Container

I was once brought to tears by a video of a woman holding a container of milk.¹ Sometimes, when I describe the video today during in lectures and workshops, I get emotional.

As I type this, over a decade later, I can see the woman in the video and hear her clearly. I can hear her words, the innocent tone of her voice. I can remember how I felt at the end of the video, and how much I cried.

The video was recorded in a rural community in Venezuela in 2015. It was a newsreel from a local television station. In the video, a reporter explains that the government had been giving away free milk in that community. The video showed a government truck carrying small containers of milk, and a group of residents crowding around it to receive their share.

The video cuts to a young woman. The reporter asks her, “What did you get from the truck?” The woman holds up the container of milk and says, “leche” (“milk”). She looks and sounds happy. She has a satisfied, modest smile on her young face.

There is an abrupt cut. The crowd of residents is angry. Someone opens one of the milk containers and pours it out in front of the camera. Out flows a grey, watery, anemic liquid. Whatever it is, calling it “milk” is a far stretch.

I remember hyperventilating and crying.

Our brains make sense of the world around us by “filling in blanks” in our knowledge and perception. This happens on a subconscious level. I think part of he reason why this video impacted me in the way that it did was because my brain filled in the blanks.

I imagined the woman living a difficult life in rural Venezuela. I imagined her struggling to find milk for her child, or for a child in her family. I imagined her feeling happy that day, seeing the truck giving out the free milk, and then going home to happily show her child what she’d brought home. As she walked home, I imagined her thinking that, finally, she’d gotten a break. Free milk! Things are finally looking up.

I realize that all of that is my head, and that none of it is true, and that thinking that it is probably makes it worse.

But what I do know is that a woman and her neighbours were given free milk by their government at a time in Venezuelan history where food and basic necessities were scarce, and that the milk didn’t look like it was fit for animal consumption.

The Classroom Kharkiv

In 2022, I was doing research for Bellingcat on civilian harm in Ukraine. This work involved verifying images of damage to schools, hospitals, shopping malls, and people’s homes.

One morning, I was tasked with verifying an image of a classroom in Kharkiv that had been destroyed in an apparent cluster munition strike. The image was not graphic. I assumed that the classroom had been empty at the time of the strike because there weren’t any bodies or blood in the classroom. Maybe I was wrong, but I don’t know.

The image showed what was left of the classroom: charred chairs and desks, scattered papers, and large holes in the walls and the ceiling of the room. I remember that the walls were colourful.

As part of the verification process, I went to Google Maps to find pictures of schools in Kharkiv to try to match them to the one that had been destroyed.

That morning, I spent time looking through dozens of public pictures taken in classrooms across the city before the war. They showed just that: classrooms. Many of the images had children in them, posing happily with their teachers. Some of the images showed the children dancing, playing, and displaying their art.

As I looked through all of those images, I had the picture of the destroyed classroom on my second screen. And the juxtaposition was heavy.

Seeing the destroyed classroom side-by-side with images of living classrooms made me think of the horrific waste of war. War destroys not only now, but in the future as well.

The children who called that classroom theirs were robbed. They had love, nourishment, and learning taken away from them, and received pain, terror, and loss in exchange.

Where were the children whose destroyed classroom I was looking at? How did they feel when they heard what happened to their classroom? Were they worried about their classmates and their teacher? Would they ever be able to feel safe inside a classroom again?

I remember feeling overwhelmed, drowned in a sort of nihilistic fog. I remember thinking about all of the effort that had gone into building that classroom and operating it: years of tax collection, urban planning, blueprint drafting, hiring of construction workers, procurement of building materials, curriculum development at the Ministry of Education, hiring of teachers, etc. In an instant, all of that effort had been undone by a blind, indifferent malice. Evil destroyed in seconds what good had taken years to nurture.

I felt unwell and called in sick to work for the rest of the day.

I sometimes think about that school and about the children who couldn’t learn there anymore.

Living Through It

The two experiences that I described above are far from the only two that I believe have caused me traumatic injury. They’re just two that hit me unexpectedly.

Knowing that trauma can find me when I least expect it has made me appreciate the power that I have to curate what enters my head. If I run the risk of being exposed to traumatic content at work, I’m only doing myself a disservice by deliberately exposing myself to harm in my downtime.

Milk and a classroom made me cry.

1. I described this video in an entry on In Venezuela dated July 4, 2015. Unfortunately, the video was deleted and is no longer available, but my transcript of it remains. I wrote my recollection of the video in this post before finding the transcript on In Venezuela. ↩︎