Using Video for Advocacy

Gillian Caldwell

In 1995, I was working as an attorney doing civil rights work in Washington, DC. A friend returned from a trip to Siberia, where he had been investigating the illegal trade in tiger pelts. Undercover, and in the midst of discussions on a sale, the traffickers had offered to sell him women. He asked me if I wanted to help him do something about it. I said I would spend some time after-hours researching the issue and see what I thought about getting involved.

Two weeks later, I resigned from my job as a civil rights attorney and camped out at his office, telling him that I would wait tables if necessary until we raised the money to support our proposed campaign into the illegal trafficking of women for forced prostitution out of Russia.

And so, my adventure in video advocacy began. Just over two years later, we released the film Bought & Sold: An Investigative Documentary About the International Trade in Women, a documentary based on our investigation, which received widespread media coverage, including BBC, CNN, ABC, New York Times, and Washington Post — and significant results internationally in terms of policy change.

Bought & Sold integrated an unusual mix of video. There was undercover footage shot with miniature tie cameras in meetings with the Russian mafia — gathered while we posed as foreign buyers interested in purchasing women to work as prostitutes. And there were conversations with women around the world who had been forced into the sex trade. Additional interviews with counselors and advocates helped frame the key issues surrounding trafficking and conveyed recommendations to policy-makers.

What made Bought & Sold influential internationally was that it was ground-breaking in the information it revealed in a powerful visual medium. At the same time it could be used in screenings before a broad array of audiences, including law enforcement, NGOs working to meet the needs of women, girls and women at risk for recruitment, and a range of policy-makers worldwide.

Video has several strengths that convinced us that it was worth the considerable time, energy and resources required to integrate it into our work. We recognized that video could elicit powerful emotional impact, connecting viewers to personal stories. It can illustrate stark visual contrasts and provide direct visual evidence of abuses. It can be a vehicle for building coalitions with other groups working on an issue. It can reach a wide range of people since it does not require literacy to convey information. It can help counter stereotypes and assist you in reaching new, different and multiple audiences, particularly if broadcast is a possibility. And it can be used in segments of varying lengths for different contexts.

But even given its strengths, video isn't right for every campaign or organization. For one thing, it is a very time-consuming and potentially expensive endeavour. Additionally, at WITNESS we often talk about whether or not an issue lends itself to being conveyed convincingly with images and compelling human stories. Are the images accessible, or are the risks and difficulty of obtaining them obstacles you may not be able to overcome? When assessing whether to use video, even more important than the strength of the images themselves is the power of the stories they help convey. A video is only as powerful as its ability to touch the people that watch it, to connect them to the experience of the people portrayed in the film, and to motivate them to get involved to make a difference. Do you have access to the people and the stories you will need to make your video compelling, engaging, and powerful?

This chapter provides a brief strategic overview of some of the key themes echoed throughout this book and helps you begin to analyze whether and how you may integrate video into your advocacy work. I will draw on my own experiences between 1995 and 1998 in launching the video advocacy campaign on trafficking in women, and on the experiences of many other social justice video advocates around the world. I also recommend you look at the "WITNESS Video Action Plan" (see Appendix I) for a more formal step-by-step, question-by-question guide to the process of incorporating video into your advocacy.

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So, to begin with, when we talk about "video advocacy," what do we mean?

"Video advocacy" is the process of integrating video into an advocacy effort to achieve heightened visibility or impact in your campaign. "Advocacy" is the process of working for a particular position, result or solution. For example, in an environmental context, you might advocate to prevent the construction of a sewage treatment plant in a poor neighborhood. In a human or civil rights context, you advocate to stop a woman from being stoned to death for infidelity to her husband or to press for a change in laws to enhance women's rights. In a community context, a group may mobilize support for the construction of a new school.

All these efforts represent different kinds of advocacy, and each advocacy campaign requires its own analysis of several important factors to lay the groundwork for success. For example, who is in the best position to help you get what you are looking for? How can you be most influential with that audience? What arguments, stories or evidence should you present? At what time and in what place?

When considering whether or how to integrate video into your advocacy work, the process can be broken down into five key steps:

• Step 1: Define your goals.

• Step 2: Talk to other people who have worked on the issue you want to tackle. What has worked, what hasn't, and why?

• Step 3: Analyze your style and strengths, and identify your allies.

• Step 4: Define your audience and think through how to communicate your message to them — your format, style and the "messenger").

• Step 5: Decide on a level of involvement and start planning production and distribution.

Step 1: Define your goals

By 1995, trafficking in women for forced prostitution had been going on...