Safeguarding and the responsibility to bear witness

Over recent years, charities have rightly done a huge amount of work to move away from the paternalistic and often harmful storytelling approaches of the past.

There is now a much stronger emphasis on dignity, agency and respect in how we represent the communities organisations exist to serve. That progress matters, and it should not be undone.

But over the past few months, I’ve been having conversations with fundraising and content leaders across the sector, and I’ve found the same tension coming up again and again. How do charities balance ethical storytelling with the responsibility to bear witness during emergencies — and is the sector getting that balance right?

Beneath that sits a more difficult question. In some cases, have safeguarding frameworks, designed to protect people, become so rigid that they limit organisations’ ability to bear witness at all?

From these conversations, it seems like organisations are spending more time focusing on what can’t be done or said rather than on finding new and responsible ways to tell the truth about what is actually happening. And the result, at times, is communication that softens reality so much that the true scale and severity of crises become harder to see.

Difficult images are avoided. Language is diluted. And in the process, real stories and real experiences are left untold.

Striking a balance

At the point of a crisis, we are probably documenting what may be the most difficult moment in someone’s life, and that should never be treated lightly. But there is also a responsibility not to smooth over the situation so much that audiences are prevented from understanding what is actually happening, or why urgent action is needed.

Safeguarding concerns are real, and they lead to understandable constraints. But they can also result in slower, more cautious content, and in some cases, a kind of paternalism that holds back stories that people on the ground are actively choosing to share.

This had real consequences. In an already difficult climate marked by funding cuts, organisational restructuring and growing demand across multiple emergencies, cautious communications can result in fundraising appeals that fail to hit the mark, to the detriment of the people sharing their stories.

Which brings me to another question. Should the structures and processes charities use to gather content in non-emergency contexts apply in the same way during an active emergency? Or do moments of acute crisis call for different approaches — ones that are faster, more responsive, and that place more agency in the hands of the people whose stories are being told?

Part of the answer, I think, may lie in moving towards more co-creative models, where affected people and communities play a greater role in shaping what is shared, under what conditions and with what purpose.

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Ultimately, this comes back to balance. And to recognising that the way organisations apply safeguarding in emergencies may need to look different from how it operates in more stable contexts. The structures and processes that make sense in more stable contexts may not be fit for moments of acute crisis. Safeguarding should enable responsible storytelling, not silence it.

If charities are among the few with access, trust and context during moments of extreme devastation, then safeguarding cannot simply be about minimising risk. It also has to be about enabling truth — responsibly, humanely, and in ways that honour the people whose stories are being told.

Dignity without dilution

For organisations grappling with these questions, the challenge is not whether to choose between dignity and truth, but how to build approaches that can hold both. That might mean rethinking approval processes, creating more space for co-creation with affected communities, or designing emergency content models that are ethical, responsive and fit for context.

These are not easy questions, and there is no single answer. But they’re questions more organisations are now having to confront.

If your organisation is facing these tensions too, our latest report, Dignity Without Dilution, offers insights from research with over 6,000 members of the public and what they think of fundraising communications.

If you have feedback, suggestions for future research, or if we can help you unpack and improve your storytelling, please get in touch. We’re always here.