The Rory Peck Trust: Award 1998

The 1998 Rory Peck Award Brochure

When the shooting has to stop

Ron McCullagh, Insight Television News, on the narrow gap between exposure and exploitation

mccullag.gif (5548 bytes) Sireena is crying as she removes her glasses and then her wig and then, through sightless eyes, she looks at me as if to say: "There! That’s what they did to me." But my camera is pointing at the ceiling fans, doing their best to cool us all down on a sweltering afternoon in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Every year in Bangladesh an average of 250 women, mostly teenage girls, have acid thrown in their faces. The common cause – teenage boys whose proposals of marriage have been rejected and on the principle, "If I can’t have you then no one else is going to have you" they destroy the face of the one they believe they loved. Every year the authorities, vulnerable as they are to bribery, charge three or four such attackers out of hundreds of guilty.

When Sireena was 14, a boy threw concentrated sulphuric acid in her face. He wasn’t even arrested. Today, twenty-five years later, she and twenty other victims of acid sit around me in a meeting. They are angry and desperate – but there’s hope here too. Until recently all their future held for them was a miserable marriageless life, lived out in poverty and shame behind curtained windows and a shut door.

They are taking turns to tell their stories, not just to me but to each other – the afternoon is long and anguished. Yet the spirit of the group towards this stranger, me, the foreign reporter, is one of openness and a sort of relief – here was somebody concerned about their abysmal experiences. Maybe he or his film will help?

It’s Sireena’s turn. The acid had been thrown over her head and face and her injuries are by far the most appaling of the group. There is an awkwardness in the way in which she exposes her terrible wounds. Tears stream down the hard scarred skin of what is left of her face. I realise by the gestures of the woman sitting beside her that this woman is encouraging Sireena to do this, probably for the camera. I realise this is acutely embarrassing to her. Down the lens, in that portable studio that is our private haven, I decide that what I am filming is unacceptable. I switch the camera off and point it at the ceiling.

Sireena did not want me to film her. She did only what she thought I wanted her to do. If her exposure had come from anger, defiance or plain bloody-mindedness, then, perhaps, I would have kept filming. On the other hand, if, as I sensed, she had done this reluctantly, out of a misplaced sense of duty – she the most disfigured, letting the camera witness and record the wrong that had been done to her – scars that normally she was so careful to hide – then what? Was I right or was I wrong?

I imagine myself crawling injured through the rubble of my London suburb in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Three days have passed. I’ve seen a few helicopters and heard buildings falling in the distance but the first people I see are a camera crew. I can barely talk.

As soon as they see me they start filming. The reporter, clad in his Nuclear Biological & Chemical suit, walking a few yards in front of the camera. I’m relieved to see them but my smile is restrained by the strangeness of their coming.

As he gets closer I see he is staring at me, his head nodding slowly and his face a picture of concern. I’m dribbling. I begin to mumble something incoherent about not having had any water for three days but they’re ignoring me. Instead the reporter is talking to the cameraman who takes the tripod off his back and sets up for a mid-shot about three metres away.

Surprisingly I find I could be quite together about it all, but clearly he wants tears of desperation and I am the victim hoping that this man or his film might be my saviour, so tears it is then. I dig not too deeply and respond accordingly.

In too many places there are desperate, powerless people, terribly wronged who, when we bother to ask, are all too willing to expose their inner agonies to us and our cameras. We are the privileged and they are the victims and the least they deserve is our respect.

The Rory Peck Awards Brochure 1998