We know a powerful story can change hearts and minds. But sharing your story with a journalist shouldn’t leave you feeling unsafe, misrepresented, or regretting that you opened up.
Yet even with the best intentions, that can happen. Tight deadlines, quick turnarounds, multiple hands touching a story, or simply a lack of awareness can leave the person at the center of it all feeling like their experience was not fully heard or understood.
At Blue Shield of California Foundation, we want to change the conversation around domestic violence—from something viewed as a private, personal matter to a preventable public health issue that affects all of us. Journalists and storytellers have an important role to play in shaping that conversation.
Through our partnerships with domestic violence organizations across California, we’ve heard how powerful and even healing sharing one’s story can be. Survivors often speak publicly about their experiences in the hopes of helping others, changing policy, and preventing further violence. We’ve also heard about the harm that can happen when survivors feel like they lost control of their story and don’t recognize themselves in what is published.
That’s why, in 2024, we launched the Journalist Playbook, a resource developed collaboratively with journalists, survivors, and domestic violence advocates that offers practical guidance for bringing trauma-informed practices into reporting.
But the words are only part of the story.
We live in a visual world. Often, an image is what first makes us stop scrolling and pay attention. Before we read a headline or a single sentence, a photograph has already begun telling us who is powerful, who is vulnerable, whose story is credible, and how we should understand what happened.
For someone whose story is being told, the wrong image can communicate something else entirely: I was not heard. I was not understood. I am no longer safe.
So, we began asking another question: What does it look like to apply the principles in the Journalist Playbook—safety, solutions, sensitivity, transparency, expertise, and diversity—to visual storytelling?
This year, we partnered with visual journalists and educators Sarah Blesener and Jennifer Stratton, creators of the trauma-informed guide enter/exit, to explore that question. Together with the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, which has trained dozens of survivors in media relations and policy advocacy, they created a workshop that brought together photojournalists and survivors to work on a collaborative approach to visual storytelling. The workshop, Working with Care, created space for photographers and survivors to learn from one another and consider what it means to create images with someone rather than about them.
Their conversations, documented in a collective zine, Some Kind of Solstice, raised questions that don’t always have easy answers. Who are our photographs actually for? How do we acknowledge harm without sensationalizing? What happens once an image leaves our hands? Are we slowing down enough?
And perhaps most importantly, what does care actually look like in practice?
The workshop and zine reinforced the idea that trauma-informed visual storytelling isn’t just about choosing a more sensitive image, but it’s also about the process of making that image.
This project is just one example of how we’ve invested in visual storytelling this year. The Foundation is also presenting a short documentary film that highlights the potential of restorative justice in healing from domestic violence.
Filmmaker Walter Thompson-Hernández already embodied Journalist Playbook principles like sensitivity and transparency when we began working together. The survivor expertise and diversity of experiences showcased in the documentary have a lot in common with the Working with Care workshop. And like the workshop, the process of making the film centered the participants’ safety and healing. We can’t wait to share it with you in 2027.
This Domestic Violence Awareness Month, we’re inviting more visual storytellers, journalists, advocates, survivors, and others who shape the stories we see to join us in this conversation.
Throughout October, we’ll share lessons and reflections from Some Kind of Solstice, practical guidance for trauma-informed visual storytelling, and perspectives from survivors and visual journalists about what it means to create images with care.
Changing the conversation about domestic violence isn’t only about what stories we tell. It’s also about how we craft them, and who has the power to shape how they are seen.
To stay up to date on all our work, and to be the first to know about the documentary and our other visual storytelling projects or events, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter.
