Identifying distressing or offensive content

What is distressing? What is offensive?

There is no clear set way to identify material that you may find distressing or offensive. This can be a deeply personal thing, and as such, it is not possible to avoid interacting with this material entirely. However, below is a list to give staff an overall idea of broad topics that our materials cover:

. Graphic surgery films

. Child Sexual Abuse material

. TBC

Things to think about

Beyond the categories above, it's useful to think about the following things in relation to yourself:

• Your live experience

• Things that have happened to people in your life

• What's happening at home

• What's happening in the wider world

• Your mental and physical health

All of these things have the ability to increase or decrease your ability to work on distressing material in general, but also specific topics. It's important to regularly take some time to assess what your bandwidth is. This doesn't have to be shared with anyone, but can be something you do in private to help you predict how working with distressing material could affect you at any given time.

Work-based factors to consider:

Similarly, the list below outlines different areas of your job, collection or task that can often be outside of your control. Knowing what these things can help you ascertain from the beginning, what your risk of experiencing vicarious trauma could be.

• Your role e.g. have you been hired to work on one collection or do you have variety in your job.

• Face to face work e.g. you may be working with both material that's traumatic and stakeholders or users who are traumatised in relation to that material or the event that material was born out of. You may also be conducting oral history interviews. Any face to face work increases the likelihood of experiencing distressing emotions and vicarious trauma.

• Temporary contracts e.g. there's a time pressure for completing the work.

• Volume of material

• Subject matter

• Existing knowledge of the collection

• The form/medium