The Radio Rookies series "Crushed: Teens and Dating Abuse" presented unusual challenges to the Rookies producers, including how to identify young people who might want to tell their stories, how to best support the participants, and keeping journalism and reporting at the center of the process. Courtney Stein has been with Radio Rookies since 2008 and, in this series, she produced Rainy and Destiny Mabry's pieces.
To help explain some of the more delicate aspects of producing "Crushed," Courtney answered some questions about her work:
How did this series come about?
Typically Radio Rookies recruits six young people. Each of the Rookies produce a story about something deeply important to them that shapes their lives or their communities in some way. We guide them in the process, but we don’t assign the topics. The Rookies have to be curious or passionate or worried about the issue so it can sustain their interest for the many months they will report on it. Usually we end up with a group of stories without any linking theme.
Back in the fall of 2013 we were recruiting participants for a workshop in partnership with West Brooklyn Community School, which is a transfer high school for kids who’ve dropped out but are trying to come back and graduate.
I interviewed the applicants, Rainy was one of them. I remember she said she knew what she wanted to report on. She didn’t spell it out for me but implied that it had to do with domestic violence and that it was a personal story. I got the sense that this was all fresh, that she wasn’t far removed from it.
We had too many applicants for the number of spots we could offer so had to make some tough choices about who to accept into the program (this is always really difficult). Our mission is to work with young people that really need an opportunity, but when people are in the midst of crisis it’s not usually possible (or healthy) to take the time to reflect on it in a radio documentary, no less commit to a program that meets three days a week for the rest of the school year. I told the staff at West Brooklyn that I wasn’t sure if we should include Rainy. They made a case for her and said that she really needed something to hook her into the school community, so we accepted her application.
When the workshop began we had the Rookies meet with us to pitch their story ideas. Rainy told Senior Producer, Kaari Pitkin, and I that she wanted to report on an abusive relationship she’d been in and out of since she was 14. She was 17 when we met her. She really wanted to understand why she’d stayed with her then ex-boyfriend for so long. Kaari and I knew that although she’d been broken up with this guy for five months at the time, that there was a good chance she might get back together with him at some point. We talked to her about our fears but she said that she really wanted to do the story and that she was done with him. We still worried.
Rainy did wind up getting back together with her ex and was then in and out of the relationship until just a few months ago. So the story took almost two years to finish. Working with Rainy got us thinking that dating abuse was an incredibly important, all too common and under-reported problem. So we decided to do a whole workshop around the issue of teen dating abuse.
Aside from Rainy, how did Radio Rookies recruit the participants?
We first went to the organization we’d reached out to for support for Rainy, Day One. We recruited young people from there and other organizations with a similar mission, like the Relationship Abuse Prevention Program and Children’s Aid Society. Usually Rookies works with teenagers between the ages of 14-19, but in this instance we also decided to accept Destiny Mabry, who was 24, because her story seems so directly relevant to the topic.
Ultimately, Some of the applicants decided to report on issues unrelated to intimate partner violence -- Dakota wanted to report on notions of masculinity in the gay community and how he feels like an outsider, and Alba wanted to report on child sexual abuse, which she’s still working on.
Actually, it was good to have some diversity in topics because a whole group reporting solely on the same tough topic is...tough (not that Dakota and Alba are reporting on light topics).
What's the experience of being in a workshop for the Rookies themselves?
At first, it’s basically like being in a small and very hands-on class. They learn reporting skills and the fundamentals of recording and editing. Once they select their story topic, they are assigned a producer from the Rookies staff and they start doing interviews, research and gathering sound for their stories.
It’s not all work and no play. Throughout the months of workshop we try to build a sense of community amongst the Rookies by taking trips, like this visit to the White House in Washington DC, where they had the opportunity to try Ethiopian food for the first time (not a hit). We build long lasting relationships with the Rookies we work with, many stay in contact for years, continue to report stories, come back for reunions and graduation listening parties, or just stop by the radio station to fill us in on their lives. For a lot of young people, Rookies is like a family.
For most of the time Rainy was working on her story, she was still in an abusive relationship. What were the internal conversations among Rookies staff about having her report her story and whether it was the right thing for her to do?
As I mentioned, all the Rookies work one-on-one with with a producer. I have a background in social work (including work with survivors of domestic violence at the Brooklyn DA and young women who’ve been commercially sexually exploited at GEMS), so I was assigned to work with Rainy.
From the beginning, I reached out to Day One and RAPP to talk about safety planning and to ask if they thought it was a good idea for Rainy to be reporting the story at that time. I worried that the process could be retraumatizing, or worse, that reporting on the relationship might make her more likely to re-engage with him. I took her to Day One to do an intake and get set up with a social worker there.
After she got back together with “Tony” whenever she reemerged, I’d have her record a diary and then call her social worker. I kept trying to get her to go to a support group for survivors, which she did a few times, but then stopped.
What I was told by Day One and RAPP staff was that it’s Rainy’s story to tell, that it’s her decision whether she’s ready to or not and that my trying to force her into therapy is taking away her power to make her own choices. She’ll go when she’s ready, or she won’t go -- either way, it wasn’t up to me.
My job was to continue to offer her support without judgement and to do everything I could to ensure her safety as a reporter. There were times that Rainy wanted to interview Tony for the piece but we didn’t want reporting this story to encourage contact between them so decided that wasn’t safe.
One of the challenging aspects of producing Rainy's story was how to handle letting her ex know about the story. What were some of the conversations about that and how did you and This American Life staff ultimately approach it?
Rainy doesn’t use her full name in the story and we’ve given her ex a pseudonym, but we didn’t want this story to be a surprise to him. Throughout the reporting process I had many conversations with Rainy and a meeting with both Rainy and a social worker at Day One to safety plan around the broadcast of the story.
In the end we decided that writing a letter to Tony that explained what the story is about, what it includes and where it will air would ensure that he knew what Rainy alleges in the piece. We asked him to reach out to This American Life Producer Sean Cole to share his perspective.
We hand delivered the letter to his house and Sean sent him a digital copy. Tony wrote back saying that he didn’t want anything to do with the story and said, “multiple of the claims are completely wrong” and some things were left out. He didn’t give specifics.
Finally, it sounds like you have been working on some emotionally grueling stories, how has that been for you?
It’s been heavy and tough -- especially when Rainy would disappear. But it was the times when she’d re-emerge that were actually the hardest because I knew she was still in it, and that once she left my presence, she’d be going home to him.
But what’s been heartening in all of this is getting to work with Rainy in such an intimate way over the past two years. She is truly incredible.
And she’s so much more than a survivor of this abusive relationship, she’s resilient and deep-thinking, she’s an astrology mastermind, a dog whisperer (she worked at the shelter where I got my two pit bulls), and she’s schooled me in the ways of the old-school, Italian Brooklyn that she was raised in.
I’ve had the privilege of helping her get to know and understand herself through telling this story. And I got to be there for her high school graduation. I couldn’t be more proud of her.
I was also the producer that worked on Destiny Mabry’s story about cycles of abuse within her family. She bravely reported this powerful piece, working through and continuing to report as the year anniversary of her sister, her niece and her nephew’s death came and went. She kept writing and reworking her script as she celebrated her niece and nephew’s birthdays. And I got to see her truly own the telling of her story and watch the process help her heal.
There were many, many tears -- from her and from me. I couldn’t help thinking of my own sisters and my nephews and she described their murders. Destiny and her family are living through an unspeakable tragedy but I’ve learned so much about grief and resilience through sitting next to her each day and helping her produce this story.