The COVOST supports these guidelines.
This post has been reprinted with permission.
Recently,
the #SMEM and #VOST communities were presented
with a new VOST Volunteer initiative for under 18s, a wonderfully
innovative idea, but one that raises concerns about involving children
in supporting official response agencies during all phases of the
disaster life cycle.
Research clearly shows risks to children and teens from exposure to
visual materials that can trigger a strong visceral reaction, yet
Virtual Operations Support Teams routinely tasked with monitoring
social media in an emergency or disaster situation cannot control the
material to which they are exposed in the live stream. Once something
is seen, it can’t be unseen.
This paper aims to:
- help agencies and organizations address key issues related to the
participation of youth and children in VOST missions, including
monitoring social media accounts.
- raise awareness of the science and research about the risks to
children, and
- establish responsible and safe VOST policy guidelines to recommend
to those considering a Junior VOST or community youth volunteer
program as part of their social media emergency management
strategy.
The Science
Carol Dunn is a Disaster Risk Reduction Specialist who specializes in
raising awareness of the implications of current findings related to
cognitive neurology and how organizations deal with and communicate
risk. She has put together the following collection of research work
and articles to assist planning decisions:
- A study has found that dispatchers face greater risks from trauma
linked to duty related exposure to traumatic experiences that happen
to others, implying that direct physical exposure isn’t required for
an individual to undergo the long term changes related to experiencing
trauma.
From the moment you see the first image you are changed
for good .… But where law enforcement has developed specialized
programs and hires experienced mental health professionals …. many
tech companies have yet to grasp the seriousness of the
problem.
- Previous exposure to traumatic situations has been found to
increase risk of long term brain changes, so even if individuals don’t
respond negatively in the short term, the situations they are exposed
to today can play a role in later trauma. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2816923/
Potential Benefits of Junior VOST
We also recognize that volunteering at a young age has been found to:
promote a healthy lifestyle and choices, enhance development, teach
life skills, improve the community, and encourage a lifelong service
ethic. (
source) Therefore, it is not our intention to
squelch student VOSTs, but to ensure that programs operate with full
awareness of the risks.
The same good management techniques apply to children
as to adults. However, they may need to be modified or adapted to
appropriately relate to children.
The
VOSG seeks to ensure
the highest standards of safety to everyone under any program we are
asked to endorse or recommend. With this in mind, we have outlined a
suggested program that we think would provide a good model for how to
incorporate student volunteers appropriately within a Virtual
Operations Support Team.
Examples given are for guidance purposes only; responsibility lies
with the Agency or Organization managing the VOST or student
program.
Example Junior VOST Program Outline
The team’s purpose, objectives and goals are outlined in an age
appropriate way to maximize youth opportunities and the community
vision for team growth and progression towards joining a professional
team when old enough (18+).
This program is designed to mitigate risk to children by aligning the
Junior VOST more closely with a
“Preparedness VOST”
than any other phase in the disaster life cycle, with some activities
and tasks explicitly excluded that a fully operational VOST would
engage in when deployed during a disaster to support an overwhelmed or
under resourced agency.
Team members may not be placed in a situation where they could be
exposed to the risks and stress that even hardened digital first
responders often find challenging, such as a situation with
fatalities.
Students are encouraged to participate in live VOST Exercises using
benign events, such as a sports game, to become familiar with how to
use social media and to communicate with authorities should a real
live emergency be presented to them during their day-to-day activities
or as a survivor of an incident in which they are directly impacted.
With this in mind, we strongly recommend any mission that includes
minors explicitly excludes monitoring the live stream in a real
emergency or disaster situation, allocating such tasks only to a
professional social media monitoring team or VOST comprising adults
with more advanced training.
To manage risk, Junior VOST missions and tasks are classified prior to
activation using a common rating system and re-evaluated during
operations should unforeseen escalations occur.
Parents and guardians are asked to sign a waiver and are given
information about what is involved.
Example Junior VOST Program Values
- Educating and acquainting the student with a modified,
age-appropriate VOST environment, encouraging an interest in using
social media for emergency management (SMEM) and fostering future
leadership.
- Recognizing that service of Junior VOST volunteers is both needed
and appreciated.
- Recognizing that serving as a VOST volunteer is a privilege and
carries great responsibility.
- Acknowledging that a Junior VOST cannot replace or replicate an
adult team.
- Encouraging students who are responsible, dependable, caring, have
the ability to follow direction, and who can provide high quality
support service to our professional teams, and eventually, join
them.
Example Mission Rating System
- G: General - All Ages
- PG: Adult Supervision and Guidance Suggested. Some Material
May Not Be Suitable For Children.
- PG-13: Adult Supervision and Guidance Strongly Cautioned.
Some Material May Be Inappropriate For Children Under 13.
- R: Restricted. Under 18 Requires Adult Supervision and Guidance.
- NC-18: No One Under 18 Authorized To Support Mission
Children are closely supervised and any escalation that presents
during an activation triggers re-evaluation of the mission for
appropriateness to the age group.
Example Junior VOST Tasks
Selected tasks that might be safely allocated to a Junior VOST team,
grouped by phase. Each task would be rated for age appropriateness.
Preparation:
- Create VOST workbook templates and populate with search strings,
key websites and resources, ready for use.
- Create “Lay of the Land” lists of official social media accounts
on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc.
- Create or source local community maps to mark emergency related
resources - shelter locations, hospitals, school etc.
- Monitor app use in the local community and keep the Agency
informed of new apps and trends of interest, especially in use amongst
youth.
- Assist and support Preparedness Messaging: Junior VOST could pull
together fact sheets on all-hazards events and possibly assist in
breaking those down into social media messages to be available for
PIOs to use. This age group might also assist with official
preparedness accounts such as @READYColorado messaging or monitoring
instead of the operational @COEmergency side of the house.
- Help build Community Resilience by promoting the use of SMS
alerts, Code Red, etc.
- Tech support: Help professional EM staff gain a better
understanding of the world of social media, set up systems and
troubleshoot tech issues.
- Prepare a coordination summary for Junior VOST reporting of 911
type issues.
Response and Recovery:
- Junior VOSTs are not engaged during the response phase of an
emergency or disaster situation due to high stress levels and risk of
trauma involved in routine VOST monitoring activities.
- A Junior VOST may be able to assist with some limited recovery
tasks where pre-filtered feeds can be determined as suitable content,
such as sorting, categorizing, or mapping, including identifying
volunteer opportunities.
- At no time should a Junior VOST member be asked to monitor live
unfiltered feeds while an emergency response is ongoing, neither to
help identify 911 issues on social media, nor prepare official
reports.
Important issues that also need careful consideration, but have not
been addressed here for reasons of length, include liability and
accountability.
Authors and Contributors: Joanna Lane, Carol Dunn, Kim
Stephens, Caroline Milligan, Nathan
Hunerwadel, Micki Trost.
Junior VOST - Guidelines for an Under 18 Program by
The Virtual Operations Support
Group is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
3.0 Unported License.
