And what we try to do instead.

By Méline Laffabry

---

“Giving voice to the voiceless” is one of the most repeated phrases in journalism. It appears in mission statements, grant applications, and award citations. It is meant to signal something good: that the speaker is committed to including people who are usually excluded, to making space for perspectives that mainstream coverage ignores.

We do not use it. Not because the intention behind it is wrong, but because the phrase itself carries assumptions that undermine the intention, and we think it is worth saying clearly why.

The first problem is what it implies about the people being described. To give someone a voice is to suggest they did not have one. But the communities most often referenced by this phrase, people living through conflict, displacement, poverty, crisis, are not voiceless. They have things to say. They have been saying them, to each other, to local journalists, to community organisations, in languages and formats and spaces that do not always reach international media. What they lack is not a voice. What they lack is access to platforms with power, and editors willing to listen, and structures that make their perspectives legible to audiences who have been trained not to expect complexity from certain parts of the world. These are failures of the system, not absences in the people.

The second problem is what the phrase does to the person or organisation doing the giving. It places them at the centre of an act of generosity. The journalist, the NGO, the media organisation: they are the ones with the capacity to give, and the community is the recipient. This is a flattering position to occupy, and it is a distorting one. It obscures the fact that the person doing the giving has made choices about whose voice to carry, in what form, toward what audience, with what framing. Those choices are not neutral. They involve power, and describing them as generosity makes that power harder to see and therefore harder to question.

The third problem is that it hides what is actually happening. When a journalist goes to a community affected by crisis and extracts testimony that is then shaped, edited, contextualised, and published under the journalist’s byline for an audience the community member will never meet, something real has taken place. It may be valuable. It may even be done with great care and integrity. But it is not the same as that person having a voice. It is a representation of a version of what they said, made by someone else, for purposes they may not have been fully told about. Calling this giving voice does not make it more ethical. It makes it harder to be honest about what it is.

We think about this at aidóni because we are also, in some sense, in the business of bringing people together and producing things from those encounters. We are not immune to the same dynamics. We have a founder, a perspective, a framework. We make choices about who is in the room and what the room is for. We are not a neutral platform, and we do not claim to be.

What we try to do instead is not a clean alternative. It is an orientation, and orientations are harder to point to than techniques. But it has a shape.

We try to create conditions where people can speak on their own terms rather than ours. This means being explicit about the purpose of a session before it begins, about what will be done with what is said, about who will have editorial control over the outputs. It means designing processes where the direction of the exchange is not predetermined, where a journalist can be questioned as well as listen, where a community member’s knowledge is treated as a contribution to thinking rather than as raw material for someone else’s product.

We try to remove ourselves as the necessary intermediary wherever we can. The goal of our programmes is not to produce aidóni‘s version of how a crisis should be covered. It is to create enough shared understanding between people who rarely talk to each other that their future encounters, between journalists and practitioners, between editors and community organisations, are better than they would have been. If we do our job well, we become less necessary over time, not more.

And we try to be honest about the power we do hold rather than pretending it is not there. We have access to journalists. We design the process. We decide what gets published and what does not. These are real capacities, and the people who participate in our work are entitled to know how we use them. Transparency about power is not the same as not having it. But it is the beginning of being accountable for it.

None of this means we always get it right. The phrase “giving voice” is not just a bad habit of language. It points to a genuine difficulty: that telling other people’s stories is always, to some extent, a translation, and translation always involves loss and choice and the translator’s own position. What we are trying to do is hold that difficulty honestly rather than resolve it with a phrase that makes everyone feel better about a problem that has not gone away.