Forward Thinking: Training the Media and NGOs for Hostile Environments

Andy Thompson ‘visits’ Nairobi, Kenya, to speak with Stephen Smith, Managing Director of SEPAR International, a Security, Risk Management, Training and Logistical Support company specializing in hostile locations worldwide, about their low profile and holistic approach to training for potentially traumatic scenarios, including hybrid digital and physical training solutions.

SEPAR provides Safety & Risk Management Training services for operating in Hostile Environments. What is the origin of the company?

I left the UK military in 2004 after 15 years and went straight into media security in Baghdad. I then started working for a number of different organizations within television, print and radio. Back then, the world was starting to transition from analogue to digital media, so I transitioned too. I got involved in various media safety projects for indigenous media in places like Afghanistan, Somalia and places where journalists really had a tough time of it – not just due to the sort of environment they were in, but also how that makes them isolated because of money, because of clans and all kinds of things like that.

I was helping to develop “systems of safety” where they encouraged things like solidarity and so on. Whilst I was doing that, I was still working with The New York Times, but I did my Masters focusing on the Afghan media and what was happening there. I then decided to start my own company – and initially focused on Afghanistan and the media as a target market – but was pushed, very quickly actually, into humanitarian work, NGOs, a few private clients, and the “softer”, more “low profile” approach – which then led on to training. I was very fortunate, very early on, particularly towards the end of the 2000s and early 2010s, to work with a number of organizations that were developing thinking when it came to training.

TRAINING COURSES

HEAT and HEFAT

Training the Trainer

Women-only Training

Crisis Management Training

Trauma Medical Training

Driver Skills Training

Fire Safety Training

Localised Security Guard Training

Student Safety Training

For a while, at the time, there was a pervading “militaristic” style attitude towards things like HEAT (Hostile Environment Awareness Training) and so on. But other organizations and people were quite forward thinking, keeping up with things like digital transition, and looking at the holistic approach to training. So, as well as the physical aspect, we’ve got the digital aspect – but also the psychosocial element to consider. Pre 2010, it was a field that people didn’t really understand. People didn’t want to touch it. They were very scared and worried about things like personal and professional damage as a result of attempting to address the subject. Fortunately, with a number of organizations that I worked with, I became cognizant of this subject, and I was very fortunate to be able to integrate that into education, which we still do

Would you say the NGO and the Media have a different approach to other sectors?

What we saw, really from 2003 onwards, was that it was relentless for bureaus and offices for NGOs and the media that were embedded in war zones, particularly Baghdad and Iraq. People were playing catch up, as they tend to with security as things develop. People were starting to notice things like suicides, and also about getting hacked and about information security and about how that is now a vulnerability, particularly for older generations, and how it can affect and damage organizations, particularly if it’s not managed correctly.

One thing we see even now, if you go for a job interview, people will look at your social media, people look at your Facebook, and if they see you to be a potential digital nightmare, then that could ruin your chances of employment.

Some people still don’t learn, despite high profile problems that other people have had!

That’s an interesting point, on some of the training we do – that actually and unfortunately, some people are just wired up that way. Some organizations perhaps don’t factor that in. Per every hundred people there – we all have our idiosyncrasies and our various nuances – some people are actually potentially “digitally blind”. When it comes to scammers, even if they’ve been conned before; even if they click on the link that could be malware – they’ll still be susceptible because that is just the way they see the world.

You started out in the media – is that still the niche for SEPAR, or have you branched out? What is the nature of training you provide?

That’s mainly our core base. There are some of the private bits and pieces as well, and we have private clients that ask for specific things – for example, surveillance-based issues, and linking that into the digital world as well: digital safety.

HEAT courses are a key deliverable for us. We do them in the UK – at the moment that’s obviously on hold [due to Covid restrictions]. There are one or two organizations out there that do purely online courses, and that’s great. It’s something we looked at the beginning of Covid, but we decided it just wasn’t really feasible for us, both financially and because of the development work behind it. So what we’ve got now is what we call a hybrid solution. Recently we did a course in America (and elsewhere) where we do some part of the courses online. What will happen is part of the course will be a digital security expert, for example. That person will be “zoomed” in and then you’ll conduct your training, correctly spaced.

And then we’ll have a psychologist, for example, on another day – they will come in on a call, and he or she will do their part: the same kind of model. We have to demonstrate our “Covid-safe” responsibility. So as much as we can do in the classroom, it’s also about, bringing in new ways of working, and how we can practice that with minimal human interaction.

You’ve obviously been able to adapt quite well to this year’s events?

We’ve had to. It damaged the business, like many. We’re still recovering. And that’s everybody out there, isn’t it, experiencing similar fallout.

I was on a call the other day about this hybrid approach to training, and whether this will be a legacy [of Covid] and I think it might be. I think even after Covid has passed, it’s something we’ll probably continue.

What else is your look ahead? What’s your outlook, and what do you think your trends are?

I think it’s that, really. There are certain factors and certain courses where you need the physical involvement, where you need that practice – you know, that muscle memory – that experience that raises your heart rate; that perhaps gets you thinking about problem solving and stuff like that. I’m sure that could be factored in. But there are certain aspects, for example, a psychologist or perhaps a person who wants to talk about their experience, where something went badly – where you can use that “zoom methodology”

What makes you different – what is your success down to?

There are a number of things. We’re very fortunate that in our field there are a number of organizations that support us and recommend us: a strong network of experienced professionals that we can call on. For our U.K. course, we have a film maker that comes in. He had an horrific incident where he had been kidnapped and he talks about the process leading up to it; his preparation; what happened when things went wrong with what happened when things went right, and then, eventually, unfortunately, what happened to him. What he does, particularly with that media audience, is it brings in that continuity between our associated professionalism. So, it’s not just me as an ex-soldier talking; it’s people representing themselves in the correct field. I won’t talk about psychosocial care, for example – I don’t want to misrepresent what that is. It would be wrong for me to do that.

So, those aspects set us apart. Also looking at what we’ve got out there and mixing our approach – the holistic approach of mixing those various crafts, and so on. If we interview someone and it’s of a sensitive nature – it could be an NGO doing something with children for example – our approach is to really consider each and every scenario:  What are my considerations? How do I talk to a person? Is that person traumatized? If that person is traumatized, what do I do as an interviewer to make sure that that person isn’t further traumatized? What do I do that’s responsible and ethical?

And then, also, how do I look after that data, and manage that person who might not know, that might say something or do something that might put them in a vulnerable position. All those are bits and pieces that perhaps sometimes get forgotten but are so important.

How have you approached your training in terms of standards?

We are CPD accredited. There are various educational bodies that overlook training. We’ve gone for CPD and, from there, our curriculum is evaluated, and we subscribe to what we are delivering. Also, it’s all well and good having a “body”, but it’s also getting feedback from our clients. Before we start the courses, we put out questionnaires and we try to shape the course to fit their needs. And in some cases, we’ll have an organization that has specific needs. We’ll work together to develop a curriculum and then we’ll deliver it so it is more relevant to them.

How did your instructors keep up to date with their own skills and drills?

They tend to jump on other courses, and I oversee and update the curriculum and then we feed it back to them.

How has your approach changed over the years? How has training evolved?

The more practical we can make it, the better. The days of killing people by PowerPoint are numbered!…. Yes, there is a certain amount of theory that people need to know, but you can deliver that theory with a number of aides, not just by putting on PowerPoint, and it has got to be quite engaging. Try and get the audience engaged!

Also managing how the day is constructed. If you are going to do theory, it’s better in the morning after a bit of a wake up. For instance, in our HEAT curses, every morning starts with what we call an “observational memory” game. They’ll do that and then, from there, they’ll go straight into a medical scenario.

And even on day one, when they’ve done no training, it gets people awake, gets them thinking, but also gets them thinking about the situation they’re in: “Have I got the tools to deal with it and, if I haven’t, then hopefully that promotes my learning interests. I might need to find out how to deal with this”.

We’ll do a bit of theory and stuff like that before lunch, and then the afternoon will be   purely practical exercises. Our approach is to help them ingest that information, because some of these courses are for four or five days, and even though that’s practically a week, it is still a short time to take in quite a lot of information.

How large are your courses?

It depends, yes. At the moment our normal monthly HEAT course is between 6 and 10 and no more because of Covid. That’s probably the right number to cope with it.

Normally, (pre-covid) it is certainly no more than 14 or 15. Especially on the practical exercises because it then starts to lose that focus on individuals and it starts to stretch the course out a lot longer as well

What are the main challenges you have encountered over the years?

One is trauma. Even if you put out a questionnaire beforehand, people just generally don’t want to talk about trauma. There’s a lot of trauma that you might know about that might have happened as a child, for example.

You have to be very careful in training and keep looking for that. And that’s where the psychosocial aspect the training needs to be effective, then dealing with that in the correct way. A good analogy is if you do training and you’ve got, say, six people and one person is traumatized because of your training, then your training has failed.

You need to have that balance where the training is effective, but not in a way that harms someone. You hear plenty of horror stories. It’s about what am I trying to achieve? Am I training people in the field to react to a situation effectively? Do I really need to push it that much?… and then having a very clear and easy system if someone says, “you know what, I’m not particularly comfortable with this”, they can say that and don’t feel awkward or ashamed, that it’s too much of a big deal and so on. They know that we’re in a learning environment for their benefit and not some kind of boot camp.

Identifying that trauma is not always easy and sometimes it comes as negative feedback. I remember once, we did a psychosocial workshop and this person said, “I’m not really sure how effective that is. Actually, if anything, it made me angry”. A day later, that person asked to see the psychologist one-to-one. What happened is that, obviously, during that talk, the person had a bit of self-reflection and, unfortunately, it made them feel a bit low and they wanted to think about that. And, that’s quite a common thing.

Also, it’s about age. I mentioned analogue and digital. When you’ve got people that are over a certain age, the digital interpretation and how they apply that to life and things like that, it can be quite tough and it can be quite frustrating for them. And if you’ve got a person of a certain age that’s being talked about, and how we secure messages, how we basically look after and store data encrypted, and so on, it  can be quite daunting and they can get very frustrated. So it’s about how we manage that as well.

What is the mindset of people coming on to courses like this that could be potentially troubling to them?

It’s a mixture. Some people do it because they have to. Some people for insurance. For some people, because it’s a prerequisite before they go into hostile, or what is seen as a hostile, challenging environment. Some people want it. Some people want certain aspects more than others. There are a lot of people that, particularly when they go into more investigative processes, want to know more about digital safety.

For some organizations, employees have to attend. Some people have been on many of these courses before and had varied experiences. And some people actually come on these courses scared. They think they get pulled out of their beds at two o’clock in the morning and all this nonsense. So we make it very clear from early on that it’s not so… because if people are on your courses and they feel like this, then it’s not an effective learning environment. From the start we say, look, that’s not what this is about. This is about creating hopefully the best learning environment for you guys, so when you leave here it’s a benefit and not a trauma.

What frustrates you most about the training environment at the moment?

Covid has affected business, it still does. At the moment we’ve got a course planned in the U.K. and I don’t know if I can fulfil it because of the situation. But it’s just a factor. I’m one of millions of people that are affected by this, and that’s just life. So I’m reasonably an optimistic person. But it’s just annoying.

If we look at how training is delivered, and sub-optimal standards in some cases: we can get that across the board, in any kind of sort of industry. It’s up to the client or whoever to do their homework and hopefully make a reasonably informed choice. There’s plenty of dialogue and discussion groups out there about bad experiences and bad courses. Some organizations react to that. Some organizations just want a box to exercise and that’s their prerogative. Some NGOs have in-house courses and one or two of them have mixed reputations, particularly regarding kidnap. But that’s their choice. It’s up to the client, if they’re going to pay money, to do the research. Hopefully what we’re doing is pretty decent and we’re continually looking at how we can improve. But, you’ll always have a mixed bag.

It comes back the idea of the evolution of your training, and staying one step ahead of those whose standards, maybe, up to scratch.

The recent evolution for us, as I say, is the hybrid approach where we deliver via Zoom calls now, and digital is constantly developing. I’m fortunate I attend certain things in different parts of the world where there are discussions about what the new threats are. I’m not an expert, so fortunately, some of the people that I use are way up there. The digital curve of development is extremely steep but the digital safety curve is not as steep and we, as humans, are generally behind that curve.

How do you rate the impact of your training services?

That’s a hard thing. It’s not really that tangible. As long as people can leave us, “prepared”.  We get good feedback and there’s certain aspects to that where people come back and say, “I did this when someone got injured” or whatever. And that’s great.

We’ve got a charitable or community outreach project, so that’s something we try and do, that has tangible impact, working with organizations like, for instance, a couple of charities in Afghanistan we’re involved with; one or two here in Kenya; one in Tanzania and also a few in the U.K., which my wife and her team back in the U.K. work with. That’s something we’re developing, but it’s something we like to be involved with.

Impact differs from place to place. One of the first things we do for a course is a risk analysis, as a classroom, as a team of participants. We create a situation, and we ask ourselves what the potential risks are. Obviously in Afghanistan it’s very different in Kabul, to other provinces, to perhaps Nairobi. And in Kenya, it’s the same. What’s different in Nairobi is different in Mombasa.

What do you think has been your biggest failure, and a lesson you’ve learned along the way delivering Security Risk Training?

As an ex-soldier, I’ve had to learn about being a businessman! When it comes to business development and marketing I have not been particularly strong in that regard. It’s not something I’ve come from. That’s part of my business that perhaps has been quite lacking!

What should prospective clients be looking for and what should they seek to avoid if possible?

Accreditation, that’s very important. And all the basic building blocks of ISO compliance, for example. I think if an organisation is quite serious, they’re going to take those kinds of things on. Just do your research in a certain field. If there’s certain things that you want to do … There are many groups out there on social media and stuff like that, to help.

Try to get it to fit what you want to achieve.  If you’re an NGO and you specialize in migrants, you want a course that identifies the potential problems you’ll have in dealing with related issues. If it’s a media related and you want to do the more investigative side, then you want a course that obviously reflects that.

What’s been a memorable moment for you in the history of your Training Services.

We’ve had flash floods in the middle of practical training. I remember one scenario that we had in Kenya last year – we hit a medical scenario and then a crazy storm came and the whole place got flooded. We had to undertake a double vehicle extraction. All the students and the actors and I had to push all our vehicles out and begin towing them through the mud. So, that in itself was a practical exercise – added value for the delegates!

Can you cite an example of a training service provider that you admire, that you can point to and say: these guys got it right?

I was fortunate, years ago, to be involved with IREX’s SAFE programme, [SAFE (Securing Access to Free Expression) is IREX’s flagship program to enable media practitioners and social communicators to work as safely as possible in closed and closing spaces.] and it was designed by a lady who was the first person I’ve met who really did the “holistic approach” to training I mentioned. I was brought on board to help with the initial part of it. The way that she integrated this digital psychosocial approach…the many countries we visited, the course experts that I met, I thought were especially interesting. It was all very new, very forward thinking, and I admired her. And I still admire some of the teams that she still has. She’s moved on now, but some of those guys that still work in some of the countries, particularly like here in Kenya, are as good as they get – they’re really amazing at what they do.

Can you explain more about psycho-social training?

It’s about preparing yourself before a traumatic incident, during and then after it. What an organization, what a person needs to do after that happens and then things like interviewing people that are traumatized. It’s still a problem today. I know many people that have been in horrific situations, and afterwards their organizations have said, look, do you want psychosocial support? And then they’ve said, “oh, no, no, I’m fine”. But because of the nature of what’s happened, people have backed off. “If you need anything, let us know”… And of course, they don’t get back in touch. But the problem is there are a lot of manifestations, both physically and psychologically. The longer you leave these things, the worse it gets. There’s a lot of damage out there. For them, it’s too painful to start or engage in that process.

The good thing about the way the UK Military began adopting the support model is “pairing” where you’ve got your friends and other people that you can talk to. But if you’re a freelance journalist or if you are an individual professional, you’re working on Ebola or something like that, at the end of the day, you go back to your hotel and you’re on your own. You haven’t got the option, necessarily, to talk to people. And it just gets worse. And you think, “if I bring this up, perhaps professionally, this will scupper me”. Things are improving, but there still are still a lot of problems.

How do issues around diversity impact your training?

We are involved in diversity issues – gender and at times LGBTQ+. There are still seventy-four countries in the world where homosexuality is illegal. There are still some countries where, if you travel as a woman and you do certain things that are normal, perhaps in the Western world, like sit with someone in a cafe, who is not your husband, that could potentially get you arrested. We look at how that gets addressed, and how that gets delivered.

Sexual harassment is another example – a number one, constant criticism, in terms of how it is pitched: making it a victim-managed situation, as opposed to looking into other methods. You know – typical tropes like “don’t wear short skirts everywhere or don’t wear perfume”.  Some of the people on the courses are “ignorant” of and oblivious to this threat. Everyone’s different. You will get people that just are not aware. They just don’t have much experience outside of perhaps leaving college or university.

Stephen Smith can be contacted about SEPAR International at stephen@separinternational.com or via his website, https://www.separinternational.com 

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