Should human rights advocacy prioritize empowerment or expose systemic abuses?
I've worked in human rights documentation for eight years, and the pressure to always talk about victims' suffering can obscure their resilience. But when we focus too much on agency, do we risk minimizing the structural violence that governments and corporations perpetuate? For me, the debate is whether human rights advocacy should center on empowerment narratives or on exposing systemic abuses, because both are true yet pull us in different directions.