BEHIND THE HEADLINES

Daphne Bramham

Freedom of the press and human rights are hot button issues when it comes to talking about Canada's relationship with Asian countries. They are also concerns for Daphne Bramham, Asia Pacific reporter for the Vancouver Sun.

She acknowledges that these controversial issues are often coloured by people's own nationalistic and ideological lenses.

"Of course, we filter through our values. We all come with a pre-programmed set of who we are," she said. "I write for Canadian audiences and the audience that I write for has a set of shared values.

"When I write about China, of course, I filter it through Canadian values because that's how Canadians view China. How the Chinese view events may be quite different."

Daphne travelled to Singapore two years ago on a fellowship from the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and learned about censorship first-hand.

"My interest is in how many things actually can't and don't even make it to the headlines because of the amount of censorship there is in many Asian countries," she said, citing Singapore, Malaysia, Burma and Pakistan as examples.

At a conference sponsored by, what Daphne termed loosely as a "feminist group" in Singapore, two Singaporean women spoke out strongly against a government policy that does not allow female civil servants to get the same family health benefits that their male co-workers do.

Although there were more than a dozen reporters at the event who interviewed the women after their speeches, none of what they said made it into the paper the following day. What did appear was a report of an innocuous speech by a government minister about the importance of family values. She later phoned one of the two featured women, a law professor.

"The reason that she aired her concerns at a public meeting was so that she would be out in the open. There's safety in being in the public," Daphne said. "But when the story didn't show up in the newspapers, she began to feel that she might be threatened by the government."

Daphne stresses the importance of having Canadian reporters in the region to get a true understanding of what is happening in Asia. Due to censorship in various Asian countries, relying on the local media means that Canadians get a clouded picture of what is really happening and what people are really thinking about.

One example of this is the debate over Asian values.

"Much of the debate over Asian values is a bit of a smokescreen for autocratic leaders to maintain the government they have," she said. "I don't buy the argument that ordinary people in China think human rights are not important and that they don't want to have the same sort of rights that we have."

She explains that newspapers are still grappling with how to cover these issues effectively given daily deadlines and limited news holes. It is difficult to include all the nuances in a child labour story with a limit of 600 words, she said.

There are also very few Canadian reporters in the mainstream press who cover Asian issues on a full-time basis. The norm is that many reporters end up covering the region very occassionally and many of them have never been to Asia. And that leads to problems, she said.

While reporters can improve the way they cover controversial Asian issues, they have no plans to stop exposing them.

"Part of the reason that you see this interest in these issues in Canadian newspapers is that people in Canada do care," she said. "If I wrote stories about human rights and about child labour and about women's rights and nobody read the stories then I wouldn't be writing about those issues for very long."

Daphne Bramham highlights child activist Craig Kielburger and the East Timor Alert Network as examples of young Canadians working to make a difference in the global community.