How watching videos of ICE violence affects our mental health

The recent murders of Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good are drawing renewed attention to the activities of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

While they are not the only people to have been killed by ICE agents, first-hand videos of the events of their death have made us all witness to the extreme violence being carried out in the US.

Multiple versions of the footage went viral globally, capturing the world’s palpable sense of injustice. These videos demonstrate how mobile media is transforming each of us into a new kind of witness to suffering.

We need to find new ways to process such collective trauma and channel it toward meaningful action.

Why some deaths grip the world

Every day, we are exposed to loss, grief and death through our mobile phones. The distance between the participant and the observer – between the mourner and the witness – collapses. This is what scholars call “affective witnessing”. The rise of social media, body cam technology and surveillance media have all driven this phenomenon.

As we watch viral footage of tragic events, the boundaries between the emotions of the recording witness and our own merge. We feel their grief in our bodies, and become witnesses by extension.

All witnessing is “affective” – meaning it stays in our bodies, hearts and minds. But there is a particular intensity that comes with mobile media witnessing, since our phones live in our pockets, in an especially intimate space we can’t always distance ourselves from.

Cultural studies scholar Judith Butler notes that in the case of war and violence, grief is not just personal – it’s social, cultural and political. Butler argues that when grief goes public (such as through social media), inequalities are magnified. Some losses become more visible and “grievable” than others.

Read more: Images from Gaza have shocked the world – but the ‘spectacle of suffering’ is a double-edged sword

In recent years, we have increasingly witnessed through social media what death researcher Darcy Harris calls “political grief”.

Political grief encompasses the collective loss and mourning felt by communities facing systemic injustice (including non-death related). It can take the form of emotional, psychological and spiritual distress arising from certain events, policies, and ideologies.

All of the violent ICE incidents reported in the US are deeply embedded in a sense of political grief being felt across the world. They prompt the lingering question: “Is this the future of the world?”

From text messages to TikTok

From its outset, mobile media has played an important role in making political grief visible and providing systems for collective action.

From its 2G beginnings, mobile media has been used in “people power” political revolutions. For instance in 2001, text messaging was used in the Philippines to mobilise protesters to demand the removal of then president Joseph Estrada.

More recently, footage of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police had global ramifications. As cultural studies scholars Andrew Brooks and Michael Richardson note, the affected body of the Floyd witness who filmed the video represents

both the intensity of the event and the embodied experience of the witness, establishing a relation between the two.

Brooks and Richardson call this “embodied affective witnessing”, whereby the victim, the first-hand witness and their online audience all become implicated.

At the same time, mobile media can be a weapon when used by a state as a form of surveillance technology.

What do we do with what we can’t unsee?

In a space where the distance between mourner and witness is vanishing, digital “grief literacy” is needed.

Psychologist Lauren Breen and colleagues describe this as finding ways to identify and normalise respectful conversations about grief, mourning and loss that connect to hope and social change.

In the context of distressing ICE footage, this could look like

• pausing before re-sharing graphic material, and considering who might be affected
• seeking out safe spaces for processing political grief
• channelling distress into tangible real-world action, such as contacting politicians, or supporting affected families.

We also need to understand that we all grieve differently. For two years, we have been investigating how everyday Australians explore grief, loss and mourning via mobile media.

Through interviews with mourners and field experts, we’ve encountered stories ranging from personal bereavement to collective non-death loss, such as ecological grief and political grief.

Many of the people we interviewed developed their own social media strategies to cope with loss on personal and collective scales.

Some chose not to share footage out of concern for their own wellbeing, respect for victims’ dignity, or due to scepticism over what positive real-world impact re-sharing would have.

Others engaged in thoughtful sharing to create spaces for understanding, hope and activism.

But sorting through these feelings shouldn’t fall entirely on individuals. Ultimately, we need better media grief literacy, and ways to hold complex public discussions that address how grief may be dealt with on both an individual and collective level.