The first fundamental rule when working with children is their safety. They are to be protected at all costs and especially in high-risk situations. They are not pawns in the socio-political spheres of adults.

Ask Marian Wright Edelman, legendary founder of the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., if she would support cameras being placed in the hands of youths to photograph criminal activity in the most dangerous neighborhoods in the nation's capital, and she would probably conclude that this would be far too dangerous for the young people and their families.

In January 2007, B'Tselem launched "Shooting Back," a video advocacy project focusing on the territories.

Its project provides Palestinians, including youths, living in high-conflict areas with video cameras. Its goal is to bring the reality of life under occupation to the attention of the Israeli and international public, exposing and seeking redress for violations of human rights.

I first heard of B'Tselem's project in July 2008 when I received a call at my home in Los Angeles from a friend in Boston telling me that Brian Williams of NBC News had just aired a story about people using video cameras in Israel in a program called Shooting Back. She asked if I was connected to this group, as she knew me as the founder of Shooting Back. Apparently, B'Tselem, which has raised substantial sums of money from US philanthropists and foundations, had been visiting the US to make media appearances to further its cause and raise money. As a result, its efforts were widely covered in mainstream publications.

I viewed the NBC story and researched the project on the Web, where one publication, The Telegraph, featured B'Tselem's project and headlined its story "Cameras as weapons." I was surprised to learn that the group in Israel was calling itself Shooting Back - an infringement of my ownership of the registered trademark and service mark - but I was even more surprised to find that my personal name was also linked with this enterprise. While my own work, both as a photojournalist and as a photographer working with disenfranchised children, may resonate in some ways with the goals of B'Tselem's project, the more I researched the more disturbed I was at being linked to a project whose actions, in my estimation, violate youths rights to safety.

THE NONPROFIT organization that I founded in the 1980s in Washington, Shooting Back, Inc., was dedicated to empowering children at risk by teaching them photography to document their world and bring public awareness to critical issues in their lives, such as homelessness. Work from children at Shooting Back garnered international publicity through television and print media, traveling exhibitions, books, video and, more recently, the Internet.

The work of Shooting Back is often acknowledged as a pioneering effort by the literally hundreds of people worldwide who have subsequently created similar projects under the rubric of participatory photography or photographic empowerment - giving cameras to disenfranchised people, mostly youth, to document their lives.

Giving people cameras to use as weapons against criminal activity can be a dangerous act for the people using them, especially kids, their families and other loved ones. It should be done with the utmost caution. People in the field debate the ethics of our projects, how they are run, what their impact is on the participants and how the images are subsequently used.

With B'Tselem's project, I was struck with the potential danger to the kids given cameras to document human rights violations in an extremely volatile environment in the Middle East. For a start, they were being drawn to potential conflict hot spots in which they might be exposed to real physical danger, from either side.

Furthermore, the kids are named on B'Tselem's website and their faces are shown on television news. Criminal prosecution is an outcome of several of the videos, putting the young videographer in the stressful position of potentially having to testify in court and increasing his or her vulnerability. Additionally, B'Tselem staffers have reported that they have been verbally and physically attacked. Has it not occurred to them that a similar fate might await the kids given the cameras to film abuses?

I don't claim to be familiar with the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the surface, the work of groups working to end human rights abuses, such as B'Teselem, is laudatory. However, it astounds me that no one has talked about the obvious risks and dangers to the youth.

The camera is sometimes a dangerous weapon not only for the subject but also for the photographer.

In a recent letter to B'Tselem, I requested it cease and desist using the name Shooting Back. I don't want my name connected to a project, whatever its intentions, that I believe puts children at risk. The response was to retain a large New York law firm to defend its use of the trademark without my authorization and, in my view, infringement of my trademark.

The writer is the founder of Shooting Back and a professor at University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication.

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