Recorders often face difficulties when making status categorisations, such as contradictions, ambiguity, concealment, misinformation, or barriers to investigating status.
Difficulties in determining status that recorders had to overcome arose for a number of reasons:
- The victim’s family or armed group gave misinformation or concealed a victim’s status;
- The perpetrator of the incident gave misinformation or concealed a victim’s status;
- Difficulty accessing relevant information;
- Grey areas in the definitions that the recorder used and/or data sources used.
DEFINITION AND CATEGORISATION IN CASUALTY RECORDING, p. 23