By Pauline Ades-Mevel, Head Communication desk Reporters Sans Fontieres for Europe and Balcans
Covering women’s rights does not come without risks for reporters. RSF has established that from 2012 to 2017, the rights of at least 90 journalists in around 20 countries were seriously violated because they dared to cover or talk about women’s rights or gender issues. Several months of research has yielded the following chilling breakdown of these cases: 11 of these journalists were murdered, 12 were imprisoned, at least 25 were physically attacked, and at least 40 others were or are still being threatened on social networks.
“Never forget that a political, economic or religious crisis would suffice to call women’s rights into question,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex. Contemporary developments unfortunately prove her right. In the United States, outraged protests against President Donald Trump’s sexist remarks erupted in early 2017. In Poland, a bill banning abortion, permitted in certain circumstances since 1993, was submitted to parliament in 2016. In Iraq, a bill endangering women’s rights that included lowering the legal age for marriage was presented to the parliament in Baghdad the same year.
Covering women’s issues does not come without danger. A female editor was murdered for denouncing a sexist policy. A reporter was imprisoned for interviewing a rape victim. A woman reporter was physically attacked for defending access to tampons, while a female blogger was threatened online for criticizing a video game.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has wanted to turn the spotlight on violence against journalists covering these issues. and focused specifically on threats and violence against both men and women reporters covering women’s rights. In 2016 and 2017, RSF registered more than 60 cases in more than 20 countries of the rights of journalists being violated in connection with reporting on the condition of women. Almost 90 cases have been registered since 2012. This data has allowed us to classify the kinds of violence: murder, imprisonment, verbal attacks, physical attacks and online aggression. Cyber-harassment represents more than 40% of the cases registered.
In RSF’s view, the information predators responsible for this violence fall into three main categories. Some are religious groups. They target journalists who challenge their propaganda by advocating the emancipation of women. Some are criminal organizations that object to media meddling in their affairs by denouncing their exploitation of women. And finally, there are autocratic governments that are determined to defend their patriarchal societies. Censorship, harassment, threats, and attacks all take a dramatic toll on journalists in countries such as Afghanistan, where many are forced to abandon the profession or even flee abroad for safety reasons. But despite the threats, many other journalists have redoubled their efforts in defence of freedom of expression.
RSF has focused on several of these resistance figures. “It’s not the issue that is dangerous but the society in which it is tackled,” said Nadine Al-Budair, a Saudi journalist based in Qatar.
1.Covering women’s rights can kill
Miroslava Breach and Gauri Lankesh, journalists who provoked
“Writing about women’s rights can prove dangerous in certain countries when it means undermining traditions and arousing awareness in minds that have been subjected to a machista society,” says Juana Gallego, the head of Spain’s Gender Equality Observatory and a lecturer in journalism at the University of Barcelona, explaining the degree to which journalists can find themselves exposed by the fight for women’s rights.
Covering gender issues can kill. This is RSF’s alarming conclusion from the number of murders in the past two years. Eleven of the reporters covered by this study – 12% of the cases – have been killed in connection with their work since the start of 2016, including two leading investigative journalists in 2017, Mexico’s Miroslava Breach and India’s Gauri Lankesh. Miroslava Breach, a reporter for the Norte de Ciudad Juárez and La Jornada newspapers in Chihuahua, in northern Mexico, was shot dead in her car as she drove her son to school on March 23, 2017. Eight gunshots ended the life of “an intelligent and ethically irreproachable woman,” her colleague Olga Alicia Aragón wrote in a tribute published in La Jornada the day after this “horrible crime.” Known as “Miros” by her colleagues, Breach had been a reporter for more than 20 years, covering organized crime in Chihuahua, one of Mexico’s most violent states, and the many murders of women in Ciudad Juárez (see details on page 15). The Norte de Ciudad Juárez, a daily that had been operating for 27 years, closed eight days after Breach’s murder.
Five months later, Gauri Lankesh, the 55-year-old editor of Gauri Lankesh Patrike, a secular and feminist weekly founded by her father, was killed in Bangalore, in southern India, on September 5, 2017. Two men on a motorcycle shot her in the chest and head as she was entering her home. Her murder triggered an outcry and a wave of concern about media freedom. Courageous and outspoken, she had known her life was in danger. She openly criticized the Hindu nationalist government, accusing it of defending not a religion, but a “system of hierarchy in society” in which “women are treated as second-class creatures.
The media are constantly denigrated in India and, a few months before her death, Lankesh was sentenced by a lower court to six months in prison in a defamation case brought against her by two senior members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). “I hope other journos take note,” the BJP’s media officer said at the time.
“These killings are premeditated executions,” says Abeer Saady, an Egyptian journalist who is vice-president of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) and author of a safety manual for woman journalists. “The journalists are selected and targeted.” The staff of Tolo News, an Afghan 24-hour TV news channel that focuses on women’s issues in much of its reporting, was targeted on January 20, 2016. Seven of its employees were travelling in a Tolo News minibus when it was rammed by a vehicle loaded with explosives on the Dar ul-Aman road in west Kabul. All were killed by the blast, which was claimed by Islamists. It was the first time an Afghan media outlet had been targeted in this manner since the Taliban government fell in 2001. Other journalists were killed for similar reasons before 2016. Nawras Al-Nuaimi, a 20-year-old journalism student who covered women and youth-related stories for Al-Mosuliya TV, was gunned down by armed men near her home in Mosul, in northern Iraq, on December 15, 2013. RSF said at the time that it was “stunned and appalled by her murder.” Photographer and cameraman Dwijamani Singh was killed in Imphal, in northwestern India, on December 23, 2012 when police opened fire on a crowd demonstrating their support for an actress who had been the victim of sexual violence. According to Abeer Saady, these deaths show that, “journalists can be shot in cold blood, even when they are not in the battlefield.” And the deaths are all the more appalling when they go completely unpunished.
Murdered with impunity
No investigation was ever conducted in Iraq into Al-Nuaimi’s death. “Failure to prosecute after a crime of violence against a journalist is tantamount to encouraging the perpetrators to continue,” RSF said, deploring “the failure of the local and national authorities to respond to the deadly campaign against journalists.” Iraq is ranked 158th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2017 World Press Freedom Index, while Afghanistan is ranked 120th. In Mexico, the investigations into Miroslava Breach’s murder have been chaotic. After dragging their feet for nine months, the Chihuahua authorities announced on December 19, 2017 that the presumed killer, Ramón Andrés Zavala, had been killed. The federal police announced six days later that they had arrested the murder’s presumed instigator, Juan Carlos “El Larry” Moreno Ochoa, a member of the Los Salazares crime organization. This appeared to constitute significant progress but it fell far short of satisfying Breach’s family, who are convinced that the Chihuahua authorities were involved in her murder. The family has only recently been given access to see the judicial file on her case. According to the Mexican Institute for Competition, more than 95% of violent crime goes unpunished in Mexico, which is ranked 149th in the World Press Freedom Index. In India, which is ranked 136th, the government announced the creation of a special team to investigate Gauri Lankesh’s murder, but those responsible are still at large. A few weeks after the murder, the government of Karnataka, the state where it took place, said the killers had been identified but “evidence is still being collected to prove their guilt.”
In a press release issued at the time, RSF called on the Indian authorities “not to compromise in any way in rendering justice to a journalist who was completely uncompromising,” and to establish a national plan of action for the safety of journalists and for preventing dangers and threats against them. This request has not as yet received any response.
2- A range of abuses to silence journalists
In the past eight years, RSF has registered more than 20 cases of verbal, physical, or sexual attacks in connection with coverage of women’s issues. “We are going to cut you,” Mae Azango, a Liberian journalist who writes about genital mutilation, was told by telephone in 2010. Sajeev Gopalan, a reporter for the Indian daily Kalakaumudi, was attacked at his home in April 2017 after writing about two young girls who had been sexually assaulted by the police. During the revolution in Egypt, when sexual assaults were particularly common, the predators were “very selective about the targets,” says Abeer Saady, who used to be vice-president of Egypt’s journalists’ union. The targets were “mainly women activists or journalists” that they wanted to silence. It was in this extremely aggressive climate that Natasha Smith, a 22-year-old British reporter studying at Falmouth University, was raped in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in November 2012 while making a documentary on women’s rights as an endof-course project and for Channel 4. “I was tossed around like fresh meat among starving lions,” she said. “Men began to rip off my clothes. I was stripped naked. Their insatiable appetite to hurt me heightened. These men, hundreds of them, had turned from humans to animals.
Elena Milashina – Price on her head
Some call Elena Milashina the heir of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian investigative journalist who made a name for herself by covering human rights violations during the war in Chechnya, in the northern Caucasus. When Politkovskaya was murdered in 2006, many of her peers decided to keep their heads down and avoid sensitive subjects. But not Milashina, a fellow Russian reporter for the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta. “Writing about flowers never interested me,” she said at the time. “I want to be useful and find out about things that are not right. That’s my nature.” One of the subjects she investigated and covered was the murder of Natalia Estemirova, a fellow journalist and human rights defender based in the Chechen capital of Grozny who was found dead in neighbouring Ingushetia.
In April and May 2015, Milashina visited Chechnya to investigate the story of a 17-year-old girl who was being forced to marry a Chechen police chief 30 years older than her. In her article, Milashina revealed that the police chief, an associate of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, already had a wife and had threatened reprisals against the girl’s family if she rejected his marriage proposal. Although human rights groups campaigned for the Kremlin to intervene, the wedding finally went ahead. The police chief warned Milashina: “We have you in our sights.”
A few days after the wedding, Grozny-Inform, an online news agency created by the Chechen information ministry, posted an editorial alluding to Milashina that was headlined, “The United State moves its pawns.” It said: “If you had to dig into Milashina’s biography, you would find points in common with Politkovskaya. She uses the same tactics and she will probably end up like her, only this time it will not come from the Caucasus.
Online threats
Aggressive comments and insults also fly around social networks. “Presstitute,” an amalgam of “press” and “prostitute,” is widely used to insult women journalists in India. “I have been called a whore, a bitch and ‘presstitute’,” said Barkha Dutt, an Indian journalist who was trolled online after the publication in 2015 of “This Unquiet Land - Stories from India’s Fault Lines,” a book in which she describes the abuse to which she was subjected as a child and adolescent. “My mobile number has been shared publicly on multiple online platforms urging people to send me abusive and threatening messages,” she told the Hindustan Times, which devoted a series to cyber-harassment entitled “Let’s talk about trolls.”
How could an award-winning journalist, one who was elected personality of the year by her peers in 2012, end up being threatened with rape and murder online? It is the feeling of omnipotence that social networks create among their users that is to blame according to Bobby Ghosh, who was Hindustan Times editor until last year. “It gives people the licence to behave in a way that they would not dare to do, or even think of, in a non-digital world,” he said. In all, RSF has registered 39 cases of cyber-violence, representing 43% of the cases examined in this study. It is the most common form of abuse suffered by journalists covering women’s issues.
Cyber-violence is a phenomenon that knows no borders, that affects the poorest countries and the most democratic ones alike. RSF has found many cases in India, the United States, and France. All of the online attacks mentioned in this report targeted women journalists – a trend that seems to be confirmed by a survey that the think-tank Demos conducted in the United Kingdom in 2014. According to RSF, women journalists received about three times more inappropriate comments than their male colleagues.
“What is important to notice is the violence of these messages,” says Elisa Lees Muñoz, the executive director of the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). Anita Sarkeesian, a blogger critical of the way women are portrayed in video games, was the target of a hate campaign in Canada in July 2012 that included rape and death threats and sexist insults. “Most of the threats and insults against women are sexual” and come “crashing down on women,” says Abeer Saady. Sarkeesian received many pornographic drawings showing her being raped by video game characters. But worst of all was the Flash game that was created with the sole aim of allowing players to digitally beat her up. She ended up filing a complaint and fleeing her home. “The video game community and the geek community in general are really sexist,” the French blogger known as Mar_Lard said in an article that led to insults and threats against her as well. The threats are sometimes especially direct and precise.
In France, the journalist Nadia Daam was the target of a cyber-harassment campaign orchestrated by trolls on the Jeuxvideo.com website’s “Blabla Forum” for 18 to 25-year-olds in November 2017 after she used her morning spot on Radio Europe 1 to criticize the sabotaging of an “anti-jerk” emergency number set up by feminists for women who are the victims of harassment.
She was immediately deluged with rape and death threats and insults on social networks and via her email accounts and mobile phone. Attempts were made to hack into her instant messaging and social network accounts. She received emails informing her that she had been registered on porn and paedophile websites with her home address. When she accessed private chat areas on Discord, an app used by this community, she discovered that information had been gathered about her. One person said he had checked out the neighbourhood where she lived. Another talked of the possibility of “raping her corpse” and mentioned her daughter. One said he would hammer on her door in the middle of the night. Because of such specific threats, the police advised her to stay somewhere else for a few days. RSF is concerned to see cyber-harassment being used as a way to pressure journalists to shut up. These online conspiracies taking advantage of the virality of social networks now pose a threat to journalists that must be taken very seriously.
- Leading predators
- Authoritarian regimes
- Shut up or resist
- Promote coverage of women’s rights
- Take account of the specific needs of covering women’s issues
- Ensure that journalists are aware of gender practices
- Take initiatives to create gender-related positions (e.g the New York Times created the positon of a gender editor in October 2017)
- Take account of the specific nature of attacks on journalists – mainly women journalists – who cover stories related to women’s rights
- Establish an internal emergency procedure for cases of threats
- Take screen shots of threatening messages on social networks
- Do not hesitate to report threats or attacks to the authorities
- Get to know your subject matter in order to be able to evaluate the dangers before going into the field
- Find out about cultural and social practices in the country where you are going, how journalists are perceived and what security is like on the ground
- Decide together with your editors who is the best person to cover this kind of story: man/woman
- Try to work in a team when in dangerous places
- Ensure that sources are protected
- Delete all information of personal nature from laptops, smartphones and tablets
- Secure professional data that could compromise you or your sources
- Ensure that stories are not published until you have left areas controlled by militias or armed groups to avoid being spotted