WUNRN
WORLD PRESS FREEDOM DAY – MAY 3, 2015 – THEMES
*Independent & Quality Media
*Gender & Media (With Special Focus on the 20th Anniversary of the Beijing Declaration & Platform for Action)
*Digital Safety for Journalists & Their Sources
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Reporters Without Borders
http://en.rsf.org/women-journalists-commitment-and-05-03-2015,47647.html
WOMEN JOURNALISTS’ COMMITMENTS AND CHALLENGES
Reporters Without Borders pays tribute to ten women journalists
from the four corners of the globe, ten women with different backgrounds who
have told us about their jobs, their commitment and the specific challenges and
dangers they face in the course of their work.
More and more women are entering journalism, a profession long
reserved for men. Some have chosen to focus on investigative reporting,
covering human rights violations, corruption or other subjects that are
off-limits in their society. Like their male colleagues, they are the targets
of threats, intimidation, physical violence and even murder because of their
reporting.
But because they are women, the harassment often takes specific,
gender-based forms, including sexual smears, violence of a sexual nature and
threats against their families. The very fact of being a woman journalist is
regarded in some societies as a “violation of social norms” and may lead to
reprisals.
In a profession that is still mainly masculine, many women prefer
not to speak out about the specific difficulties and dangers to which they are
exposed in connection with their work. But a worldwide study published last
year by the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) spoke for itself.
Nearly two thirds of the 977 women journalists questioned in the
IWMF survey said they had been the victims of intimidation, threats or abuse in
connection with their work. In a third of the cases, the person responsible was
their boss. Nearly half had been subjected to sexual harassment and more than a
fifth to physical violence. Despite the psychological impact of this abuse,
most of the victims say nothing.
But some do. “I was often threatened by phone or in anonymous
letters for two years (...) I was warned that I would be responsible for the
deaths of members of my family if I did not stop working,” an Afghan woman
journalist told Reporters Without Borders last year. In the end, she did resign
but she went public about the harassment. Women in a patriarchal society often
give up working because the authorities do not protect them and impunity is the
norm.
Physical safety is a constant challenge for Zaina Erhaim,
who trains citizen-journalists in northern Syria and for Farida Nekzad, the
founder of Afghanistan’s Wakht News Agency. Hla Hla Htay,
anAgence France-Presse reporter in Burma, and Marcela
Turatti, who freelances for Proceso in Mexico, constantly
confront the difficulties of being a woman in “a man’s profession.”
Iran’s Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani and
Liberia’s Mae Azango describe the harassment they have received
because of their journalistic commitment to women’s rights. Khadija
Ismayilova, Azerbaijan’s leading investigative journalist, and Brankica
Stanković, Serbia’s most famous TV reporter, have been subjected to sexual
threats.
In Democratic Republic of Congo, Solange Lusiku Nsimire,
the only female newspaper editor in the eastern Kivu region, is worried about
here family, which has been the target of threats and attacks. Her concern is
shared by Morocco’s Fatima Al Ifriki, who even stopped writing at
one point in order to protect her family.
Noting the dangers that women journalists confront, the UN Plan of
Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity stresses the “importance
of taking a gender-sensitive approach.” Such an approach needs urgent
implementation.
Investigative reporter Khadija Ismayilova has
specialized in covering Azerbaijan’s most taboo subject – corruption and
conflicts of interest at the highest government level. To shut her up, a
sex-tape was used in a blackmail attempt in March 2012 but, far from putting a
stop to her reporting, she re-issued her most important articles.
Ismayilova gives as good as she gets in her
relations with a regime bent on silencing all critics. And she has paid the
price – smeared in the government media, prosecuted on spying and defamation
charges and often picked up for questioning. She was finally arrested on absurd
charges last December after spending several months following the cases of
detained human rights defenders – organizing legal support and assistance for
their families, helping to daw up a list of political prisoners and providing
the international community with constant alerts.
The authorities have imprisoned Ismayilova
but they have not managed to silence her. In letters smuggled out of prison,
she has continued to criticize the government and call for resistance. As a
result she has been placed in solitary confinement.
From a cell just a few dozen metres from
hers, detained fellow journalist Seymour Khazi paid tribute to her in an open
letter in January: “I don’t know if it is due to the extremely patriarchal
nature of our society (...) but when they wanted to refer to a woman’s
strength, determination or courage, our fathers always said: ‘This woman is
like a man.’ Nowadays (...) to refer to a man’s character and strength of will,
I would rather say (...) this man in like Khadija.”
Brankica Stanković has headed Insajder –
Serbian TV station B92’s flagship investigative TV programme – ever since its
creation in 2004, paying a high price for daring to expose corruption and shed
light on the links between the criminal underworld and Serbian politicians and
businessmen. The threats against her have grown with the passing years, to the
point that a four-member police detail has accompanied her everwhere since
2009.
The interior ministry ordered this inconvenient
but necessary security measure at a time when she was the target of an
extraordinary number of threats and insults, especially on social networks.
After an Insajder episode about the judicial system’s failure to address crimes
by Belgrade football club Partizan’s extremist supporters, an effigy of
Stanković in the form of an inflatable doll was brandished in the stands of
Partizan’s stadium during a European match on 16 December 2009, as supporters
chanted that “the whore Brankica” would suffer the same fate as Slavko Ćuruvija,
a journalist murdered in 1999. They finally stabbed the doll.
Stanković has not let up in her investigative
reporting, despite the continuing threats and the constraints of her police
escort, and wrote a book entitled Insajder: My Story in 2013.
Last year, she was profiled in the Reporters Without Borders list of
“Information Heroes” and received the Courage in Journalism Award from the
International Women’s Media Foundation.
Hla Hla Htay began working as a journalist in
Burma under the military dictatorship and has been an Agence France-Presse
reporter since 2004. She was the first reporter to get photos of Naypyidaw, the
new capital that the paranoid generals had secretly begun building. She covered
the bloody crackdown on the “Saffron
Revolution” in 2007 and the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis the
following year, when the military censored all attempts to expose their
disastrous mismanagement of humanitarian assistance.
“Under the military, we were often
followed and I had to keep changing phones to contact my sources, which was
very expensive,” she said. During the years of military rule, Hla Hla Htay
managed to participate in a journalism programme in Rangoon and did a
three-month course in Cambodia, despite the dangers involved in any trip
abroad. She joined AFP after two years as an editor at Today Publishing House
and is now AFP’s Rangoon bureau chief.
“Many people think journalism is a man’s
job. I remember that some of my male colleagues used to ‘joke’ that it was
thanks to my ‘feminine wiles’ that I managed to get an exclusive or verify
information. As a Burmese woman, working as a journalist means confronting
gender issues and cultural taboos. As far as I’m concerned, I pay attention to
my professional honesty and try not to worry about this kind of discrimination.”
Co-founder and former editor of the Pajhwok
Afghan News agency, Farida Nekzad has spent the past 12 years being
threatened by media freedom’s enemies, who have repeatedly tried to kidnap or
kill her. While investigating female journalist Zakia Zaki’s murder in 2007,
she received phone calls and emails promising her the same fate. They just
reinforced her determination to defend freedom of information and women’s
rights.
She launched the Wakht News Agency in
2008 and still runs it, employing women journalists to cover a range of issues
including women’s rights. Despite financial difficulties, the agency has a
network of correspondents throughout Afghanistan and continues to be one the
country’s leading independent news outlets.
In 2014, Nekzad was put in charge of the
Independent Election Commission’s media commission, with the job of monitoring
media impartiality during the presidential election campaign. Despite a climate
of extreme tension, she spent several months investigating media violations of
the electoral rules and complaints from the public about election coverage.
The winner of many international prizes
including the Courage in Journalism Award from the International
Women’s Media Foundation, Nekzad continues to spearhead the fight
for women’s rights in Afghanistan and to campaign for the overhaul of media
legislation with the aim of getting more protection for journalists in their
often dangerous work.
A journalist, writer and translator, Noushin
Ahmadi Khorasani is the founder and editor of the Feminist School website and one of
Iran’s leading women’s rights advocates. For the past 20 years, she has
tirelessly used her writing skills to condemn discrimination and abuses against
women and to promote change in Iran.
She is also one of the founders of the
campaign for “One Million
Signatures” to a petition for changes to Iranian laws that
discriminate against women – a campaign for which she and her fellow activists
have paid a high price. Harassed constantly by the authorities for the past 20
years because of her writing and her defence of women’s rights, she has been
arrested several times and was given a one-year suspended prison sentence in
2012.
Although blocked inside Iran, her website is
a key source of information about the problems of women in Iran, and a forum
for debating these problems. Leading writers on women’s rights such as Mansoreh
Shojai and Azadeh Davachi are regular contributors. In all, Khorasani has
written around 20 books and 100 articles, from those she wrote for Jense
Dovom (The Second Sex), a periodical published in the early 1990s, to
“Shirin wants to be president,” her latest book.
The only newspaper editor in the eastern Kivu
region who is a woman, Solange Lusiku Nsimire is very proud of Le
Souverain, a monthly that does investigative reporting, and continues to
pursue its founder’s goal of producing an independent publication that reflects
a range of opinions. “When we denounce embezzlement, inter-communal tension
or the working conditions in mines, we do it for everyone, in the name of media
freedom,” she said.
A mother of seven, she is also trying to
revive an appreciation of the written word that 30 years of war have destroyed.
“I want to contribute to Kivu’s collective memory, to document events for
future generations and to prevent the spread of rumour and disinformation.”
Her mission of peace is challenging but she tackles it with energy and, for her
pains, is the constant target of threats not only from the government but also
the opposition and sometimes even civil society. “We pay a high price for
our neutrality.”
As well as producing the magazine, she likes
to stimulate a public debate and organizes participative press reviews in which
members of the public and local government officials join in discussing press
articles. Her political and social investigative reporting has resulted in her
being banned from news conferences held by the provincial authorities. But she
can rely on being fed information by colleagues working for less serious media
outlets.
Is she ever tempted to stop? “This would
be to disown myself. I don’t know how to do anything else.” Unfortunately,
members of her family have also been the victims of threats and attacks as a
result of her commitment. “I chose my profession but what about them? What
have they done?”
Mae Azango has been a journalist for 12 years
but it’s the articles she has been writing since 2010 about female genital
mutilation in rural areas of Liberia that have made her known to the general
public.
In traditional areas of Central West Africa,
the Sande secret society’s “bush schools” prepare girls for marriage and to be
mothers, with graduation consisting of a genital mutilation ceremony. Azango
had to go into hiding for a month after writing an article that described the
appalling violence of one of these ceremonies. “I wanted to draw the
public’s attention to the public health dangers of such practices,” she
said.
But that is not how the Sande’s guardians saw
it. She began getting lots of threats. “We are going to cut you,”
anonymous callers told her. Far from being intimidated, she wrote another
article about this secret society, this time about its political and economic
importance in rural areas. In 2013, her reporting led President Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf to condemn FGM, a hitherto taboo subject.
Azango does not just write about women’s
rights. In a country where newspapers seem interested only in politics and
business stories, she tries to cover the lives of ordinary people. “I write
about human rights, seizures of land from small farmers, development issues,
human trafficking and police impunity... I write for those who have no voice,
for the poor, for those cannot speak out, for those who get the government’s
attention only during elections and are then abandoned. I write to create a
public debate, so that change can take place.”
A freelancer for the magazine Proceso and
founder of the “Journalists on Foot Network,” Marcela Turati became a
journalist because she thought it was “a way to change things.” She
specializes in covering violence, especially cartel-related violence, focusing
on its victims and its impact on Mexican society with the aim of increasing
awareness of this issue. It was not an easy choice in what is the western
hemisphere’s deadliest country for journalists, one where physical safety is a
constant challenge for those daring to cover sensitive subjects.
When she started out, she assumed there was
no difference between a male journalist and a female one. Nowadays she thinks
otherwise. “It’s much more difficult for a woman to be sent to a dangerous
area (...) you have to work two or three times as hard to be able to go. I
don’t know if it’s due to machismo or overprotectiveness, but you have to work
harder than the men.”
She is concerned not just about this form of
discrimination but also about the sexual harassment to which women journalists
are exposed. She has found that the problem is not taken seriously. Women are
doubted when they report sexual harassment. They are regarded as crazy or
hysterical. People think they are seeking attention. To improve the situation
of women journalists, Turati insists on the importance of combatting impunity,
conducting investigations with a gender perspective and offering appropriate
protection to victims
Zaina Erhaim graduated from the University of
Damascus in 2007 and was doing a post-graduate course in London when the Syrian
revolution erupted in 2011. She obtained her master’s in international
journalism while helping to create the Local Coordination Committee media
centres and doing frequent visits to Syria. Then went back to Syria as soon as
she could.
“Counting the martyrs and barrel bombs was
easy” but surviving was a permanent challenge as she roamed the liberated
areas amid air-strikes and bombardments and tried to document life, to describe
“shop-keepers who continue to sell their fruit and vegetables in the ruins
of a bombed building (...) children who play amid the graves after school.”
“Lending my eyes to the world so that it
sees what I see” was complicated and was not enough. She had to do more. As
a journalist, she decided to help those who are now virtually the only source
of news coverage on the ground in Syria – citizen-journalists. In 2013, she
became a trainer so that the photos, video footage and reports they were
risking their lives to produce would be taken seriously and broadcast
internationally.
For the past two years, she has been teaching
citizen-journalists in Aleppo, Raqqa, Deir Ezzor and Idlib how to construct
media reports and has been helping them to get published. “Some of them now
work for international media. It’s very satisfying to learn that an activist
has found a job in a TV station.”
She transmits her passion as well as her
know-how. Armed with cameras and notebooks, these men and women follow her lead
in ripping aside the veil of violence in order to shed light on an alternative
Syria in which “people love, get married, have friends, have children (...)
an admirable people fighting for its future.” The future Syria that shines
in her eyes.
“I’m free now, I’ve broken my chains.”
So says Fatima Al Ifriki, a Rabat-born journalist who has had an unusual
career. The daughter of a policeman and a housewife, she entered journalism
almost by chance but within a few years became one of the national TV
broadcaster’s leading presenters.
Despite her professional success, she became
restless at the end of 2010 as turmoil swept the Arab world. In Morocco, the
adoption of a new constitution by referendum in July 2011 failed to satisfy the
hopes and dreams of a new generation that gave rise to the 20 February
Movement. For Ifriki, it was a rebirth. “These courageous young people were
demanding what I’d always dreamed of. They were demanding more freedom and
democracy, and more respect for human rights, while we, this country’s elite,
had never dared to go so far.”
When Ifriki began spearheading calls for
freedom of expression and information, the national TV station shunted her
aside and she began writing weekly columns for Arabic-language newspapers such
as Akhbar El Yaoum, expressing a level of criticism that is rare in
Morocco. After her family was threatened, she stopped writing for several
months to protect her privacy. But she soon resumed contributing to Akhbar
El Yaoumand its website El Yaoum 24 and was one of the
first to condemn the arrest of Ali Anouzla,
the editor of another news website, in September 2013, participating in his
support committee until his release.
Although she is still threatened by possible reprisals, her
continuing courage and determination can be seen in Freedom Now, a media
freedom NGO that she and such prestigious figures as Khadija Riyadi, winner of
the 2013 UN Human Rights Prize, launched in 2014. The government’s refusal to
register this NGO suggests that the road to freedom could be long and tortuous.