Inside Expression - November 2024

This month: Together, we can make women journalists #EquallySafe

These 16 Days, will you take a feminist approach to the safety of women journalists?

Women’s right to freedom of expression is essential to ending inequality and gender-based discrimination. Upholding this right means ensuring that women can share their ideas and opinions without censorship, retaliation, discrimination, or violence.

Gender-based violence deprives half the population of this fundamental right.

Gender-based violence, and the fear and threat of such violence, silences women in countless ways:

• At protests, police brutality prevents women from expressing their views on social issues
• In the streets, sexual harassment prevents women from taking up public space
• Online, abuse prevents women from sharing their views and accessing information

The price is high for women who refuse to be silenced. Women who, despite the risks, raise their voices and speak truth to power. Women who insist on denouncing gender-based discrimination and holding leaders and corporations accountable for wrongdoing.

On International Women Human Rights Defenders Day, we are looking at how gender-based violence affects women journalists – and how we can make them safer.  

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According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 11 female journalists have been killed so far in 2024. Just this month, UNESCO revealed that the number of female journalists killed is at its highest level since 2017 – and 85% of journalists’ murders go unpunished.

Killings are the most extreme method of censoring journalists – but they are not the only form that censorship takes.

ARTICLE 19 has found that women journalists face uniquely gendered risks: from workplace harassment to online abuse and physical attacks.

These attacks have a chilling effect on women’s right to contribute to public debate. A recent study found that, in response to online attacks – including death and rape threats – nearly a third of women journalists self-censored, and 1 in 5 withdrew from all online interaction.

The effects of this silencing are far-reaching: When women see other women abused for speaking out, they are less likely to raise their own voices.

This is disastrous for society’s right to know. When women journalists are hounded out of the public sphere, society is deprived of the perspectives of half the population, issues that affect women receive less media coverage, and we all become less informed.

A gendered problem calls for a gendered solution

Despite the deeply gendered nature of attacks against women journalists, measures to improve journalists’ safety often fail to consider women’s particular needs, and women are often excluded from decision-making processes.

And women journalists themselves are not a monolithic group.

The risks and abuse they face differ depending on their race, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, and other characteristics. Those who already face oppression in one form or another typically face greater risks and harsher abuse.

‘Black, Indigenous, Jewish, Arab and lesbian women journalists ... experienced both the highest rates and most severe impacts of online violence’

— International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) Online Violence Project

That’s why an intersectional feminist approach is needed to enhance the safety of all women journalists, everywhere.

Such an approach requires us to attend to women’s everyday lives, in all their diversity. It reminds us that women journalists are the experts on their own experiences. And it enables us to learn from their creativity and resilience in the face of structural inequalities.

#EquallySafe: Towards a feminist approach to the safety of journalists

Since 2022, ARTICLE 19 has worked to develop and roll out this approach through our project Equally Safe: Towards a feminist approach to the safety of journalists.

In 2024 we start the second phase of this project, which aims to consolidate practical approaches to women journalists’ safety, using a feminist and intersectional perspective.

‘Building feminist approaches to the safety of women journalists requires rethinking what justice and safety means to those facing gendered  attacks – attacks that impede the exercise of their human rights.’  

– Paulina Gutiérrez , Head of Protection and Civic Space, ARTICLE 19

Equally Safe takes a bottom-up approach.

We began by speaking with a diverse group of women journalists on the ground in 6 countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Nepal, Paraguay, and Sri Lanka. They told us all about the risks they face, the solutions they are creating, and how allies worldwide can support them.

And we designed the project around their needs and priorities.

Women facing violence and discrimination are the authorities on their own lives and experiences. They must be at the decision-making table, designing solutions and guiding their adoption.

In collaboration with women journalists and feminists, we have created a range of resources – including a global research report, 6 case studies, and a set of 3 practical guidelines – to help civil society organisations and policymakers apply an intersectional feminist approach in their own work.

Our guidelines, for example, show how organisations working with women journalists can mainstream this approach into their work on:

• Monitoring and documenting attacks against journalists: From planning to interviewing survivors, avoiding re-victimisation, and managing the psychosocial impact of this vital work.
• Advocating on emblematic cases: From defining advocacy goals to selecting a case, managing expectations, and devising a post-advocacy exit strategy.
• Organising protection training: From safe transport and childcare considerations for participants to curriculum design, creating a safe space, dealing with trauma, and post-event review.

Drawing on ARTICLE 19’s experience, women journalists’ priorities, and global good practice, we show how civil society organisations can make their limited time and resources count.

These 16 Days, will you take a feminist approach to the safety of women journalists?

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