On the occasion of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the Journalists and Writers Foundation organized a virtual panel discussion “Violence Against Women Journalists around the World” on March 9, Thursday at 11:00 AM via JWF`s YouTube Channel which was also live streamed at the NGO CSW`s online events portal.

With the rise of undemocratic regimes, 2022 marked another milestone in deteriorating media independence and press freedom. Countries with ongoing armed or internal conflicts such as Ukraine, Iran, Russia, and Turkey continue to remain at the top of the list where women journalists combat the highest number of cases with many different forms of human rights violations. The media is not truly free and inclusive with the equal participation of women journalists, who have an important leadership to cover gender-specific news and raise awareness on the deteriorating women`s rights which are often under-reported. Despite the various challenges, while women journalists continue their transformative work to report on the systemic and grave human rights violations, the alarmingly increasing injustices that they encounter are overlooked. The most frequent forms of violence against women journalists include physical attacks in the field, arbitrary detentions, defamation campaigns, and legal harassment.

In her opening remarks, UN Representative of the Journalists and Writers Foundation, Cemre Ulker, underlined that women are subject to intersectional violence on many different grounds but online attacks, defamation campaigns, physical, and psychological violence, legal harassment continue to be increasingly reported as women journalists are on the frontline documenting various atrocity crimes taking places across the globe. Ms. Ulker indicated “Women in the media have an important role to disseminate critical information through a gender-sensitive lens and combat against the discriminatory media literacy. Even in the direst settings, women journalists are being subject to harassment.”

This online CSW panel discussion convening prominent women journalists was moderated by the award-winning Stephanie Fillion, a New York-based reporter specializing in foreign affairs and human rights and a United Nations correspondent. In her introductory remarks, Ms. Fillion shared various insights from her career path facing gender-related challenges during her reporting in Canada. As a UN correspondent, she underlined that she covers just violations from New York and she says they are dependent on the courageous work of reporters, journalists working on the ground, facing all life-threatening risks to convey information to the globe. 

The first speaker of the session, Dr. Gulnoza Said, Head of the Europe and Central Asia Program of the Committee to Protect Journalists spoke on the shrinking space of women journalists and the forms of violations that they encounter. “The ultimate form of violence against journalists is murder,” said Dr. Said who added that in 2022, seven women journalists were killed on assignment, four out of which were covering the war in Ukraine. In most of these cases, when journalists are murdered and accused of doing their job, justice has not been achieved. Since September 2022, CPJ has documented the detention of about a hundred journalists and these numbers are unprecedented. Dr. Said also mentioned that the world`s longest-imprisoned journalist, Hatice Duman, is deprived of her liberty by fabricated charges and remains in Turkish prisons since 2003. She said that Belarus is another country with a high number of journalists behind the bars, being the world`s 5th largest jailer of media workers. In her remarks, Dr. Said also highlighted that women journalists are also under pressure as they are most frequently threatened by their children as well, not the harassment that male journalists, who are fathers encounter. 

Following Dr. Gulnoza Said`s talk, Iryna Matviyishyn, Journalist at Kyiv Independent talked about the role and experiences of women journalists covering war crimes in Ukraine. Full-scale invasion created prominent challenges for journalists to report from the field. Covering the war in your own country is nothing to compare to being a war correspondent in another state says Ms. Matviyishyn, “we continue to feel its tremendous psychological effects even after a whole year of a full-scale war”. The full cycle of being in an information hub with war updates is quite depressing. Ms. Matviyishyn indicate that most of the journalists covering the war in Ukraine are female reporters and their voices are seen and heard globally. Women`s presence at the frontline from trenches, war zones, and battlefields is very important; but despite all, gender challenges are still visible in Ukraine, especially in online spaces as female journalists face more virtual harassment than their male counterparts.

Mayra K. Yazdari, TV Producer and Journalist at CBN News spoke on the best practices of Iranian women journalists to create global solidarity for women in Iran. Ms. Yazdari says that the situation is different in Iran compared to Ukraine, as Iran is occupied by its government, the Islamic Regime, taking more than 80 million hostages. Freedom of expression drives all other fundamental human rights said Ms. Yazdari and underlined that under the Islamic Regime, Iran is the third biggest jailer of journalists with the lowest freedom of expression rankings. She presented the findings of the Tehran Journalists Association which indicates that since the spark of the nationwide revolutionary movement, the regime arrested over 70 journalists. Mayra Yazdari also reminded the audience that the two women journalists who reported the brutal killing of Mahsa Jina Amini, Niloufar Hamedi, and Elaheh Mohammadi are still in jail. The regime continues to incriminate the women on the frontline with false accusations. Ms. Yazdari noted that media is used and misused by the government as a propaganda machine of the Iranian regime, indoctrinating the public against the Western states and the people as enemies.

Lastly, Marina Dias, Journalist from The Washington Post in Brasilia, talked about the forms of increasing violence against women journalists and discussed cases from Brazil. Ms. Dias said that professional journalism has always disturbed public authorities, in Brazil and all over, because women journalists challenge them, and investigate the misuse of their power in the office. But since the end of the military dictatorship, in Brazil, in 1985, according to Ms. Dias, there had never seen the kind of institutionalized violence against the press that we saw during the 4 years of the Bolsonaro government. She also briefed the audience on the recent physical attack that she encountered at a riot by former President Jair Bolsonaro’s allies. The event concluded as panelists exchanged views and inputs at the end of the session and addressed questions received from the audience.