Fearless, female ... and in the line of fire
After the murders of two high-profile women reporters this week, Judith Woods asks if women on the front line are more at risk than men
As news emerged yesterday that a female investigative journalist had been killed in a car bomb on Malta, the shock waves were felt across a continent.
Daphne Caruana Galizia, 53, was a fearless reporter who had accused the island’s top politicians of corruption. Her voice was silenced with horrifying finality when her hire car was blown to smithereens; a killing calculated to serve as both punishment and warning.
Meanwhile, nobody yet knows why Mexican broadcast journalist Cecilia Mendez was murdered in a hail of bullets the same day, as she drove her car through Guadalajara.
These two assassinations bring to mind the words of former Reuters correspondent Anne Sebba, who wrote in her book on female war reporters,
Battling for News, that in this day and age “women are targets”.
Sebba was speaking of conflicts in the Middle East, where a Western woman who enters the theatre of war is often regarded with hostility: “Women are targeted more, because a lot of these conflicts are now in Muslim countries,” she says. “They see Western women wearing provocative – that’s their word, not mine – clothes, and therefore, they feel, the West has to be taught a lesson, that they’re fair game.”
Sexual assault and intimidation are commonplace; CBS war correspondent Lara Logan was beaten, sexually assaulted and, in her words, “raped with hands” in 2011 while covering the Egyptian Revolution in Tahrir Square. She spoke out in order to try to remove the stigma, but her experience is not unique.
In 2013, the Uk-based International News Safety Institute and Us-based International Women’s Media Foundation published a report which found nearly two thirds reported some form of harassment or violence on the job; six had been raped. Meanwhile, Mexico’s National Network of Journalists has documented the murder of 19 female journalists. Could it be their instinct to dig for personal stories puts them in more danger?
“From what I’ve seen on the front line, the women appear more driven than men,” one male foreign correspondent admitted. “Maybe it’s because they had to fight that little bit harder to get the posting, but I suspect they genuinely do care more about the human stories behind the headlines. That’s why they always come across as more intrepid, always pushing for a new angle, a fresh perspective.”
In that respect gender can work in a woman’s favour. Phoebe Greenwood, a freelance reporter based in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, says women often make the majority of correspondents first on the ground in the Middle East.
“Obviously there were the superstars who paved the way such as Kate Adie, Marie Colvin and Orla Guerin but now we are on a total equal footing to the men when it comes to reporting in conflict zone,” she says.
Contrary to Sebba’s experience, she believes they “sort of become a third gender and in some ways are safer because we are women. The Muslim men treat us with a kind of deference and actually talk to us about the war, their strategy and their weapons – which they wouldn’t do with the women of their country. It’s very difficult for the male journalists in Muslim countries to talk to the women and children. As a result women can often get more colour about a conflict or the latest situation with greater ease.”
She mentions the late, great Colvin whose loss, five years ago, is still mourned. Her life had been spent in dogged pursuit of the truth; undaunted by losing her left eye while covering the Sri Lankan conflict in 2001, she was singularly unfazed by Colonel Gaddafi’s efforts to seduce her whenever she interviewed him. But in 2012 Colvin was deliberately tracked down and murdered by the Syrian government, seeking to silence her reporting on civilian casualties in the besieged city of Homs, according to a lawsuit filed by her family against Bashar al-assad’s regime.
Her name has passed into the annals along with the groundbreaking women reporters who began their mark on history early last century. The Daily Telegraph’s Clare Hollingworth, who died earlier this year aged 105, was the first journalist to report the outbreak of the Second World War, landing her the scoop of the century, just three days into the job. She later bore witness to horrors in Vietnam, Algeria, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, reported on the cultural revolution in China, and was credited with the first and last interviews with the Shah of Iran.
A reporter’s reporter, Hollingworth preferred the eye of the storm to being in the spotlight. But in recent years those two points have very much converged; social media making it both easier to report, but easier to be tracked.
The Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was unflinching in her coverage of state atrocities carried out in Chechnya; the authorities relentless in their pursuit of her. She endured violence, intimidation, was subjected to a mock execution and poisoned on a plane when she went to cover the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis. Two years later she was murdered in the lift at the block of flats where she lived. Five men were jailed but it was never revealed who had ordered her contract killing.
The roll call of female reporters in hostile situations reveals any number of household names, from Lyse Doucet at the BBC to Us-based Janine di Giovanni, who received the Courage in Journalism Award last year for her reports from war zones including Syria and Iraq. Sky News reporter Alex Crawford trumped her peers by riding into Tripoli with the Libyan rebels in 2011, but has admitted she feels “scarred by seeing too much death”.
Meanwhile, British-born CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour, who has dodged many bullets in her time, insists that she is not a woman reporter, but a reporter. Gender is not on the agenda. It is a viewed broadly echoed by The Telegraph’s Middle East correspondent, Josie Ensor, 29, based in Beirut. “War is actually a bit of a leveller,” she believes, but intimates that sometimes softer skills can come into play.
“I don’t know how much difference it makes being a woman covering conflict but I’ve seen enough of them defuse tense situations and negotiate their way into places they’d been told were off-limits to believe it can only be an asset.”
But Daphne Caruana Galizia (see
Obituaries, Page 29) was slain in peacetime on her own soil. She was killed moreover not because she was a woman reporter; but because she wanted justice. She paid the ultimate price for her crusade.