Anisa Shahid, one of Afghanistan's best-known journalists, in the newsroom of TV station Tolonews in Kabul earlier this year. Reporters are among those being targeted by killings in the country. Photo: Arne Immanuel Bänsch/picture alliance via Getty Images
There has been a 35 percent increase in the number of women journalists detained because of their work in the last year, a new report on gender-based violence in the industry has found. According to a new report from Reporters Without Borders (RSF), women have faced increasing threats across the world while doing their jobs, including receiving sexist attacks in places such as Australia, Lebanon and Syria. The organisation found that of the 387 journalists detained across the world, 42 are women, compared with 31 in 2019.In order to collect the data, RSF sent out surveys in French, Spanish and English to its members consisting of 30 questions, and collated results based on 113 responses. It found that 73 percent found gender-based violence occurred online, with 53 percent responding that gender-based violence took place in the workplace. 47 percent said they had experienced gender-based violence over the phone, while 36 percent had experienced it in the street. According to the report, 84 percent of respondents said that sexual harassment takes place in their country against women journalists. The report also found the workplace to be one of the main sites of harassment. 51 percent of respondents said their superiors were to blame for sexual violence, while 50 percent said authorities like the state or police were responsible. Many women journalists across the world have lost their lives while reporting. In 2017, Maltese reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia, was assassinated in a car bomb for her reporting on state corruption, while Kim Wall, a journalist who wrote for VICE and the Guardian, was murdered while reported in Denmark. Just last week, three women who worked at Enikass, a TV station based in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, were shot dead.“We have a pressing obligation to defend journalism with all our strength against the many dangers that threaten it, of which gender-based and sexual bullying and attacks are a part,” secretary general of RSF Christophe Deloire says. “It is unthinkable that women journalists should endure twice the danger and have to defend themselves on another front, a many-sided struggle since it exists outside the newsroom as well as inside.”
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