Today’s Washington Post has a must read for any journalist covering national security issues or who travels overseas in search of a story—especially female journalists, but also those who know them and travel with them.
In the story, Emily Wax shares her perspective on the special hazards for female journalists abroad. In doing so, however, she raises some important issues for all journalists and highlights some of the unexpected problems of reporting in “hot zone’’ countries with different cultures than those of the United States.
As Wax writes, she was a 28-year-old reporter about to cover Africa in 2002 when she was sent to rural Virginia to attend hostile-environment training. I know the course well because I take my students there for a weekend course a few times a year. In the wilds near Winchester, former British Royal Marines tell journalists such survival techniques as how to apply first aid, how to negotiate a traffic stop in hostile territory and how to look for potentially deadly mines.
In the more comprehensive course she took, Wax says, the Centurion Risk Assessment Services trainers taught such survival techniques as how to filter your own urine if you are dehydrated in a desert and how to drag a wounded 200-pound colleague through a field studded with land mines.
Like most journalists, she never had to put those skills to use. But Wax wrote at length about all of the things she encountered—less extreme but more pervasive—that made being a female foreign correspondent so challenging when deployed to countries such as Egypt, Pakistan or India.
It’s good stuff to know: how to deal with “grabby’’ strangers while reporting on the street, curious photo takers and “the flirtatious fixer who wants a good-night kiss.’’
“Foreign female journalists face challenges most often in parts of the world where protections for women are weak even in peacetime — in societies where men and women lead highly segregated lives and often don’t have sex before marriage,’’ writes Wax. “In these countries, men often say they view Western women as the sexual equivalent of junk food: fast and cheap.’’
She adds that these dangers increase exponentially when countries are in the midst of revolution and lawlessness, noting the harrowing cases recently of CBS News’s chief foreign affairs correspondent, Lara Logan, who was sexually attacked in Egypt and the kidnapping and sexual assault of New York Times photojournalist Lynsey Addario in Libya.
There are several places for reporters to go online to get additional information on how to take precautions while reporting overseas, including The Committee to Protect Journalists, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma.
Wax is perhaps most eloquent when she discusses why it so important for female journalists to report overseas: because they have are so attuned to the indignities and discriminations suffered by women in “places where wives, mothers and daughters have few legal rights. Their lives often include forced marriage, genital mutilation, beatings and a long list of daily indignities that make the problems of first-world women seem negligible.’’
Addario, for instance, has spent years documenting human rights violations around the world, which were often crimes against women. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, she was able to enter homes and hospital wards where foreign men in many conservative societies would never be allowed access, Wax writes.
One positive outcome of the Logan and Addario assaults, Wax writes, is that the challenges women face are now finally being openly discussed — and female correspondents are leading the conversation at newspapers such as the New York Times. The Committee to Protect Journalists recently launched a widespread survey of female reporters and photographers in war zones and conflict areas in order to document attacks. CPJ will also include guidelines on sexual assault in the next edition of its handbook.
Wax says that CPJ keeps track of how many reporters get killed or arrested, but not on how many suffer from rape or sexual harassment. And she notes that the Centurion training had little in the way of specific guidance for woman.
Personally I found that some of the Centurion training sessions I participated in did have some detailed discussions of what women should do in certain scenarios, such as not allowing yourself to be separated from a crowd of others if you are all taken hostage or kidnapped. A Centurion representative told Wax that even more attention will be paid to that in future training sessions.
Many female correspondents have said in interviews that they would have benefited from an honest discussion about what to expect before heading off to hot zones, Wax says.
Her article is a great place to start that discussion.
