WOMEN ON WAR

Surprisingly, after Lara Logan, an experienced reporter and a paramount foreign columnist for CBS news, was attacked and sexually assailed in Cairo, news network supposedly assembled to debate of drawing their female journalists out of any war zones. An attempt that some journalists’ say is comprehensible and likely, and where some say it is hypothetically offending and unsafe. What we have to decide is where do we stand? Do we really agree with “women journalists being sent out to cover conflict zones?”

Logan came out to be rebellious, initiating a fresh new chapter in the debate about the protection of women journalists. She firmly said, “I want the world to know that I am not ashamed of what happened to me. I want everyone to know I was not simply attacked – I was sexually assaulted. This was, from the very first moment, about me as a woman. But ultimately, I was just a tool. This was about something bigger than all of us – it was about what we do as journalists. That ancient tactic of terrifying people into submission or silence.” However, according to me that ancient tactic did not work.

To address the above issue, the International News Safety Institute (INSI) investigated the extent of these other dangers in a survey conducted in 2010 that asked whether women reporters found the task of reporting from a conflict situation especially difficult. The women surveyed included freelancers and staff members, traveling reporters, women based in foreign bureaus and line producers and managers. The INSI survey data suggested that more than 80 percent of respondents reported physical attack or intimidation while covering conflict. However, the majority of the responses indicated that many women journalists working in conflict areas do not believe that should be treated differently from their male colleagues. This conclusion held true with regard to most of the journalists interviewed for this project.

Conversely, several of the women interviewed thought that their job as journalists in conflict zones was not more difficult because of their sex. However, the trick for journalists of either gender is to fly below the radar. But trying to be modest can be hard. “A TV camera already draws a lot of attention and makes you stand out,” says BBC foreign affairs correspondent, Orla Guerin. “You need to dress in a way that doesn’t compound that. The aim is to connect with people, not antagonize them.” This arouses another question of “Whether gender makes a difference in covering a conflict by women who are playing a major role in the once virtually all-male preserve of battlefield reporting?”

According to this view, the "female personality reporters" - like the female newsreader and the female presenter - are part of a deliberately thought-out media strategy to attract viewers and readers.  Whether this is true or not, it is an incontrovertible fact that almost everywhere women's share of media jobs has increased steadily over the past two decades, and that female senior executives are not uncommon. But despite these advances, however capable they are and ready to "risk their lives" in the pursuit of their profession, women working in the media, may today be reduced to the status of "a (preferably pretty) woman in a flak jacket". Even today, women media professionals are likely to be judged in a quite different way from their male peers.

In contrast, the risk associated with being a war correspondent isn't limited to women, says Badkhen, who has covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and number of media outlets, "I categorically do not believe that women war correspondents are more vulnerable than war correspondents who are men.”
This shows that both female and male correspondents have been raped. Male colleagues whom she knows have been subjected to torture that involved their sexual organs. The nature of torture, the origin of torture, is to degrade, to render the tortured helpless. The torturer typically goes for methods both the torturer and the tortured consider the most humiliating.

Personally, after having followed all of the above, I do agree it is a huge responsibility. Sometimes I even ask myself if I would have been capable of accepting the challenges, those woman journalists accepted. In most places women have been regarded almost as a third gender. They aren’t treated like the women of the place. They aren’t treated like the men. But in traditional societies, where cordiality outplays ideology, they are always accorded the special pleasures afforded to guests. For most people and me, there’s no question that women shouldn’t be sent to report from the frontline. But they should be prepared. In conservative societies, that also includes a belief that women need to be protected. Sadly that belief was not one that extended to the treatment of Logan in Cairo.