The Protection Racket and Omerta
Unspoken — an article by Judith Matloff for the CJR
The photographer was a seasoned operator in South Asia. So when she set forth on an assignment in India, she knew how to guard against gropers: dress modestly in jeans secured with a thick belt and take along a male companion. All those preparations failed, however, when an unruly crowd surged and swept away her colleague. She was pushed into a ditch, where several men set upon her, tearing at her clothes and baying for sex. They ripped the buttons off her shirt and set to work on her trousers.
“My first thought was my cameras,” recalls the photographer, who asked to remain anonymous. “Then it was, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be raped.’” With her faced pressed into the soil, she couldn’t shout for help, and no one would have heard her anyway above the mob’s taunts. Suddenly a Good Samaritan in the crowd pulled the photographer by the camera straps several yards to the feet of some policemen who had been watching the scene without intervening. They sneered at her exposed chest, but escorted her to safety.
Alone in her hotel room that night, the photographer recalls, she cried, thinking, “What a bloody way to make a living.” She didn’t inform her editors, however. “I put myself out there equal to the boys. I didn’t want to be seen in any way as weaker.”
Women have risen to the top of war and foreign reportage. They run bureaus in dodgy places and do jobs that are just as dangerous as those that men do. But there is one area where they differ from the boys - sexual harassment and rape. Female reporters are targets in lawless places where guns are common and punishment rare. Yet the compulsion to be part of the macho club is so fierce that women often don’t tell their bosses. Groping hands and lewd come-ons are stoically accepted as part of the job, especially in places where western women are viewed as promiscuous. War zones in particular seem to invite unwanted advances, and sometimes the creeps can be the drivers, guards, and even the sources that one depends on to do the job. Often they are drunk. But female journalists tend to grit their teeth and keep on working, unless it gets worse.
Because of the secrecy around sexual assaults, it’s hard to judge their frequency. Yet I know of a dozen such assaults, including one suffered by a man. Eight of the cases involve forced intercourse, mostly in combat zones. The perpetrators included hotel employees, support staff, colleagues, and the very people who are paid to guarantee safety - policemen and security guards. None of the victims want to be named. For many women, going public can cause further distress. In the words of an American correspondent who awoke in her Baghdad compound to find her security guard’s head in her lap, “I don’t want it out there, for people to look at me and think, ‘Hmmm. This guy did that to her, yuck.’ I don’t want to be viewed in my worst vulnerability.”
The only attempt to quantify this problem has been a slim survey of female war reporters published two years ago by the International News Safety Institute, based in Brussels. Of the twenty-nine respondents who took part, more than half reported sexual harassment on the job. Two said they had experienced sexual abuse. But even when the abuse is rape, few correspondents tell anyone, even friends. The shame runs so deep - and the fear of being pulled off an assignment, especially in a time of shrinking budgets, is so strong - that no one wants intimate violations to resound in a newsroom.
Rodney Pinder, the director of the institute, was struck by how some senior newswomen he approached after the 2005 survey were reluctant to take a stand on rape. “The feedback I got was mainly that women didn’t want to be seen as ’special’ cases for fear that, a) it affected gender equality and b) it hindered them getting assignments,” he says.
Caroline Neil, who has done safety training with major networks over the past decade, agrees. “The subject has been swept under the carpet. It’s something people don’t like to talk about.”
In the cases that I know of, the journalists did nothing to provoke the attacks; they behaved with utmost propriety, except perhaps for one bikini-clad woman who was raped by a hotel employee while sunbathing on the roof in a conservative Middle Eastern country. The correspondent who was molested by her Iraqi security guard is still puzzling over the fact that he brazenly crept into her room while colleagues slept nearby. “You do everything right and then something like this happens,” she says. “I never wore tight T-shirts or outrageous clothes. But he knew I didn’t have a tribe that would go after him.”
That guard lost his job, but such punishment is rare. A more typical case is of an award British correspondent who was raped by her translator in Africa. Reporting him to a police force known for committing atrocities seemed like a futile exercise.
Like most foreign correspondents who were assaulted, those women were targets of opportunity. The predators took advantage because they could. Local journalists face the added risk of politically motivated attacks. The Committee to Protect Journalists, for example, cites rape threats against female reporters in Egypt who were seen as government critics. Rebels raped someone I worked with in Angola for her perceived sympathy for the ruling party. In one notorious case in Colombia in 2000, the reporter Jineth Bedoya Lima was kidnapped and gang-raped in what she took as reprisal for her newspaper’s suggestion that a paramilitary group ordered some executions. She is the only colleague I know of who has gone on the record about her rape.
The general reluctance to call attention to the problem creates a vicious cycle, whereby editors, who are still typically men, are unaware of the dangers because women don’t bring them up. Survivors of attacks often suffer in lonely silence, robbed of the usual camaraderie that occurs when people are shot or kidnapped. It was an open secret in our Moscow press corps in the 1990s that a young freelancer had been gang-raped by policemen. But given the sexual nature of her injury, no one but the woman’s intimates dared extend sympathies.
Even close calls frequently go unmentioned. In my own case, I never reported to my foreign editor a narrow escape at an airport in Angola in 1995. Two drunken policemen pointing AK-47’s threatened to march a colleague and me into a shack for “some fun.” We got away untouched, so why bring up the matter? I didn’t want my boss to think that my gender was a liability.
Such lack of public discussion might explain why, amazingly, there are no sections on sexual harassment and assault in the leading handbooks on journalistic safety, by the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists. When one considers the level of detail over protections against other eventualities - get vaccinations; pack dummy wallets, etc. - the oversight is staggering. No one tells women that deodorant can work as well as mace when sprayed in the eyes, for example, or that you can obtain doorknob alarms, or that, in some cultures, you can ward off rapists by claiming to menstruate.
For women seeking security tips, hostile-environment training is the way to go. Yet those short courses also rarely touch upon rape prevention. The bbc, a pioneer in trauma awareness, is the only major news organization that offers special safety instruction for women, taught by women.
Most women recognize that even the most thorough preparation cannot prevent every eventuality. Yet victims of assault say that some training might have helped them make more informed decisions, or at least live with the outcome more easily. A correspondent for a major U.S. newspaper says that for some time she needlessly blamed herself for her rape by a Russian paramilitary policeman. How, she asked herself, had she not anticipated that he would follow her back to the hotel after an interview and force himself into the room? She believes that training “would have relieved me of the guilt that I had done the wrong thing.”
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Unspoken an article by Judith Matloff for the CJR
DeAnander:
Nice racket eh. Men assault women with impunity, and women keep it secret for fear that telling tales would get them blacklisted by (mostly male) bosses as too high-risk or high-maintenance to send into the field where the good jobs are. So everyone gets to pretend that the incidence of assault is far lower than it is… kind of like chem/pharma settlements that include gag orders, so that the victims never talk to each other or the public media and no sense can be acquired of how common or severe the abuses really are. Except that these women didn’t even get handsome cash settlements in exchange for their Omerta.
This is no different — in terms of structural power — from any other whistleblower situation involving occupational hazard. Only glasnost — and sincere, unstinting support for female journos on assignment, from bosses, colleagues, and public opinion — can make their situation any less exposed and marginalised.
31 May 2007, 7:56 pmxenia:
I’m not surprised. Some of the correspondents certainly do good and brave work, but many others are terrible people who will do anything for a sensational couple of pictures. There is a well-known case of a Sarajevan boy who was egged on by reporters to repeatedly cross a street which was favored by snipers, supposedly to show his courage. He was eventually shot, but the journalists got their nice pic. They were chased out of town by furious people when it became known, but it did not enter “western” media and the reporters still got what they wanted. I remember another guy discussing the importance of shooting pictures of a dying person rather than assisting them in their pain.
Meaning: if there is so much utilitarian thinking in the milieu, and such cynicism toward the people whose suffering they are exploiting and misinterpreting, how do you expect them to be respectful of women reporters and their rights?
1 June 2007, 6:18 amstacia:
women are not targeted for rape & sexual violence because they are members of a profession known for cynicism.
1 June 2007, 8:03 pmwomen are targeted for rape & sexual violence because they are women.
if it looks like the culture tolerates rape, or accepts it as a form of discourse (which is what your comment implies is reasonable), whether the culture is the one being invaded or the one doing the invading or both, the would-be rapist rapes just because he thinks he can get away with it.
stacia
DeAnander:
hmmm… in the Civil Rights struggle period, racist white guys would beat and rape a white girl who was ‘too friendly to Black men’ — meanwhile some hardline Black nationalist US men advocated raping white women to get revenge on white men for white racism. it’s what we’ve been talking about — the s**t dumped on women qua women, as collective punishment allegedly for their politics or affiliation with baddies or whatever, but actually for the crime of Breathing While Female.
it’s almost like the desire to trash women is the pre-existing condition and the ideology just provides the excuse. misogyny being an ur-ideology that spans and overarches more recent partisan loyalties…
1 June 2007, 8:29 pmKrl:
Hmmmmm….last I checked most of those “racist” white cats spent most of their time raping black women and systematically so not white girls who were to close to “Black Men” and its funny how those supposed black nationalist advocating the rape of white women (I assume ur talking bout E. Cleaver) never seemed to make it to the white women raping phase but only “practiced by raping black women” as that idiot cleaver put it. Spare me the ur-ideology nonsense because who is raped and who can even be raped is highly classed and raced up. Unrelated question here (regarding the request in article for more protection courses etc re rape)- how is it that these women/female journos aren’t “aware”- These journos are women all the time, how are they not aware of the specific dangers etc they face everywhere as women? What allowed them to “forget” as it were- race, class? (forget in the sense that they didnt feel need to acquire info)- Is it because they got caught up in the supposedly universal pronouns here - I.e. “journalist” in this case?
1 June 2007, 10:33 pmDeAnander:
Never heard of a white guy beating up on his wife/girlfriend and raping her to “teach her not to look at” men of some other ethnicity? I can’t footnote this, but pretty sure I have read anecdotal or autobiographical testimony. However, Krl’s points are solid and my post was hasty and sloppy: Cleaver did, weirdly enough, suggest that Black men should practise raping Black women in preparation for raping white women — the Black women were easier targets because of structural racism (plus being closer to hand and more familiar, I guess?). But still the women were targeted for rape, as women — he certainly didn’t suggest raping Black men as practise for raping white women!
Have a feeling this thread is wiggling back towards “what is the primary contradiction” etc. I’ll defend the claim that misogyny is a deeper or broader ideology than the kind of partisan loyalties we’ve occasionally discussed here (Dems vs Repubs, left vs right, male bloggers trashing “the other guys’ women” online); but race and gender are so intertwined, I find it hard to say one hatred is “deeper than” or overarches the other today — even though I do suspect gender predates race as a hierarchical marker… presumably there was gender hierarchy even w/in early hominid bands (male domineering, etc) before “race” was even thought of, but in our current lives the two seem not only equally deep but overlapping, coterminous, inextricable from one another — the meme-cluster around “female,” “inferior,” “dark,” “biotic,” “primitive,” etc. is so tangled, who can pick it apart any more?
The metaphors of sex and colonialism are used in war, war and colonialism metaphors define sex, sex and war metaphors drive colonialism, round and round and round. Until we have Rumsfeld asserting, basically, that Iraq as a nation will be grateful for being raped by a US invasion, the old British Raj doctrine that Indians will be easily beaten and ruled because they are “emotional” and “hysterical” etc. Race, gender, war, money (class)… one big mess.
I suspect that the female journos in question probably come from (relatively) safer environments than the war zones where they are assigned; and they are not familiar with local conditions. In most parts of the US that I have been in, it is not common for men to drag a woman into a ditch to rape her in broad daylight, in plain view of on-duty police and a crowded street, without some intervention taking place. Most women who think consciously about their safety tend to relax a bit in a brightly lit, well-populated public place.
There are exceptions — streets I haven’t been in, cop riots, mob violence at football games, etc. But it is not the sort of thing that the average female pedestrian on the streets of Chicago or San Francisco expects to happen in an ordinary crowded place. And surely this would not have happened to a male journo under the same circumstances; he might have been threatened, spat on, had his camera stolen, etc. — but it is far less likely that the specific tactic of gang rape would have been used on him… And yeah, I do hazard a guess that at least some female journos from Western news agencies go into these situations with a quaint colonial expectation of being safe by virtue of their skin privilege or passport, confident of being treated with respect by “the natives” (particularly the Americans, many of whom honestly believe that everyone in the world loves and admires them — casualties of their bell-jar media culture). But does naivete make it their fault somehow? Even if that naivete has class and race overtones?
Having said all that, they were singled out for sexual assault and humiliation as women; and when the Yanks wanted to humiliate and torment their male prisoners, the worst thing they could think of to do was to pose them *like women* in porno tableaux, sexually humiliate them like prostituted women, force them to wear women’s underwear and so on. The misogyny is consistent, on all sides.
2 June 2007, 1:46 amxenia:
My argument is most emphatically not that “white” or rather “whitefied” (since whiteness is also a state of mind) women get what they deserve for their insensitivity to the suffering around them.
Of course women are being targeted qua women, as they are in all other spheres of society. Here, I am thinking about a specific atmosphere of violence, and the place of women in hierarchies created by war, which I have also experienced, both as a woman and as a moneyless native of an occupied country whose life was not worth much.
Instead, I emphasize the utter lack of empathy by many, even most war correspondents, combined with the pitched, exiting atmosphere of violence in which acts which are merely fantasy in the “civilized” spaces back home gradually become viewed as something “natural.”
Something along the following lines (alas, how easy it is for all of us to imagine ourselves in the skin of the tough male hero): If you can live in an expensive hotel and gorge yourself on nice food while everyone else is starving and barely surviving, of course the next step is to reach out for other “forbidden” pleasures as well. Why hold onto conventions and respect your female co-worker if the entire society around you is falling apart and you can supposedly escape unpunished?
2 June 2007, 7:26 pm