Women Reporting War

This is an edited transcript ...

Rodney Pinder, Director, INSI

... This evening arises out of what we think is a unique survey conducted by INSI. We often proceed in our business on the assumption — certainly the men in the business do — that everyone is the same and that there is no difference between men and women. I think this must be fairly unique on its own, but in the safety field we had the suspicion that this wasn’t actually the case and that our women colleagues who cover conflict may have specific safety concerns and problems that we never actually thought of very much before, if we thought of them at all. We didn’t even know whether they existed for sure. There is some anecdotal evidence that we’ve all had that there are some issues but it sort of hangs out there and nobody really looked at it. So we were very glad to get some funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency to look into the issue and to see whether there were specific safety issues relating to women covering conflict.

We did a survey ... to determine exactly what, if any, differences there were so that we could be aware of these issues and try and do something to address them. We found, for example, something we thought we knew already, that there is no specific flak jacket made for female correspondents and this seems to me to be a large gap in the safety equipment field. There are issues of stress which need to be looked at and Mark Brayne who’s a specialist in this issue for Dart Europe is here and can talk about that tonight. There are issues of whether the Hostile Environment Courses take adequate account of female participants and some of our respondents to the survey actually said there should be some female trainers, or more female trainers involved, who are more aware of the specific concerns of women taking part. One thing that did come through from several respondents indeed was a feeling that some women in the field were not taken as seriously as their male colleagues when it came to safety issues. Rather demeaning in fact; a woman would raise a safety concern and nothing was done about it until one of her male colleagues raised exactly the same concern. Now this is not only demeaning but it’s also dangerous, because if there is a safety concern out there, surely a woman can spot it just as quickly as a man and something should be done just as promptly. So these concerns that have been raised have come out very clearly in the survey but what we want to do now is to try and take this forward. We thought that an event like this evening would help air some of these issues in a more direct and even provocative way and I’d like to come out of this evening with some specific things to carry forward ...

In a moment I’ll hand over to Elizabeth Palmer who’s a seasoned correspondent who’s covered many conflicts for CBC and CBS and I’ll leave it to Elizabeth to run the evening because she’s very aware, acutely aware of some of the issues concerned. Before I hand over to Elizabeth I’d like to ask a former colleague of mine, Judith Matloff, who was with Reuters — we worked together in Africa — Judith has covered many conflicts and is well versed in these issues. She was with the Christian Science Monitor and is now a professor at Columbia and she has come over especially from New York for this occasion and has some pertinent points to raise ...

Judith Matloff, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

I’m going to be very very brief. Basically I spoke with quite a few colleagues both male and female before this event just to make sure my own impressions weren’t just mine. A consensus was reached that you can put the problems facing female war correspondents into two categories: one is biology, the other is society.

On biology, the most glaring one is rape — the risk of it, and the fear of it. I fortunately have not been raped but have had three colleagues who will admit to it. One was raped by her fixer/translator, who had been recommended by three male colleagues; they never had problems, she did. Another one was gang-raped by some Siberian policemen. Male colleagues had not been gang raped by Siberian policemen. Another woman was randomly raped whilst on a story by somebody; we’re not even sure who he was.

The problem with rape is not just the personal and physical violation, there’s also the issue of AIDS; so it’s a doubly dangerous problem. None of these women, by the way, talked about this with their male bosses. There’s a lot of shame attached to it and there was a fear that their careers would be impacted because of it. So I feel it’s one of those things that has to be put on the agenda. I understand from one of the health care, caring profession people here it happens to men too but we don’t hear about it and I think, like trauma, we have to put this stuff on the agenda. Another problem which a lot of women face is that we are physically smaller than men generally and flak jackets are generally made for men, who might weigh 175lbs and might be over 5’11”. I’m a 98lb weakling. I measure 5’3”. Rodney, when he was my bureau chief ten years ago in Africa, actually had a special flak jacket made for me and that was passed on to other small people in the bureau. They are made for women ,and when I went on then to the Christian Science Monitor, I basically did not wear the flak jacket that was given to me that weighed three times as much. A lot of women have had herniated discs in their necks, they cannot run with the flak jackets that have been given to them. It doesn’t take that much to just have one flak jacket in the office that’s designed for women but, aside from Rodney, I don’t know of any other case where it’s been done.

Another issue, I’m going to raise it, it’s the ‘M word’, menstruation. People don’t talk about it. I can’t tell you how many colleagues take hormonal pills so they don’t menstruate when they’re on a job. This is dangerous, it can cause cancer later. It’s not healthy but they do it because they’re too ashamed or embarrassed to ask their male bureau chiefs to send in another box of tampax when they’re on an extended assignment in a place like Baghdad. It should be up to the male bureau chief perhaps to say ‘do you need any female supplies?’ A friend of mine was taken hostage in Somalia; the State Department had enough sense to send in about five thousand boxes of tampax in case she was there for about seven years. Surely male bureau chiefs should have the same sort of thing when they’re sending in more tapes and DVDs or whatever they’re sending in to supplement your equipment, just think about your female colleagues.

The other thing is miscarriages, again the other ‘M’ word; people don’t like to talk about it. I can’t tell you how many of us, and I include us; have had miscarriages in war zones. You don’t want to tell your colleagues you’re pregnant — because it’s still early, you don’t want to turn down a job, because you might not ever get another job — and you lose your baby. And I can’t tell you how many people this has happened to; at last count it was twelve. And again, it’s just something that people don’t talk about, but it’s happening, it’s going to continue to happen and maybe it should be out there and talked about.

Okay, that’s the embarrassing physical stuff then there’s the societal stuff. I can’t tell you how many women, including myself have taken ridiculous risks because we had to prove ourselves to be ‘tougher than the guys’. Well, if there wasn’t a newsroom culture where we had to prove ourselves to be tougher than the guys, we wouldn’t take these stupid risks; and I think enough women have been in Iraq, enough women have been in Chechnya and anywhere else that we shouldn’t have to have that kind of pressure. And where do we get that pressure? Because some of the people who hire us or the other men in our news room don’t quite treat us as equals — I’m getting nods here in the audience — and I think there just needs to be a re-think on the management level. A lot of women are doing really dumb, stupid things because they don’t want to appear to be scared.

The other problem is sexual harassment by colleagues; and you’re unlikely to call your male boss and say ‘that photographer is driving me crazy’ ... but there does seem to be a huge amount of sexual harassment from colleagues. I’ve had more from colleagues than I’ve had from sources in this type of job. Why? Because you’re sharing where you sleep. A lot of times there’s a scarcity of hotel rooms, you’re in the two twin beds or sometimes the same double bed; you’re in a tent together you’re in a sleeping bag next to each other; you’re on the floor of a church or sleeping in the back of the vehicle. Ideas get into peoples heads and I think there has to be a newsroom culture where it is completely verboten. Men should be told — it’s in my contract at Columbia, don’t harass your students; well maybe it should be in your contract when you join the BBC — don’t harass your equals. And it’s not part of the corporate culture I think in most news organisations. So on this incredibly depressing note that’s where I end and I hand over the floor to you.

Elizabeth Palmer

Thank you. A lot of your comments rang true to many of us. I would add to your list of biology preoccupations finding a place to pee (Oh yeah!) in the desert where not a blade of grass, not a shrub is available for cover! I remember one time, not so long ago, going into Iraq on that lunar landscape between Oman and Baghdad driving along and about half way one of my colleagues who’d been drinking a lot of water according to her combat zone training, was just fit to burst, and so we walked up to the front of the convoy and I arranged a little modesty towel and held it up and in fact we were doing very well until the helicopters appeared … Perhaps part of the solution is to begin to talk about the problem.

There are many social pressures I remember also, and I won’t make this into a litany of anecdotes, but I do remember in Northern Afghanistan, coming into our campsite dirty one night from the frontline, flinging off my flak jacket and seeing the French radio reporter doing the same. Down went her helmet, out came the Sat Phone up went the antennae and the next thing I heard was her saying ‘Allo, Gregois, it’s about that geography test, I want to know why you didn’t get 67% as we agreed’, and so on, and then she went into the homeroom schedule and so on. I don’t know what the solution is, and maybe you have some suggestions, but certainly women wear the ‘hat of mom’ onto the battlefield much more frequently and much more conscientiously than men wear the ‘hat of dad’ and it adds to the stress of the job and it certainly adds to the number of hours in a day for many of us when we’re out there.

There are of course, many more concrete and perhaps pressing things in the sense that they are more immediately dangerous. I’m thinking of the threat of sexual abuse or rape as an instrument of combat or even just intimidation and one of the things that came up time and again in the survey was the lack of support for freelancers that permanent employees to larger news organisations enjoy. So what I’d like to do is throw this discussion open to the floor for a little while and see what things come out of the audience. I’d like to have and airing of views to begin with, those preoccupations that we need to consider and talk about and then about half way through perhaps we’ll shift to considering solutions so that there’s a constructive outcome to this discussion and it may result in a series of recommendations that could in fact go out and maybe become concrete and something that we can refer to in the future. So would anybody like to begin by commenting either on the survey or talking about the experiences that they’ve had themselves in the field?

Jennifer Glass, BBC

I’ve spent a lot of time in 2004 in Fallujah. I’m heading back to Baghdad on Monday to cover the elections. I know Judith from the fall of Maputo, and I know Liz from Fallujah. I want to just talk a little bit about the survey. I think it’s sad that you only got 29 responses when there are so many women out there, and an increasing number of women out there; it seems exponentially to be growing. I think the number one concern for women in the field is physical well-being. Because we’re smaller, we’re concerned about rape, we’re concerned about attack, we can’t run as fast as the boys, it’s harder to run in the flak jackets. I think that is something that should bear a lot of discussion this evening; I was surprised that 82% of respondents said that they had suffered some sort of physical attack or intimidation. You have to gauge that with the fact that war is an aggressive place, it sometimes is a place where people do things that they wouldn’t normally do because lots of bad things are happening around and that’s something that maybe perhaps people aren’t always prepared for. I talk to a lot of young women who say ‘Ooh! I want to be a war correspondent, I want to stand on some distant roof top and toss my hair and talk about how dangerous it is’, and I don’t think there’s always a great appreciation. Some of them do it because they want to be a TV star and not because they have a real appreciation of the combat zone.

I thought one of the good suggestions which came out of the survey was the defence class; that sounds like a fantastically good suggestion because the more comfortable you are in your own skin the more comfortable you are in defending your own space, the more comfortable you’re going to be in a hostile environment. I’m actually on a hostile environment refresher course this week so I rushed up here. On hostile environment courses, some are very good, some of them have been less so, and I’ve had some bad experiences on one. I’ve been a foreign correspondent, a conflict correspondent for 11½ years I’ve done everything, Chechnya, Bosnia, all the Africa stuff, Afghanistan, Iraq, so to go into one of these hostile environment courses and have these military guy talk to me like I’m a five year old … I also don’t look terribly seasoned so I walk in with my hair in a pony tail and jeans and these guys treat me like I’m five years old, these guys whose last experience was the Falklands War. And then that night they try and pick you up at the bar: ‘You know, I was in the Falklands …’ I’m like: ‘You know, I was in like 8th Grade’.

Liz picked up on a good point, the evidence of the gap between staff and freelancers: a big, big gap. I think freelancers feel they have to take bigger chances; freelancers are taken more for granted and asked to do more risky things. Part of it part of a ‘proving culture’; part of it is you’re trying to build a career. Men obviously suffer the same exact problem and I remember it back from Sarajevo days but there’s a big gap especially in the hostile environments training which is very expensive, armoured vehicles in the field which are very expensive and if you are out there — and Judith and I both worked for the Christian Science Monitor where we were the only two people in Africa and we didn’t have any of that stuff, no budget for that kind of stuff. That’s a big concern.

... In a hostile environment local knowledge is possibly the most important thing you can have, especially as a woman knowing the local customs. In an Arabic country, if you go out with your hair wet they think you’ve just had sex or you’re a prostitute, it’s good for girls to know that and the number of women I just say that to — ‘hey by the way you should always go out with dry hair’. No managers told me that. I found out from a female friend who lived in an Arab country. I’ve got long thick hair, it’s an issue, and most of my male colleagues do not have that issue.

I would have liked to have seen a little more on PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I think women experience different things; I think we’re just emotionally built differently. The emotions that go in have to come out somehow. I notice in my years I’m much more emotional than I was 10 years ago. I find myself watching television saying ‘that commercial was beautiful’ and I think ‘what is wrong with me?’; and then you realise that all that stuff that you saw and kind of put aside, because you just had to get whatever it was done on the day, has to come out some way you have to filter it somehow. I would be interested to see how other people filter things, how they cope with those experiences. There is a little bit in the survey, but it more dealt with unhealthy ways of coping, alcohol and drugs, whereas I think there are great ways of coping like ice skating and punching bags. I’d like to thank Rodney and Mark and Sue (Brayne) for giving us this opportunity and forum because it’s very important to share women’s experiences. There’s a woman trainer on the hostile environments course I’m on and it makes a huge difference because girls think of things differently than boys do.

Elizabeth Palmer

I think we should limit our discussion this evening to gender-specific issues, I hear you about the armoured vehicles and so on but I think I was one of the respondents of the survey and I was very unsure at the very beginning that there were gender specific issues and, as I began to think, I isolated them. But I think that often women in the field are so keen to get the job done there’s never enough time, and we have to be as on-the-ball as our male colleagues and, absolutely, we’re running with the pack, and I think that the whole issue of gender-specific issues is subsumed until we get into a forum like this. So let’s really use the occasion to isolate them and speak about them frankly and then maybe, as I’ve said before, we can come up with some recommendations.

So, what are the most pressing gender-specific issues for women correspondents? I’ll throw sexual abuse and rape as a starting point. How big a fear is it, how big a factor in women correspondents’ accepting assignments or carrying out assignments? Is there anybody who’d care to talk about that?

Tira Shubert, Freelance Producer

Also include producers and the camera women, too, because everybody has slightly different experiences. I’m a television producer, most of my experience in the field has been doing television, and occasionally I’m out writing. So you’re in a team, so you’re going to have totally different issues than people who are out there by themselves doing print or doing radio. I was arrested twice in Turkey. I’ve covered two of the three Gulf Wars.

So I think that if you have any chance of choosing the team that you are working with — and nowadays more and more organisations, especially if you’re going into a difficult place, you have a very strong input into who you want to be with. I think that over the years ... that the people that shouldn’t be in the field in many organisations have been eliminated, and so I think that that has improved the atmosphere of things very, very much. On the other hand I think that the risks of places that we work in has increased.

Palmer

How about, how comfortable do we feel about talking to our male colleagues about sexual predation and the whole fear of being ‘watched’ and or ‘singled out’ for special attention and even assaulted? I can remember in Afghanistan being very concerned about the security of the house we were all living in because I was quite aware that at night somebody could creep in silently and come into my room, probably armed, and rape me. It was an issue for me in a way that it wasn’t an issue for the men, because I felt much more vulnerable in that respect or perhaps more targeted. I mean I was a woman and all the Afghan women were locked up in their houses so the only people prowling about were Afghan men, and I knew that a lot of them were sexually interested and/or repressed and the thing that stunned me about it when I did talk about it was how much my male colleagues were completely unaware of it.

Once I mentioned it, I must say, everybody cooperated very well and we improved the security of the house, but I think you do have to feel very comfortable with your colleagues in order to bring these things up and then just expect as a matter of course a response. How many women feel intimidated about talking to their male colleagues?

Matloff

It’s very difficult if it’s not somebody you trust, but what Tira said is very important. If you’re working with colleagues that you do trust I think that it does work, but often you’re randomly in the field; if you work for a newspaper you’re not part of a team. The only time being a foreign correspondent for 20 years that I actually felt that I had somebody looking after me was actually in Reuters, that Namibian cameraman, John Liebenberg. We were in Angola and John looked after my welfare and we were travelling with five other journalists. The General on the front said ‘she can’t go because she’s a woman’. The other journalists went on the helicopter and John said I’m not going, she’s got to come with us, and he organised a boycott and he just kept and eye on me. But generally, if it’s somebody that you don’t really know, you’re uncomfortable talking about it and a lot of men are very dismissive; and again you don’t want to seem like a sissy, or a wimp. I think it has to be part of the corporate culture that men have to go out there being told by their bureau chiefs and their managers ‘You have to be protective of your female colleagues, it’s your job to look after them’ and I think they would be more sympathetic if they were trained to be but it doesn’t occur to them.

Palmer

To be perfectly honest the culture of female correspondents, or at least there are many many more of us now and we are able to say things like tampax in a war zone without everybody looking away. I know that in our office in Baghdad, the bag full of tampons and sanitary napkins and whatnot is sort of handed over like a legacy every time there’s a handover of correspondents, and it’s actually helped since we went on our hostile environment training and the fellow from Pilgrim pointed out that tampons are the ideal thing to stem bleeding in a bullet wound. So now they’ve acquired this added legitimacy as things to have on the battlefield. But it is still a new phenomenon and I know that a lot of the older fellows are still embarrassed, certainly by tampons and to a certain extent by us being there.

I know that also there’s a kind of a prevalent sort of predatory mindset among some of the older correspondents, producers and cameramen, that anything goes out there and that women are fair game. There is one correspondent, who shall remain nameless, who is famous for coming and sexually harassing every single damn woman who goes out into the field in one of our shoots, and it’s gone from being a bit scary to now being a bit hilarious but that’s only because the critical mass of women has changed and the information goes around and we all wait for it when we go out there and rebuff him, now, as nicely as possible because he’s getting so old that it’s simply an impossible situation.

Palmer

Are there any freelancers here who’d like to talk about the lack of support for freelance staff, particularly freelance female staff?

Deborah Pout

Yes, I’ve been living in Jerusalem for the past 4 years and I wanted to say about the emotional stuff: About two years ago when there was a bomb every evening, and then the Israelis would go in and you just had no sleep, and you’d go to these sites where a bus had exploded and you’d see bits of bodies and you’d go home and I ‘d just cry my eyes out. I did feel because I was on my own that I didn’t have that support, and I would just go and cry and cry and cry, whereas I think my male colleagues just went out and drank, drank themselves crazy and that’s how they coped with it. I think that ‘s a big difference between men and women. Women will go back and cry in our pillow and I think the emotional toll for me was very great, and I did feel that I didn’t maybe have the necessary support, or if I phoned friends back in the UK it’s very difficult to explain when you’re in the middle of that situation to convey what it’s like, the reality, day in, day out, and it was just endless … That’s one of the things, just the lack of support.

Palmer

What sort of support would have helped?

Pout

Just somebody to talk to, I think, really, about what you’re going through. I mean I’d bump into people, and I had friends, but a lot of my friends who were in the profession were men, and then I had non-journalist friends, but they couldn’t really understand … and I didn’t really actually I suppose … want to talk to them about it. You know I wanted somebody who would know, who’d been there and who would understand what I was going through.

Palmer

In a kind of feminist analysis this is dangerous waters, isn’t it, because traditionally I think feminist thinking has been not to admit to, or explore very much, the emotional approach of women to tragedy and death, particularly when it comes to children because it amounted to a weakness in the eyes of the male culture. I wonder whether now we’re going to see a world where it can be turned into a strength because as communications technologies change the way wars are covered, and the civilian tragedies may become a bigger and, quite properly, better-reported part of any war, perhaps the women correspondents, and reporters and producers and certainly camera women ... will become instrumental in changing the focus of the story. But certainly, you bring it up and you’re very brave to bring it up. I think it’s some of the things that women, at least of my age, still skirt around a little bit because it is equated, in at least my generation, with weakness, and it’s something we could never admit to if we were going to stride out onto the battlefield as we so dearly wanted to do twenty years ago when we were setting out.

Pinder

This raises an important issue that came up right at the beginning when we were thinking of doing the survey. We got some very negative reaction from some women conflict reporters who said ‘Look: I don’t want anything to do with this; we don’t want to be treated any different, we’re not any different, if we start raising issues that show that we are different it’s going to penalise our careers’. And I think that one of the issues is that of emotion.

... How many people here, for example, feel constrained or reluctant perhaps to speak, or even to get involved because of possible career penalties and are these fears real? Are there career penalties? Have women experienced career penalties because of this? And if some have we’d certainly like to hear about it. Because I really think that core issue has to be confronted because there shouldn’t be such penalties. Logically it is no more sensible to have a career penalty on a woman who’s emotional than a lot of men who are emotional. I suspect it probably does happen though.

Claire Hershman, Psychotherapist

Can I just go back one to the issue of rape? I deal with trauma. I don’t see traumatised journalists very much, but I do see people who’ve been tortured and, I haven’t seen that many, but the women have all been raped. Why are women raped in war? Because that’s the number one thing that happens and I suspect that women journalists that are frightened are actually talking about the truth, and if you’re going into these zones, the first thing you’re going to see is huge numbers of people that have been raped. Some of the stuff that’s coming out of Iraq, well to me is just astonishing. The kind of rape and stuff that goes on, and we’re talking about our ‘sisters’, so how can we be journalists on that level? I think vaguely what you’re talking about is we’re talking about a different level of experience if you see what I mean?  

Palmer

… I haven’t been raped and I don’t think I know any journalists who have been raped on the job but I know Judith has (known people who have been raped). We all, on the other hand, I think you’re quite right, we do meet women who have been raped in war zones often and, fortunately, now it is beginning to be regarded as a war crime. Take me forward where were you going from there?

Hershman

I think I’m trying to talk about feminist consciousness that, you’re talking about being in Jerusalem and crying and being very upset, but if you’re, as a journalist, going into an area that you can so identify with, which is (a), you’re frightened of yourself and (b), has been happening that gives you a level of trauma that I suspect men wouldn’t bring to it yet. A very bad thing to say. But you know what I mean … We do identify, as women, with other women, and I think that’s something that needs to be thought about, what you’re bringing to a situation when you’re actually documenting that level of suffering that you can identify with and could easily be you. 

Palmer

I think that, in most of the societies we cover, women are the ones who are the victims of war, not only in the most obvious sense but also because often they hold very little power in the society and they’re responsible for home and family; and they’re the ones who have little input into the political decisions that led to war; and on the other hand, they are the ones who are responsible for protecting their children when the bombs fall. So perhaps we do identify more with them, and there’s almost an institutional reluctance, at least in my view, and I’m speaking very much as and individual, to talk too much about the victims. There’s this whole default to the hardware of war or to the politics of war because it’s easy, it’s interesting often, particularly for people who are interested in analysis, and so on. And I think that we default away from the civilian stories of war often, and certainly from stories of women, which are often the stories of families of war, and I know in my own view that’s been frustrating. This is an editorial observation and we’re getting away from security, but it certainly probably increases the stress and perhaps the potential for PTSD that we feel once we get home. Does anybody have anything to add to that?  

Brian Kelly Freelance Cameraman

Just a couple of things that came up that sort of tweaked me in a way. First of all I don’t think that gender gives us any special insight into anything. So I don’t think that as women you should go down a road that says you have special insight into women’s things because you are women because, then we’re going to turn around and go back a hundred years and say that you wouldn’t know how to do a man’s job because you wouldn’t have a penis. So I don’t think we should go there. I think we’re equal in being able to emote, I have a mother, or did, she’s dead, I have a wife and three daughters, I think I can get what happens. That’s the main thing I wanted to say ... we’re all in this together ...

Palmer

Now wait a minute .. would you, if your daughters were going off to war, would you be afraid they were going to be raped, Brian?

Kelly

Yes, I thought … 

Palmer

Well, let me ask you the question in a different way. Would you be more and differently worried about your daughters being journalists in war zones than your son?

Kelly

Yes, I would be, just because that is a problem, and if I was working with you that would be an issue, or with any woman that would be an issue obviously. That is a problem … I’ll say one thing about working with women in the field is that, and maybe this is all wrong, but as a man I do feel more protective. Some years ago, and it wasn’t a war zone, but it was not an easy place to go to, that was Kosovo when the Serbs were taking over and driving the Albanians out, way before, we’re talking 20 years ago. A female correspondent who wanted to, actually she was trying to get to, there must have been some other war going on at the time, she was seven months pregnant and eventually her husband talked her out of it, and we went to Kosovo together but, you know, there was a feeling that if things got dangerous it would be more awkward because she was pregnant.

Palmer

Well that was a different discussion and I remembered it because we were working together at the time and the question was should we be more concerned about her unborn child than her? Or should we make her be concerned about her unborn child? I remember that and I still don’t know the answer. Anyway a little bit of a digression, but …

Kelly

If I can be clear about something, I think rape is a big problem, and it’s great that it’s a war crime now, and it is a problem for females in the field, it’s one of the things that can happen. There are certain parts of the world that male rape is going to happen as well but I don’t think that it’s something that we worry about as much ...

Palmer

Are there any print journalists in the audience who might like to speak besides Judith? ... No? ... How about this whole business of self defence? I know that when I did my hostile environment course there was no specific self defence component for women. Maybe we could just see a show of hands of how many women here would feel reassured and think it was appropriate to have a self defence component in the hostile environment course? Karen, you are the shining exception … I was lucky enough to have a hostile environment course with Karen as an instructor.

Karen McMenamin, Pilgrims

We do the hostile environment training for the BBC and for other people at the moment. I’m here really because we are always looking to improve the course, and the reason why I’m here is because I wanted to listen to what you guys are feeling on the ground, so that we can perhaps direct the training towards helping you and supporting you a little bit more.

With regards to the self defence classes, I did weeks and weeks of doing self defence training and I feel quite confident that in certain situations I might be able to defend myself fairly well. What concerns us, which is why we haven’t introduced it onto the courses, is that you come down to us for six days, we bombard you with a whole load of stuff after six days, and really one whole day is taken out with the situation awareness where you’re not even getting instructed, you are not really trained well enough to defend yourself against an assailant and if you tried it and you weren’t skilled enough, you could actually end up getting more severely injured than you would have been had you not tried to do something defensive. So that’s why we haven’t put that into the course, but it comes up regularly as a request and I do think that perhaps you guys need to look at, in the times that you are perhaps back in the UK, whether it would be worth getting yourself on a course and really getting your skills to a level where you are confident and competent that you could perhaps do something in the right circumstance. But it’s not something we are doing because it could actually be quite dangerous.

Palmer

I think it’s really something that perhaps should go on the list. I think that even if it were a separate course I know that I would sign up and I’m sure many of my colleagues would as well. Just while I’ve got the microphone. What about talking more about the biology of women in the field during those courses because they could be a bit ‘ladish’, because mostly they are men and it wouldn’t do any harm for those guys to actually be exposed to some of the things we have to be aware of, whether it’s the risk of rape to how to get a tampon in when there’s not a shrub in sight.

McMenamin

Obviously, when you came on the course, Elizabeth, we actually used to have a session on rape and sexual assault. Now initially it was introduced because when we first started running the courses women were saying ‘We feel at risk of being raped or sexually assaulted’, so we did actually introduce a session to do with that. Initially we made it voluntary, it wasn’t something necessarily that everybody had to attend because obviously we are not in a position to know, sometimes, if somebody has had and experience in the past, so it could actually be quite distressing to force somebody to come and talk about rape or sexual assault. So we made it voluntary. The blokes never used to turn up to start with, we used to get the odd one or two that would come along, and they usually tended to be the younger ones who were a bit more in tune with women’s issues. In the end, we did try making it compulsory and gave a little sort of warning, if you didn’t really want to be here then feel free to leave, and actually it was quite positively received because a lot of the guys were unaware of what women had to go through, but also they were unaware that they could become victims. And it’s not necessarily that they get raped per se with a penis, they get sexually assaulted with an implement is what normally will happen to them, but there is still a high percentage, and it’s probably a higher percentage than we’re aware of because people are not coming forward and reporting it. Unfortunately at the moment that’s been taken out of the course because some people are uncomfortable giving it, some people are uncomfortable receiving it and with the pressure of other things.

... A couple of other quick things:

Flak jackets: Some companies are producing flak jackets for women and I’ll find out which companies are and email you Rodney so that you can distribute that ...

The male harasser that you mentioned, Elizabeth, that you found rather amusing, and you didn’t find a threat because of his age, I would suggest you do something about it anyway because all you need is for other men to witness that he’s getting away with it that it then sort of becomes almost accepted, and it shouldn’t be accepted, that’s just a comment ...

Mark Brayne, Dart Centre

... It’s extraordinary to be hearing a conversation like this. I can’t recall anything like it. I’ve never sat in on this kind of conversation since I’ve been in journalism. I think this is an extraordinary evening, to actually name some of these issues and get them out.

In practical terms, just to remember the importance of women’s experience of trauma, PTSD itself was defined in 1980. It was put into the diagnostically statistical manual of mental disorders DSM-III in 1980, based on the experience of American psychiatrists looking at the experience of American, mainly men, war veterans from Vietnam and looking at their symptoms. And on the other side it was an out-working of the feminist movement in America, where women in the late 60s and 70s, for the first time, began to talk publicly about their experiences of rape and sexual humiliation.

The psychiatrists who were dealing with the rape victims were working with a set of symptoms, and the psychiatrists who were dealing with the Vietnam war vets were working with a set of symptoms, and they got together and said ‘Actually it’s astonishingly similar. The symptoms that this group of trauma survivors are demonstrating are the same as, are almost identical to those of the other group.’ ...

Women coming into positions of editorial clout is making a real difference. At the BBC now, a lot of the BBC is run by women, and thank goodness, more women programme editors in television than men. So the culture really is changing, the work that we’re doing at the Dart Centre, at the BBC and elsewhere, is meeting a willingness to go there, to talk about these things to get it out into the open, which is extremely refreshing. Very practically, I do like the idea of some advice on the website. One of the things that we’ve done with the Dart Centre recently (are) some specific guidelines for families and partners, getting the experiences of the partners of war correspondents whether male or female out into the open and what they need from their partners, the kind of conversations that need to take place between couples where one is being sent to a really nasty place when children are involved for example as well. And what managers and editors need to know in terms of what the partners and families need in terms of support. Getting that out into the open and having a very simple couple of sets of two little brochures … is already making a difference, it really is. Those brochures are getting around and people are beginning to talk about these things. Let’s do one for women. Let’s do one for women themselves and let’s do one for managers and draw on some of the stuff that’s come out of today, we’ve got the template, we’ve got the website, we’ve got the process, let’s do it.

Palmer

I’d be very interested to hear eventually too whether the kinds of statements and testimony and perhaps people, whether women suffer PTSD after covering conflicts differently than men. Are there any useful generalisations on gender that you can make, do you know?

Brayne

Very briefly, there have been several surveys about the gender specific experience of PTSD, but let’s not get too hung up on PTSD because PTSD as such is a relatively infrequent outcome of exposure to trauma among journalists. What’s much more common is depression, anxiety, relationship breakdown, alcohol abuse. PTSD is a subset of those things, very important but it’s across the piece. What we know about PTSD is that women tend to get PTSD more than men although male rape victims are the highest, 60% of male rape victims will develop PTSD and "only" 50% of female rape victims will develop PTSD. It does mean that one in two women who are raped don’t get PTSD so there’s a lot of resilience about. Women do need a special awareness because they are more likely, on the whole, to develop PTSD than men ... 

Palmer

I’d like to take a pause right now and just introduce a special guest we have here this evening. Those of you who covered the Afghan conflict may remember Johanne Sutton, who was a French radio reporter who was killed very tragically in 2001 when she rode on an armoured vehicle up to the frontline when the Northern Alliance were waiting to engage with the Americans against the Taliban. Her father, Albert Sutton, is here this evening. We’re very, very honoured that you chose to come from France and join us this evening, and I’d like to give the microphone to you and to hear what you have to say, because I know that you have been working hard to establish an organisation in support of journalists in conflict zones.

Albert Sutton

It’s a pleasure. I have to make two points and then to offer two proposals. The first point is I believe that everybody here is entitled to have a future. Since my daughter could not have a future, this is why I took the opportunity to continue what she was trying to do among her team, 350 journalists at RFI. And she used to say ‘This is my family, you are my natural family but today this is my family’. And she dedicated herself entirely to her company. Everyone is entitled to have a future, and this future is in your hands, it’s not in the hands of the enemies on the field, nor in the hands of the companies using your services …

The second point is that companies and enemies do not care about you. We have been hearing about your emotions and experiences, but this does not mean a lot to the companies or the enemies and you must take into consideration the situation.

Then I am coming to one fact that everyone must have in mind, that life has a price, and this price, as a minimum should be at least of seven figures … We have to put the value of the reporter, and also how dangerous the job is going to be, and this must be carried on with insurance companies directly through you and not through your company, it’s very important to know that.

Then I have another point: It is important that you organise yourself as an independent association, not accepting support from companies, from institutions and from governments and to be backed by insurance companies, they have their techniques. For instance when we consider that ECGD would not even insure a small parcel for £10,000 going to Afghanistan, how can you imagine that you are going to Afghanistan in such conditions which are not even covered for a small package.

The first commission is to carry the neutral aspect of the evaluation of the situation. They will not be tied to governments, to companies or to general situations. It is up to the association to decide what is feasible or not. The second commission is covering law and the lawyers will be preparing the schedule of the commitment and of the responsibility of the companies as will all the managers of the companies. Many of the companies I have been contacting — I have been asking them to have a debate about these problems — they listen to it ... but they did not agree to do it. Financially, for this association the insurance companies have to build in their premium a portion for running this independent, international association of journalists and refusing companies, refusing people belonging to officials, to governments or to existing press companies. It’s only for journalists and nobody else and this will give you the possibility to prepare, to say what is feasible or not and anyone accepting a job before going may ask the association what’s going on.

Palmer

Thank you very much

(Applause)

Wise words, I think that ultimately we all have to remember that the price we may pay is very high indeed and it’s the memory of women like Johanne who had the courage to go out and try and report on a very important war. Probably the best and most fitting tribute we can pay to her memory is to make sure that we are all better equipped when we go out and force the companies we work for, who are always trying to save money, to make sure we are as protected and as prepared as we possibly can be. I think to sum up Judith has some conclusions or at least some prototype recommendations about how things can be improved which will perhaps help you and of course anybody who has anything to add is very welcome. Let me just pass the microphone to Judith one last time.

Matloff

I think I kind of spat them all out during my lengthy interventions before, but I think we all agree that there should be some sort of self defence, or psychological training for women going forth. Again, flak jackets like the type that Rodney Pinder ordered for me in 1993; we definitely need more of those. Advice on websites, and working on changing newsroom culture, actually getting managers aware of these issues just the way they are now suddenly becoming aware of the trauma issues and getting a top down approach to this and really somehow making materials … available on rape to help women psychologically prepare themselves. And send in those boxes of tampax when you come and bring in more equipment.

Glass

The other thing I wanted to add is there’s nothing as valuable as having other women colleagues you can talk to. So the point that you made, I have a group of friends that are like my detox friends. You know, sometimes you come out of a place and there are only certain people who will understand it and you go to dinner with someone, like Liz, or whatever and you’ll be talking about shoes and then be like ‘Oh my god! Then we saw this mass grave!’ And you need to be with somebody who can understand that you’re going to go into that and come out of that, and a forum like this is great to be able to talk to other women. That’s how these issues like that are going to get resolved ...

Pinder

Thanks Liz. And thanks for doing an extremely difficult job this evening. I’d like to thank everybody for their contributions. On a practical note, I would like to make the point very strongly — it was made by M. Sutton too — that we’ve got to do it ourselves and this is one lesson I’ve learned in the two years that INSI has been under way: we cannot expect anybody else whether they be military or trainers or news companies, to take care of our own concerns. We’ve got to do so much ourselves ...