Threatened

On February 11, 2011, as journalists were documenting the raucous celebration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square following the fall of Hosni Mubarak, the story took a sudden and unexpected turn. CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan, who was reporting from the square, was violently separated from her crew and security detail by a mob of men.…

In October 2015, when I solicited Chinese readers’ views on gender issues in journalism, one comment spoke volumes about the state of the debate in China: “Women can take advantage of their looks and feminine traits to attract well-known and powerful men to accept their interviews.”

Heba Alshibani did not set out to become a journalist. She had expected to become an academic, as many members of her Libyan family had before the February 2011 uprising that led to the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi. But when the violence did not abate after Qaddafi’s overthrow, Alshibani witnessed events that she felt compelled…

“When I cried, he slapped me hard and put his hand over my mouth.” That is how a 12-year-old girl in the Central African Republic described an episode in which a man found her hiding in the bathroom of her home in the wee hours of August 2, 2015, dragged her outside, and raped her,…

A plurality of online voices is good for democracy, yet one group has come under attack in the most gruesome ways. Threats of rape, physical violence and graphic imagery are showing up in the inboxes and on the social media platforms of female journalists across the globe. Though online harassment of journalists is not new,…

When it comes to abusive readers’ comments and tweets from Internet trolls, Katherine O’Donnell has heard it all. For years, O’Donnell, who is night editor of the Scottish edition of the U.K.’s The Times, has borne the brunt of personal attacks, including about her gender, from online trolls who take umbrage at articles in her…

Even today, the words scribbled across the pages in angry ALL CAPS are hard to look at. “HOW DO YOU GET A NIGGER OUT OF A TREE? CUT THE ROPE!!” “BEFORE THIS WORLD ENDS, THERE WILL BE A RACE WAR…” “ALL YOU PEOPLE DO IS CRY BITCH WINE [sic], BITCH.” “HAVE YOU PLAYED THE RACE…

On a recent trip to Kenya, I sat with S., a gay refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the cramped, one-room apartment he shares with three friends, all straight. The four share a bed, and none know S. is gay. The floor is covered in a vibrant yellow vinyl, their belongings clutter every…

It’s a calm day in a Ugandan village. Women gather on plastic chairs, shaded from the afternoon sun. I’m here with a handful of journalists on a reporting trip sponsored by the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). The village women welcome us and begin to tell us about their lives. Then something happens. A man…