Why female journalists in India still can’t have it all?

Women journalists have taken a step further and entered the field of photo journalism where their cameras are doing the talking. But has the industry shown its true face that women are not safe enough to follow their passion? Asha Jhabakh talks to photojournalists in the industry to find out the truth. 

The recent vicious gang rape of a 22-year old photojournalist in Mumbai has raised a basic question: are women journalists safe in India or are they as vulnerable as any other woman? In spite of being in an educated society and an industry where threats is a common word, a journalists is still as unsafe to walk back home late in the night post her assignments.

Providing a police escort for every female journalist in Mumbai, as proposed by the Maharashtra Home Minister RR Patil, in the wake of the incident is a little too much and too late apart from being unpractical. It is not surprising to see that Mumbai’s women journalists rejected Mr Patil’s offer, contending that no reporter would want to discuss her work with the police or accept special gender-centric rules for their safety, and all they need is a safe environment, in the office and also on the streets. Apart from what it means for media freedom, it is also not practical for thousands of women reporters working in the print and electronic media in Mumbai to ask for police escorts. If Mr Patil could afford such a big police force to begin with, may be such gang rapes would not have occurred any way.

A couple of years ago, a TV reporter working with a channel based in New Delhi was attacked and killed as she drove alone at midnight on the Nelson Mandela Marg. Again, she was not killed for what she reported, but because she was alone at night and the predators felt they could escape unharmed.  

In India, a female journalist is attacked mostly because she is a woman and not because of her work, whereas in some other countries they have been attacked because of their coverage. In fact, there they are victims of a double jeopardy, first as a female and then also as a journalist covering controversial stories.  

In February 2011, the world was stunned by the news that CBS war correspondent Lara Logan was brutally attacked in Cairo’s Tahrir Square while covering the Egyptian revolution. But, as Logan said later in an interview with 60 Minutes, her terrible experience may not be so uncommon. What she called a “code of silence” exists about such sexual assault on female journalists, something she said “all of us have experienced and never talk about.”  

Those who experience such attacks rarely report them, citing professional and cultural stigma as discouraging factors. In many countries, if a woman talks about being raped, she risks being kicked out of her home or otherwise deserted by her husband, getting fired from her job or barred from future assignments, or even being beaten by the same police to whom she is expected to report her abuse. But clearly, in some Muslim countries where women don’t have the same societal status as men, the dangers are even greater.

The bigger question here is, when a woman journalist in India is going to get a deserving place because of her hard work, and not because she knows someone or because she is someone’s wife or a sister or daughter-in- law or just a girlfriend. There is no doubt that most women journalists in India are focused and they became journalists because of their passion for raising some of the social issues and bringing justice to the society.   But sometimes they are hurt when they hit glass walls and ceilings in the male-dominated media industry where both the media owners and their highly paid editors want to keep even the male reporters down below in the ladder of power, so that they can never ask questions about the slant given to their piece and also never become a threat to replace their superiors who want to hold on to their highly lucrative positions, which sometimes are lucrative even beyond their own belief.  So there is an urgent need to empower our reporters, especially our female reporters, by providing them job security and physical safety.

As a young journalist with CNN in 1996, Suhasini Haidar was part of the crew that covered the national election that year. It was the first she had covered. Even after 17 years, she cannot forget the experience she went through during an overcrowded public rally she attended outside of Delhi, near the northern Indian state of Haryana. “We were horrified by the number of times our bottoms got pinched and we were brushed past,” said Ms. Haidar in an interview with Tribune, now the foreign affairs editor of the Indian television station CNN-IBN.

Ashima Narain, the photo editor of National Geographic Traveller, wrote recently in the national daily The Indian Express, “I think it is time not to be ashamed to talk about fear.” Fear is what ensures I look back as I walk, it’s what makes me look for exits when I enter potentially difficult spaces, it is what keeps me alert and often, alive. I call it other things like discomfort or commonsense, because it’s weak to be afraid — it might expose me for what I am, a woman.

 “When one is travelling late at nights with heavy and costly equipment, it is quite risky travelling alone,” said Sujitha, a freelance photographer in the city. She shares that carries a can of pepper spray as she often encounters drug addicts and drunken men as co-passengers on the train at night. “In media organizations, those who are put in charge of assigning work to reporters or photographers should be more sensitive.

For India’s female journalists, it is a big leap from the way things were a few decades earlier, when women weren’t even allowed to leave the office to report. Journalism in India was a male bastion in the 1940s and the 1950s, with the exception of a few women in newspaper offices, who usually wrote columns or worked on weekend editions but were almost never sent on reporting assignments by their male bosses.