How Conflict-Zone Security Training Fails Female Journalists

Security training courses are necessary for journalists who report from dangerous environments, but often don’t prepare female, trans, and gender-nonconforming reporters for identity-related risks.

By Madeleine Wattenbarger

When I arrived at a Hostile Environment and First Aid Training (HEFAT) at the University of Miami earlier this year, I was pleasantly surprised to find that over half of the 20 participants, all reporters working in conflict zones around the world, were women. The training is offered by a variety of organizations worldwide, primarily for journalists and aid workers. (Many media outlets require that journalists in particularly dangerous environments take the training once every three years; some will only hire freelancers for hostile-environment reporting if they have completed the training.)

Despite knowing dozens of female colleagues in my home base of Mexico, I still think of conflict-zone journalism as mostly an old boys’ club, populated by adrenaline-seeking Indiana Jones wannabes nurturing war fantasies, and HEFAT seems particularly ripe for those cliches. I wasn’t the only one surprised to find women in the majority: Another female participant took the train from the airport with a male colleague, who, upon realizing they were both attending the training, commented that “he didn’t expect any women to be here.”

Like most of journalism, conflict reporting has long been dominated by men. Female, transgender and gender-nonconforming conflict reporters tend to face a different set of risks than their cisgender male colleagues, and security trainings often overlook those risks in favor of an assumed cisgender male subject. Safety preparedness can look different for women, from self-defense in the case of sexual assault, to what kinds of contacts to cultivate before a risky reporting trip, to what equipment to carry. Institutions that deal with journalist security are increasingly reshaping their practices to address gender-related concerns, but the industry at large often comes up short in addressing the risks that female and gender-nonconforming journalists face in hostile environments, particularly with respect to sexual violence.

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During one module in the training I attended, the trainers asked us to share our own experiences when someone made us feel unsafe while on assignment. The connotation of sexual violence was implicit. Though our male colleagues would later share their own stories of finding themselves in risky situations, they remained largely silent. Many of the women in the room shared readily, mentioning instances of harassment by sources or fixers or the assignments turned down for the red flags that they’d immediately noted. Gender-related security concerns shapes journalists’ approach to assignments from the get-go.

For journalists reporting in hostile environments, security preparedness for an assignment typically starts with a risk assessment of the challenges that might arise. Lucy Westcott, the James W. Foley Fellow at the Committee to Protect Journalists, emphasizes that these assessments should include gender- and identity-specific dangers. “In a hostile environment, women always face the same risks that men do, whether that’s kidnapping or being shot,” she says. “But there’s also always a greater risk of sexualized violence against women.”

That means that situations that may be benign for a male colleague may put a female journalist in danger. Sulome Anderson has spent her career reporting from the Middle East and North Africa, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt, where she’s covered stories on ISIS, the Syrian refugee crisis, and Hezbollah. Anderson says that the situations that most concern her aren’t usually on the battlefield. “In those situations, you know the risks, and there are ways you can prepare. For women, it’s the interactions, like one-on-ones with sources, or interactions with people you don’t really know,” she says. “Women are conditioned to make other people comfortable. It can be hard to say no when we want the story.”

Anderson always tries to report with one man around who she completely trusts, whether that’s a fixer, photographer, or driver. In some contexts, she needs to have a man who could advocate for her if something goes wrong.

Westcott, of the Committee to Protect Journalists, points out that even digital harassment towards journalists disproportionately targets women, specifically women of color. But it’s not unusual for security training curricula to relegate identity-related modules to an afterthought. Encarni Pindado, a Spanish photojournalist who covers migration throughout Central and North America, recalls a security training she attended in which discussion of sexual assault was wedged into the end of the day. “After nine at night, they told the women to stay with the first aid trainer to talk about sexual assault, while of course the men were going out for beers,” she says. “We were really angry, and we spent the time talking about that.”

Not only did that sidelining undermine the importance of sexual assault-related training, Pindado notes, but it also reinforced the assumption that only women need to learn about sexual violence preparedness. She recounts one experience while she was reporting in Honduras, in which a source began aggressively hitting on her in the presence of male colleagues. “Of course they don’t always need to intervene,” she says. “But they need to know when you can handle something alone or when they need to intervene and how, even just with body language.”

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Programs that relegate identity to an afterthought or don’t cover sexual assault at all don’t equip journalists to deal with the situations they face in the field. So what does a gender and identity-inclusive security training look like? Nadine Hoffman, the deputy director of the International Women’s Media Foundation, suggests that it requires a paradigm shift in thinking about security. The IWMF has been running HEFAT trainings for five years, both in the US and internationally, for both all-female and co-ed groups. “We don’t have a specific gender module,” she says, “but it’s part of the perspective for the whole training.”

Training modules may include self-defense skills to escape from an attacker and sessions focusing on psychological and emotional well-being, in addition to addressing the gender-related risks relevant to various scenarios. Westcott adds that mixed-gender sessions can better educate journalists of all identities about situations their colleagues might face. “When we have male editors and female reporters in the same room, they can have conversations together, and the editors become more aware of their reporters’ risks.”

In the current media landscape, though, training can only go so far to keep female journalists safe. Low pay and little accountability from media outlets puts journalists in hostile environments at greater risk, and on-the-ground safety expenses can be higher for women. Alice Driver, a Mexico-based reporter who covers immigration and gender, points out that many security issues come down to exploitative relationships between freelance journalists and outlets. “Pay discrepancies for women are a safety issue,” she says. “Sometimes we’re not able to plan properly because we don’t have the budget to do it.”

Freelance journalists often report risky stories without guaranteed backing from a media outlet. Even once a story is accepted, media outlets rarely provide adequate travel and security budgets for freelancers to keep themselves safe—whether that means taking a flight instead of a bus ride or staying in a hotel instead of a hostel or an acquaintance’s couch. Publications seldom provide travel, medical or accident insurance or cover the costs for equipment, anything from bulletproof vests to first aid kits to GPS trackers to emergency contraception, all of which freelance journalists typically pay for out of pocket.

In addition to financial concerns, editors can keep their reporters safe by responding to safety issues as they develop on the ground. Pindado says she’s learned to trust her instincts in a potentially dangerous situation, but she doesn’t always trust her editors to look out for her safety. “They only take you seriously when something serious happens, not the preamble to something serious,” Pindado says. “When something happens, it’s important to know that the editors who hire you will take that type of complaint seriously.”

As Hoffman says, across the industry, a change of paradigm is necessary. Though the HEFAT I attended included a few moments for reflection on sexual violence-related risks, it ended with the twelve women in the room asking the trainers to show us more self-defense moves: specifically, how to escape from someone who has us horizontal with their body on top of us. Our half-day of self-defense training hadn’t included that scenario, and we spent the last 15 minutes of the training, while finishing up our written evaluations, learning how to slip out from under a body holding us down.

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