WORLD: International Women’s Day: Protect women journalists from systemic violence
To mark International Women’s Day, ARTICLE 19 draws attention to the overlapping attacks, threats, and harassment that women and LGBTQ+ journalists and human rights defenders confront when carrying out their vital work. Through sharing the findings of our project Equally Safe, we highlight what the many communicators, journalists, and activists we worked with have been making clear for many years: attacks against women journalists have never occurred in a vacuum, and we cannot respond to them as isolated incidents. Protection and violence prevention mechanisms must adopt an intersectional approach to respond to this reality.
Article 19 (08.03.2026) – Amidst a global shrinkage of civic space and rising violence and imperial militarisation, it is crucial to reflect on dominant narratives regarding security and how they shape who such security it is for. Over the course of our four-year project Equally Safe, which has focused on developing and implementing a feminist and intersectional approach to the safety of journalists, the women and LGBTQ+ journalists and communicators we have worked with from across the globe have made it clear: true security is embedded in equality and non-discrimination, which permit the equal exercise of the right to express oneself freely without retaliation or prior exclusion.
What is typically perceived as violence against women journalists is often one act – usually a physical attack – but these attacks or threats occur in the context of wider power imbalances that enable impunity and make remedies difficult to obtain.
Visible attacks are also the culmination of varied types of intersecting and structural violence that women journalists face, including surveillance, threats, online harassment, workplace exclusion, doxxing, and abusive lawsuits. These abuses take different forms but are perpetrated with the same goal: silencing women journalists and excluding them from public space. The impact of attacks is cumulative and compounded by the intersecting forms of discrimination that journalists and communicators face on the basis of their gender, race, class, queerness, disability, and other aspects of their identities.
To prevent violence against women journalists, the State has an obligation to go beyond protection methods that respond to visible violence, and to instead take an intersectional approach that demands the dismantling of the structures that enable the violence to take place at all.
On International Women’s Day, ARTICLE 19 urges governments to prioritise security that is rooted in equality, non-discrimination, and the protection of freedom of expression that enables journalists in all their diversity to hold power to account without fear of retaliation.
This includes:
- Ensuring the existence of an independent judiciary that proactively recognises and sanctions violence against journalists as acts of censorship, while seeking redress and non-repetition;
- State authorities implementing intersectional gender protocols to investigate attacks quickly and independently, ensuring that they do not cause further trauma or harm;
- Media outlets and unions adopting enforceable policies against gender-based violence and systemic discrimination; and
- Technology companies embedding human rights into the design of their services and products and proactively addressing the fact that their business models often provide the infrastructure for gender-based violence.
Our Equally Safe learnings report will be released later this month to further explore these topics.
