Anti-gender, anti-feminism and women journalists attacked

The Department of Gender Studies at the University of Lund (Sweden) held the workshop “Anti-gender, anti-feminism and women journalists under attack” last September 8, with the aim of offering a space for North Global-South dialogue Global and where we have participated to explain various projects we are working on.

The speakers were Ana Valdés , Uruguayan journalist and writer. Shora Esmailian , Iranian journalist. Åsa Ohlsson , Swedish journalist, promoter of a support network with Belarusian journalists. Alicia Oliver , coordinator of the Network and the International Network of Journalists with Gender Vision (RIPVG), and was moderated by Diana Mulinari , sociologist and researcher at the Department of Gender Studies at Lund University.

Women journalists face online and offline attacks that put their safety at risk: these attacks can range from violence, stigmatization, sexist hate speech, trolling, physical assault, rape and even murder. Different studies have shown that female journalists are the subject of attacks on the Internet to a much greater extent than their male colleagues, and that the threats they receive are highly sexualized and focus on their physical features, their ethnic origin or cultural, rather than in the content of their work. As a result, these threats tend to silence the voices of women journalists and undermine freedom of expression by disrupting valuable investigative journalism. They also distort the landscape of the media by threatening diversity and perpetuating inequalities both in newsrooms and in society.

From the European Network we have explained the work we are organizing for the II edition of the Women’s Parliament that will be held on November 24 in the Catalan Parliament and in which the different types of violence that affect women will be made visible . From the Network we are organizing Group I which has to do with digital violence, media violence and political violence against women. A topic that touches fully on the objective of the workshop.

We also took the opportunity to present the publication “Communicating the Mediterranean with a feminist perspective”, which collects the presentations from the meeting held in Barcelona and in which 10 journalists from the southern shore of the Mediterranean participated.

Finally, and as representatives of the RIPVG, we were able to explain the work done by the Alerts Commission which, since 2009, documents, monitors and participates in campaigns in support of women journalists who have suffered some type of violence in order to exercise their his work A violence that grows due to intolerance of criticism, corruption and impunity when it comes to attacks on freedom of expression.

Among the various agreements that emerged in the workshop, it must be said that it was approved to be part of the Alerts Commission of the RIPVG, to follow the development and agreements of the Women’s Parliament as a good practice, and to join the dissemination and support with engaged journalism in Belarus.