'Arab women journalists experience the most violence linked to online threats’, says new damning report

Arab, indigenous and Jewish women journalists are being disproportionately targeted by online violence, a damning new study has found.

Preliminary findings from the UNESCO-commissioned study, carried out by International Center for Journalists (ICFJ),  have been listed in a report.

They uncover a disturbing trend of online violence from doxing, Islamophobia and misogyny, through to targeted death threats against female journalists.  

"Black, Indigenous, Jewish, Arab and lesbian women journalists participating in our survey and interviews experienced both the highest rates and most severe impacts of online violence.” the report writes.

It showed that 73 per cent of women journalists experienced online violence: Twenty-five per cent of women experienced death threats, 18 per cent experienced sexual violence.

Additionally, nearly half of the women surveyed experienced harassing private messages (48 per cent), 14 per cent were hacked, and many women’s loved ones were threatened with violence.

Online violence against women journalists verges from large-scale attacks or extreme, isolated threats, through to the slow burn of networked gaslighting, which involves relentless lower-level abuse.

The internet has given rise to a new journalistic frontier and the 24-hour news cycle. With it comes anonymous accounts and a sense of impunity that emboldens abusers to engage in threatening behaviour.

Society: We meet Farah Koutteineh, founder of @key48return - an online account which started out as a student movement to counteract censorship in universities, but has gone on to tackle @instagram's silencing of #Palestinian voices.https://t.co/F8ZOVdTic4

— The New Arab (@The_NewArab) May 28, 2021

Lebanese journalist Ghada Oueiss, Al Jazeera’s Arabic presenter, revealed that she had been the target of a prolific online violence campaign.

“[Every day I went on air], I would receive on my Al Jazeera email – because somehow it was leaked - a death threat,” she is quoted as saying in the report.

“One of them that I can never forget [said]: ‘You will be looking at the camera to talk to your audience and you will start reading the bulletin and reading the autocue in front of you. You will notice that there is a gun and [a] bullet, that bullet will go straight to your head.’ Then I started getting emailed pornographic pictures... they started to put my head on naked women. And then, they made another email in my name and they started sending to my colleagues' pictures of [my] head on a naked body, also porn pictures.”

Arab women experience a disproportionately high rate of offline attacks linked to online violence (53 per cent of Arab women), according to the report. They face a far higher risk of being attacked in-person. 

In Pakistan, freelance journalist Youssra Jabeen was accused of blasphemy and ‘defaming Islam’ when she wrote about the absence of female heroes from school textbooks. She was later told to delete the story as “these accusations can get you traced, killed or kidnapped... It could have affected my workplace and everything,” she says.

Jewish women and indigenous women are also more likely to be attacked online (88 per cent and 86 per cent respectively), with the former being the target of anti-semitism.

The abuse female journalists experience has at times been linked to a “foreign State actor”.

“[There] are multiple examples from social media platforms - Twitter, Instagram - which are horrifying,” said Caoilfhionn Gallagher, a lawyer representing several women from the BBC Persian service.

“They are rape threats. They’re horrendous threats of sexual violence either to the journalists themselves or to family members. And sometimes they’re misogynistic threats to male journalists singling out female family members, or false allegations about male journalists raping their female colleagues.”

Online violence against women is growing and has become a new, global phenomenon.