Bapok & Hooker @ 152th brothel MUST READ these Rape Stories of Reporters

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They suffered brutal rapes and tortures for reports they wrote on the news, from violent mobs. Some days this will happen in SG?
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http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/07/wolfe.violence.female.journalists/

Women journalists speak out on sexual attacks
By Lauren Wolfe, Special to CNN
June 7, 2011 -- Updated 1619 GMT (0019 HKT)
CBS correspondent Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob while reporting in Cairo, Egypt. Her recent ordeal is a high-profile example of what women journalists endure all over the world.

CBS correspondent Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob while reporting in Cairo, Egypt. Her recent ordeal is a high-profile example of what women journalists endure all over the world.

Editor's note: Lauren Wolfe is senior editor for the Committee to Protect Journalists. CPJ's special report "The Silencing Crime: Sexual Violence and Journalists" and guidelines on sexual aggression were published today. Wolfe has written previously about sexual violence against journalists on the CPJ Blog.

(CNN) -- Rebel soldiers gang-raped her, slapping and beating her while she was on assignment. She was a West African journalist trying to report a story that these soldiers didn't want told. Four years after the attack she still calls herself "empty" and "traumatized." She saw her doctor, but never told anyone else but me. Today, she insists on having her story reported -- with the hope that recounting her rape will help her quiet the terrors that replay in her mind.

This woman, who asked to remain unidentified out of fear of reprisals, is one of the many local and international correspondents who have been sexually violated while working. The most high-profile recent example was the assault on CBS correspondent Lara Logan in Cairo in February. But Logan is far from the only journalist to undergo such an attack.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, an international press freedom organization, regularly writes about journalists who are beaten, kidnapped, or jailed. But we have exposed very few cases of sexual assault in the last 30 years: Only a handful of reporters chose to speak on the record. We decided it was time to document how such dark acts have silenced journalism around the world and have released our findings today in a special report.

Sexual violence against journalists isn't new, but it is getting more attention. More women journalists than ever are working at higher levels in the field, and international media and press freedom groups are acknowledging the problem in a public way. The sudden spotlight on the issue has prompted dozens of women, and some men, to tell CPJ what they've endured.
Lauren Wolfe
Lauren Wolfe

I talked to more than four dozen journalists from the Middle East to South Asia, Africa to the Americas. About half were local journalists, the others foreign correspondents. Seven had been raped, while many more were sexually penetrated by hands or objects, violently groped, and threatened with rape.

The assaults fall into three general types: sexual violation targeting a specific journalist, often in reprisal for her work; mob-related sexual violence against journalists covering public events; and sexual abuse of journalists in detention or captivity.

Sexual aggression takes other forms as well. Most common is the groping of female journalists on assignment, with 22 of the 25 foreign correspondents I interviewed reporting they'd been groped multiple times. They were usually covering public events, such as protests or celebrations that are often scarcely controlled mayhem.

And when I say "groped," I'm talking about violent touching, not a simple swipe, and sometimes at the most bizarre moments. Kate Brooks, a freelance photographer based in Turkey, said a man grabbed her crotch from behind as she was photographing a severed foot at the scene of a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

One of the most candid journalists I spoke with was Jineth Bedoya. That I can reveal her name is of great consequence -- journalists who have been sexually assaulted usually choose to withhold their identities because of the stigma that surrounds such attacks. So many journalists are afraid to have their names published out of fear that they will lose assignments, or because of cultural barriers against reporting abuse.

Bedoya was gang-raped while reporting on right-wing Colombian paramilitaries in May 2000. While on assignment for the Bogotá daily El Espectador, men abducted, bound, blindfolded, and took her to a house in the central city of Villavicencio, where she was beaten and raped by multiple attackers.

In the 11 years since her assault, Bedoya has met at least three female journalists who were raped in reprisal for their reporting. These women chose to stay quiet because of cultural and professional stigmas, she said. But on May 24, Bedoya brought her case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. She hopes it will encourage her colleagues to "denounce what's happened to them and be able to ask for justice."

Journalists face the threat of sexual violence every day in every region of the globe. Documenting the sexual violation of journalists working in war zones or on dangerous assignments shows that an international press freedom organization recognizes, and does not accept, the horrors they endure. I hope it will give them the courage to continue to cover the corruption, atrocities, and conflict they experience every day. I know that for one West African journalist, it already has.

The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Lauren Wolfe.

 

[Capano2121]

Maybe it is happening, just not reported or covered up!

 

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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=55972

Female Journalists Break Silence on Sexual Violence
By Kanya D'Almeida

WASHINGTON, Jun 7, 2011 (IPS) - On Feb. 11, while the world was celebrating former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's fall from power, CBS television correspondent Lara Logan was being "mercilessly assaulted" by a group of well over 200 men in a dark corner of Tahrir Square.

"For an extended period of time they raped me with their hands," Logan, who was ripped away from her bodyguard by a mob and beaten before being attacked, said last month in an interview with the New York Times.

A public statement co-drafted by Logan and CBS chairman Jeff Fager meant that she "didn't have to carry the burden alone, like my dirty little secret, something I had to be ashamed of," Logan said in one of her few interviews on the attack, two months ago.

Though Logan is not the first - and is unlikely to be the last – journalist to be subjected to such brutality, her story exposed the silence around such crimes, which happen far more frequently than the media world has acknowledged or that women themselves are willing to admit.

In the first extensive compilation of its kind, the New York City- based international press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released "The Silencing Crime: Sexual Violence and Journalists" Tuesday, a special report documenting a deluge of stories of rape, sexual abuse and severe harassment.


Changing a Culture of Shame and Fear

Though a great deal of systematic research has been conducted on imprisonment, disappearances, torture and, of course, assassinations, there is very little documentation available on sexual violence.

Rodney Pinder, whose organisation, the International News Safety Institute (INSI), serves journalists working in hazardous situations, said that female journalists were reluctant to respond to INSI's 2005 survey on gender-based security issues for fear that editors - the majority of whom are men - might balk at the idea of sending female reporters into the field for "safety issues".

"It would be a terrible shame if that were the consequence of documenting these attacks," CPJ's Lauren Wolfe told IPS. "Nobody keeps men away from the field because of fear of kidnapping… and it would be shameful for media outlets to pull women from the field for this reason. Women and men both know the risks associated with their profession and make their own choices."

Though women's fears of being socially and professionally ostracised are certainly not unfounded, advocates believe that continuing to muzzle women's voices or failing to bring such crimes to light will only breed the culture of silence and impunity.

"As a press freedom advocate, I can only tell women that the more information we have on cases of any kind of assault – sexual or otherwise – the better we are able to carry out effective advocacy," Wolfe told IPS.

"I don't think keeping silent on the abuse can in any way benefit the media or the people who read the news," she added. "It is imperative that the world sheds light on crimes committed against journalists, and act to prevent them from happening in the future."
"I wrote a blog post about Logan's attack the day after it happened and immediately women started contacting me to tell me their own personal stories of assault," Lauren Wolfe, CPJ's senior editor and co-author of the report, told IPS, adding that the reaction to Logan's attack by women around the world constituted the momentum behind the report.

Based on over four dozen interviews with 27 local and 25 international journalists from Asia and Latin America to Africa and the Middle East, the report only scratches the surface of what is likely a much more widespread crisis, yet it is the only substantial document detailing crimes that activists believe occur across the world with frequency and impunity.

"From threats and groping to aggressive physical harassment and rape, these acts not only obstruct the work of journalists but are used as retribution," Wolfe said in a press release Monday.

"Acknowledging and assessing sexual aggression against journalists is a first step toward formulating solutions and advocating for change. This report is a step in that direction," she added.

Stigma breeds silence

Many of the women who brought their stories to CPJ are doing so after years of silence, having hitherto feared being demoted, demonised or further humiliated by coming forward about attacks.

Indeed, the majority of the women interviewed for the report did so under condition of anonymity to "protect" their careers. The few who agreed to speak on the record also acknowledged their own, and their colleagues', reluctance and hesitation to expose the crimes.

Jineth Bedoya, a then-journalist for the Bogota daily El Espectador, was abducted while investigating the actions of ring-wing paramilitaries in Colombia in May 2000. In a house in the city of Villavicencio, she was beaten by multiple attackers and gang-raped.

In the decade following the crime, Bedova has encountered three colleagues who have remained silent on reprisal attacks because of "cultural and professional stigmas".

However, Wolfe wrote in an article on CNN Tuesday, two weeks ago Bedoya brought the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, hoping to inspire and encourage women to "denounce what's happened to them and be able to ask for justice".

"It's embarrassing, and you feel like an idiot saying anything, especially when you are reporting on much, much greater horrors," Jenny Nordberg, a New York-based Swedish correspondent who was violently groped while covering the late Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan from exile in October 2007, wrote to CPJ in February.

"But it still stays with you," she added. "I did not tell the editors for fear of losing assignments."

"[Also], I just did not want them to think of me as a girl. Especially when I am trying to be equal to, and better than, the boys," Nordberg said.

And, as Logan pointed out, sexual violence does not leave the same visible scars of torture or other forms of abuse. After rape or sexual assault, "You only have your word," Logan said. "The physical wounds heal. You don't carry around… evidence the way you would if you had lost your leg or your arm in Afghanistan."

(END)

 

[minibond]

Give them a warm up. Send SPH Media Corp all to Egypt etc countries for long assignments.