Reporting on Afghanistan has become incredibly difficult, but journalists need to urgently find ways to cover the Taliban’s campaign to erase the country’s women.
That was the message conveyed by a panel of women journalists hosted by Rukhshana Media at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia on Saturday to discuss their work, and look at ways in which the media can amplify the voices of Afghan women.
Alex Crawford, special correspondent for Sky News, said she was shocked by how little protest there had been outside Afghanistan about the Taliban’s efforts to erase women from public life, and urged the audience to do all they could to get the message out about what’s being done.
“I’m as guilty as anyone else in that my newsroom will tend to send me where the bombs are falling. The bombs may not be falling in Afghanistan, but it is being exploded inside out,” she said.
“The culture’s being broken, the women are being erased, and we have to find more inventive ways of covering it and try and force it on the agenda, because it’s not going away and it seems to be getting a whole lot worse.”
Crawford, who has been covering Afghanistan for more than two decades, said she had not been granted a visa to return after reporting from a maternity ward where teenage mothers told her they feared dying because of the country’s maternal mortality rates, some of the world’s highest.
Now, she said, foreign journalists wanting to go to Afghanistan to report have to tell the authorities what stories they want to cover, and it was made clear to her that reporting on the ban on girls’ education imposed by the Taliban more than four years ago was off the table.
Rukhshana Media’s founder Zahra Joya said reporting inside Afghanistan was very challenging because of the levels of censorship, as well as self-censorship by journalists. Rukhshana’s reporters, who work anonymously for their safety, are nevertheless at risk “because we are gathering information the Taliban never wants to come out,” she said.
But Afghan women are “still fighting in whatever way they can,” and that provides hope, said Joya. She pushed back against what she said was a pervasive narrative in the West that women in Afghanistan were used to subjugation and did not want their freedom. “My question is, who doesn’t want freedom?” she demanded.
Amie Ferris-Rotman, a former senior correspondent for Reuters in Afghanistan and a founder board member of Rukhshana, pointed out there had been surprisingly little coverage of the widespread sexual violence against Afghan women and highlighted a collaboration between Rukhshana and the Guardian that exposed the gang rape of a woman in an Afghan jail.
The panel, which can be watched here, was moderated by Meera Selva, chief executive of Internews Europe.
