15 Jun 17 | Digital Freedom, Mapping Media Freedom, Netherlands, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Dutch journalists launched a campaign to pressure advertisers into reconsidering advertising on sites that denigrate women.
A petition urging advertisers to withdraw their ads from provocative right-wing blog GeenStijl, shook up The Netherlands last month. About 150 women journalists and celebrities signed an open letter after a post that lead to a storm of sexual harassment and rape threats towards a female journalist. A few large companies and government institutions have so far pulled out their adverts.
The first time Loes Reijmer’s picture appeared on the front page of GeenStijl, in March 2017, she had just written a piece for her newspaper De Volkskrant about the reasons behind and the consequences of online sexual harassment of women.
In the article, she explained how blogs and social media groups are increasingly harassing women, for example by posting nude photos without their consent. She mentioned GeenStijl as the one Dutch example of a website thriving on sexist, racist and humiliating content.
GeenStijl, a popular and controversial website owned by Telegraaf Media Group, was quick to answer to Reijmer’s critical article. The next day her headshot appeared on the front page, accompanied by the text: ‘This is Loes Reijmer. Would you do her?’ A storm of sexist comments followed, including rape threats.
In April, daily NRC-columnist Rosanne Herzberger added fuel to the fire by writing a column questioning GeenStijl’s credibility. She went one step further and urged GeenStijl’s advertisers, some of the biggest companies in the country, to rethink spending their money on the site.
“The question is, which companies are making content like this possible?” Herzberger wrote. She mentioned companies like TUI travels, McDonald’s, Renault, Rabobank, Dutch theme park De Efteling and even the Dutch tax service and the Ministry of Defense.
GeenStijl has a reach of 1.2 million unique viewers per month, which makes it one of the biggest online media outlets in the country. Its videoblog Dumpert.nl has an even wider reach, 2.2 million views per month.
“Humiliating women is big business,” Herzberger stated firmly. Her column was widely spread and shared on social media, and lead to many companies to actually reconsider their advertising choices.
A couple of days later GeenStijl reposted the picture of Loes Reijmer with now the text: “Would you do her? Tell us how!”, followed by even more threatening comments by GeenStijl readers.
This is when dailies Volkskrant and NRC joined forces and published an open letter addressed to the advertisers. “Dear advertisers,” it read. “You are paying for a website where sexism and racism is the norm, not the exception.” About 150 women, from celebrities to journalists, signed the letter.
The campaign was inspired by the American organisation Sleeping Giant that keeps track of companies whose adverts appear on the alt-right website Bartbreit.
Journalists in The Netherlands are increasingly experiencing harassment and threats, a recently published investigation by the Dutch Union for Journalists (NVJ) showed. More than half (61 percent) of all (638) questioned Dutch journalists have been threatened physically or via social media at some point in their career, 22 percent even on a monthly basis. Amnesty International called the Dutch numbers “worrying”.
Volkskrant’s own ombudswoman, Annieke Kranenberg, believes it is a worrying trend. In an op-ed in De Volkskrant she stated that being a target of sexual intimidation and threats online could lead to self-censorship.
She asked several Volkskrant journalists about their experiences and many admitted they are suffering from self-censorship. “I always expect to receive negative comments, but the comments on GeenStijl are the worst, the most hateful you can get,” one journalist, who remained anonymous, told her. “The reality is that I do think twice before I write about something sensitive.”
Even the journalists that don’t have experience with self-censorship find themselves obstructed in doing their jobs. When they have been smeared by GeenStijl, they notice the articles in which they have been portrait negatively, keep coming up in the search engines. “I’m bothered by that,” one journalist said. “People Google your name before they say yes to an interview request.”
Online harassment against female journalists and women, in general, is not just a problem in The Netherlands, ombudswoman Annieke Kranenberg argued. “Worldwide it has an effect on press freedom,” she wrote. She referred to an essay by the American journalist Amanda Hess in 2014: Why women aren’t welcome on the internet. The amounts of sexist and threatening messages women receive online “are an assault on women’s careers, their psychological bandwidth, and their freedom to live online,” Hess stated.
OSCE’s media freedom spokesperson Dunja Mijatovic published a report on the topic in 2015. She concluded that female journalists are disproportionately affected by online hate speech. Mijatovic recommended that media companies themselves could play a role in changing this discourse by working on better on equality on the work floor. Media companies should also publicly stand up more against online hate speech, and they must ensure psychological and legal support for their journalists, Mijatovic argued.
GeenStijl has fired back to the open letter. They argue that dailies De Volkskrant and NRC have crossed a line by publishing such a threat and that by doing so they are themselves restricting freedom of expression.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row full_width=”stretch_row_content_no_spaces” content_placement=”middle”][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”91122″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2017/05/stand-up-for-satire/”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
27 Apr 17 | Events
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”90019″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.hayfestival.com/”][vc_column_text]Christina Lamb, Helena Kennedy, Rachael Jolley and Joan Bakewell
In a tribute to the late frontline journalist Sue Lloyd-Roberts and her posthumously-published book, a panel of three exceptional and indefatigable heroes talk to Joan Bakewell about women reporting on war. Lamb is the Foreign Correspondent of The Sunday Times and the author of Farewell Kabul and The Girl from Aleppo. Kennedy is a world-renowned Human Rights lawyer. Rachael Jolley is editor of Index on Censorship.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
When: Saturday 27 May 2017, 8:30pm
Where: Hay Festival venue Baillie Gifford Stage
Tickets: £8.30 from Hay Festival
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
12 Apr 16 | Awards, mobile
Indonesian comedian Sakdiyah Ma’ruf, a nominee for the 2016 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award for arts, was born to conservative Muslim family in Java and went on to become one of very few female stand-up comedians in the country to appear on national TV.
British comedian Shazia Mirza, the host of this year’s awards, talks to her about tackling no-go subjects, trying to win family approval, and how the stand-up scene is growing for women in Indonesia.
Sakdiyah Ma’ruf (left) and Shazia Mirza (right)
SHAZIA: Have your parents come to watch you do stand-up?
SAKDIYAH: My parents came to one of my shows once. It was in 2012 in one of the biggest theatres in Jakarta. I invited them to the show because it was held in a “dignified” building. I wanted to help my parents, and especially my dad, see that I was doing a “dignified” job.
I was very nervous. It was a full house. But I didn’t care whether the audience liked me or not, as long as I could get at least silent approval from my dad.
Since the show, my dad has supported me in my career as a comedian – not fully perhaps – but from this moment on, he knew that stand-up was something I did and would continue to do – in addition to the other “real jobs” I have.
I remember my parents saying they were pretty nervous about how the audience would respond to me. Perhaps my dad thought he could accept what I was doing if I gained approval from at least half of the audience.
The truth is that it isn’t always easy to get out of the house to perform. In June 2015 I was invited to open for a good friend of mine who is one of the biggest stand-up comics in Indonesia. He called me in April for the gig and it took me almost a month just to craft the right sentence to ask for my dad’s permission to perform.
SHAZIA: Do you say exactly what you want to? Or do you think: “No I can’t say that, people might get upset”
SAKDIYAH: The truth is that I rarely say exactly what I want to. I mean, can you imagine expressing all those voices in your head to the audience?
I say what I believe in; what I have experienced; what I am concerned about; what I like; what I don’t like; what I’m angry about… For me, comedy is always about telling the truth. You can’t be genuinely funny without being completely honest with yourself and your audience.
But I do self-censor, I self-censor all the time! I’m not afraid to talk about taboo topics like religion, race relation, a bit of sex etc – but only if it helps me to be honest with myself and my audience to be honest with themselves. I make sure I craft my jokes on these topics in a way that is truly funny; otherwise I’ll just sound like another girl complaining about how unfair life is.
I also make sure I’m being fair. I fact-check before I talk about something, so that I don’t just make things worse.
SHAZIA: Are you the only woman in Indonesia doing stand-up?
SAKDIYAH: No, of course not. I was the first, but the number is now growing. Every year there are new female stand-up comics performing on TV or participating in competitions.
SHAZIA: Do you feel pressure to talk about “heavy” subjects, like Islamophobia and terrorism, in your comedy? Or do you prefer to talk about lighter things sometimes – like shopping, dating, going on holidays.
SAKDIYAH: I want to talk about the issues that matter to me, things I can relate to, things that are part of who I am and what I have experienced.
I love talking about Muslims and the way they practice and interpret their religion. I talk about Islamophobia, violence towards women, the idea and construction of femininity and masculinity, my ethnicity.
Yeah, sometimes I feel such pressure to talk about “heavy” topics, but for what it’s worth, I think there is no such thing as a “light” topic in comedy. With a great comedian, even jokes about a refrigerator can bring new insights on humanity.
And I guess this is what is so beautiful about comedy: it helps us get to know who we are who others are as well. Every individual has multiple identities. I have been perceived as this Muslim girl fighting against fundamentalism through her comedy. While this is true, I do not want to just be seen as some kind of a “comedy jihadist” fighting against fundamentalists. I have layers to my identity, just like everybody else.
SHAZIA: Do you receive letters and emails from people who have seen your performances? What kind of things do they say? What do women say?
SAKDIYAH: Yes, I do. A woman once asked me whether I am a “true” Muslim. Perhaps she considered my jokes too daring or inappropriate for a Muslim woman to tell. She asked me all these questions about whether I really wear the hijab every day and whether I pray five times a day.
I like getting these kinds of responses. I feel like these people genuinely care about me or at least about Muslim women in general.
22 Sep 15 | Austria, mobile, News and features, United Kingdom
Panelists at the OSCE meet on online attacks against journalists: writer Arzu Geybulla; Gavin Rees, Europe director of the Dart Center for journalism and trauma; Becky Gardiner, from Goldsmiths, University of London; journalist Caroline Criado Perez
“This is not something that only ‘ladies’ can fix,” emphasised Dunja Mijatovic, the OSCE’s Representative on Freedom of the Media at an expert meeting on the safety of female journalists in Vienna on 17 September 2015, which Index on Censorship attended.
The importance of collectively tackling the growing problem became an overarching theme of the conference. “There is a new and alarming trend for women journalists and bloggers to be singled out for online harassment,” said Mijatovic, while highlighting the importance of media, state and NGO voices coming together to address the abuse.
Arzu Geybulla and Caroline Criado Perez, journalists from Azerbaijan and the UK respectively, started the meeting with moving testaments of their own experiences. Despite covering very different topics, they have received shockingly similar threats – sexual, violent and personal. “Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you and choke you with my dick” was one of the messages received by Perez after she campaigned for a woman to feature on British banknotes.
Although male journalists also receive abuse, women experience a two-fold attack, including the gendered threats. Think tank Demos has estimated that female journalists experience roughly three times as many abusive comments as their male counterparts on Twitter.
The problem, said Perez, was not just the threats but how the women who receive them are then treated. “Women are accused of being mad or attention seeking, which are all ways of delegitimising women’s speech,” she said. “People told me to stop, close my Twitter account, go offline. But why is the solution to shut up?” She added: “This is a societal problem, not an internet problem.”
“Labelling a person, and making that person an object, is particularly common in Azerbaijan,” said Geybulla, an Azeri journalist and Index on Censorship magazine contributor who was labelled a traitor and viciously targeted online after writing for a Turkish-Armenian newspaper. “Our society is not ready to speak out. You can’t go to the police. The police think it must be your fault.”
The intention of the meeting was to highlight the problem, while also proposing courses of actions. Suggestions included calls for more education in digital literacy; more training for police; more support from editors and media organisations, and from male colleagues. There was some disagreement on whether the laws were robust enough as they stand, or needed an update for the internet age.
Becky Gardiner, formerly editor of Guardian’s Comment is Free section, spoke about how her own views on dealing with online abuse had changed, having initially told writers they should develop a thicker skin. “It is not enough to tell people to get tough. Disarming the comments is not a solution either. That genie is out of the bottle.” Gardiner, who is now a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, is working on research into the issue, as commissioned by the Guardian’s new editor, Kath Viner.
It was suggested that small but crucial steps could be taken by media organisations to avoid inflammatory and misleading headlines (which are not written by the journalist, but put them in the firing line) and to be careful of exposing inexperienced writers without preparation or support. Sarah Jeong from Vice’s Motherboard plaform said, in her experience, freelancers often came the most under attack because they don’t have institutional backing.
The OSCE said this will be the first in a series of meetings, with the aim of getting more organisations to take it serious and to produce more concrete courses of action.
Read more about the online abuse of women in the latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine, with a personal account by Gamergate target Brianna Wu and a legal overview by Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire).
Tweets from OSCE’s #FemJournoSafe conference:
https://twitter.com/julieposetti/status/644456066432937984
