On Day 11 of the Egyptian uprising against the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak, Globe and Mail correspondent Sonia Verma and her colleague Patrick Martin were walking through what she describes as the “nouveau riche” neighbourhood of Mohandeseen. Verma was filming a pro-Mubarak crowd marching in the streets. At first this all-male crowd seemed friendly, some of its participants even smiling and waving flags for the camera. Suddenly, though, the scene turned menacing as some armed marchers charged Verma and Martin. As she recalls, “We were basically surrounded by this mob on all sides and they were becoming violent toward us.”

Fortunately, a security guard from a nearby apartment block emerged, firing gunshots into the air. The crowd froze. He grabbed the two journalists and hustled them into an apartment building. A woman living on the first floor took the three of them in. They stayed for several hours until the mob moved on. It was only after the security guard had escorted the two reporters back to their hotel that Verma realized she had deep bruises along her back and one arm.

Today the incident is an afterthought. But that day in the apartment in Mohandeseen, Verma’s immediate concerns were escaping and the safety of the family who sheltered her, leaving her no time to think about her daughters: Annie, then three, and Sarah Jane, two.

It was thinking about her own two children—ages one and two—that may have kept Lara Logan alive on February 11, 2011, the day Mubarak resigned from office. As is widely known, the CBS News chief foreign correspondent was not as lucky as Verma when she ventured into the celebratory crowd in Cairo’s Tahrir Square with her bodyguard, producer, fixer, cameraman and two Egyptian drivers. As she noted later about the response to Mubarak stepping down, “It was like unleashing a champagne cork on Egypt.”

But the mood wasn’t purely triumphant. Logan’s fixer, Bahaa, could hear men shouting in Arabic to attack her.

In a 60 Minutes interview, Logan recounted how, after she was forcefully separated from her crew, men began to grab her everywhere. They stripped her of clothing, pulled at her hair, scalp and limbs, beat her with sticks and raped her with their hands. She believed she was going to die and had essentially given up. Then she thought, “I can’t believe I just let them kill me…that I just gave in, that I gave up on my children so easily.” She decided to survive for them by surrendering to the assault.

In response to the attack on Logan, the Toronto Sun’s Peter Worthington wrote an inflammatory column that posed the question, “Should women journalists with small children at home, be covering violent stories or putting themselves at risk?” His answer: “It’s a form of self-indulgence and abdication of a higher responsibility to family.” Logan’s decision to report from Egypt was, he said, “the right thing for her to do journalistically—unless, of course, she had small children, which was the case. Her son…should have taken precedent over her wishes to cover the world’s biggest story for the moment.” Worthington continued, “This holds true for any woman covering wars or revolutions.” (Worthington later clarified that by small children he meant those under age five.)

Not surprisingly, the response among journalists was almost universally negative. Jan Wong, a former Globe reporter, called him a misogynist. Stephanie Nolen, the Globe’s South Asia bureau chief, was also dismissive: “It’s not 1940.… My partner is every bit as engaged, as involved, as important to my children, and it would be an equally devastating loss for my children if either of us were killed. And I think it is profoundly insulting, not only to women, but to men who are parents and care about their children, to suggest otherwise.” Wilf Dinnick, Verma’s husband, wrote an open letter to Worthington demanding an apology and indicating that Verma chose not to write about her mob experience in Egypt “because she feared sexist and antiquated views like yours might take away from the importance of the story in Egypt.” He concluded: “Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Middle Eastern dictators of your vintage are being tossed out of power for being so out of touch.”

Heated rhetoric aside, is the journalistic community out of touch with the particular risks faced by female reporters, mothers or not, in conflict zones?

Even as the New York–based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) launched an investigation into sexual violence as an occupational hazard, more incidents surfaced. A little more than a month after Logan’s ordeal, New York Times photojournalist Lynsey Addario was released from six days of captivity in Libya, during which she was repeatedly sexually assaulted. Four weeks later, CBC reporter Mellissa Fung’s memoir Under an Afghan Sky, about her 2008 kidnapping that lead to 28 days as a hostage in Afghanistan, revealed she had been raped while in captivity.

To research the CPJ paper, senior editor Lauren Wolfe spoke with more than 50 women who reported assaults ranging from aggressive physical harassment to groping to gang rape. (She notes that male reporters, to a much lesser degree, are also at risk for rape.) In the resulting report, “The Silencing Crime: Sexual Violence and Journalists,” released in June, she charged that “sexual violence has remained a dark, largely unexplored corner.”

Four years before Wolfe’s report, Judith Matloff, now an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School and a former long-time foreign correspondent, wrote “Unspoken,” about the sexual abuse experienced by female foreign reporters. The piece appeared in the May/June 2007 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, but went largely unnoticed. Only in the wake of the Logan episode, when CJR featured her article prominently on the website, did 30 news organizations interview Matloff. Today, she says the Logan episode “really blew the lid off what had basically been a dirty secret in the industry for a long time.”

Gillian Findlay of CBC’s the fifth estate regrets not revealing that she found herself at the mercy of groping hands while caught in a Baghdad crowd in 1999. It wasn’t until March 2011 that Findlay publicly spoke about the incident for the first time, at a symposium on female reporters. She recalled how she had been separated from her crew and was terrified before her fixer came to the rescue. Now, Findlay describes what kept her silent: “I didn’t want my male colleagues—at the time most of my colleagues were male—to look at me differently or feel differently about me or feel they had some responsibility to take care of me. I just knew it wasn’t good if I talked about it.”

In “Unspoken,” Matloff tells a more extreme version of Findlay’s experience: the case of a photographer working in India who was set upon by a group of men “baying for sex.” Rescued at the last minute, she later decided not to tell her editors what happened. “I put myself out there equal to the boys,” she says. “I didn’t want to be seen in any way as weaker.”

Wolfe and Matloff also discuss women’s feelings of shame, their fear of being labelled troublemakers and their concern that they won’t be believed. But both highlight this issue of self-image. In her CJR article, Matloff wrote, “[T]he compulsion to be part of the macho club is so fierce that women often don’t tell their bosses.” More recently, she elaborated: “The bosses don’t know about it because the women don’t talk about it. And then because the bosses don’t talk about it, the next generation of women don’t talk about it.” Even today, those bosses are predominantly male—the foreign editors for the National Post, the Toronto Star, CTV, the Canadian Press and the Globe are all men.

Ann Rauhala was one of the exceptions when she served as the Globe’s foreign editor from 1989 to 1994. Based on her experience, she speculates that having a female boss could make women dealing with sexual abuse feel safer speaking up and more likely to seek help. She adds: “It might make editors [and] newsrooms more inclined to make sure that everybody who goes out there gets training and education that takes into account the possibility of sexual assault.”

On the other hand, Stephen Northfield, the Globe’s foreign editor for the last six years, doesn’t see safety as a gender-specific issue. “We support everybody who wants to do this kind of work,” he says. The paper has 12 staff foreign correspondents based overseas, three of whom are women, in addition to Verma, whom the paper parachutes in.

Of course, as the Globe figures suggest, it’s no longer unusual to find women in the field, unlike the days of Kit Coleman. The journalist and war correspondent for Toronto’s Daily Mail and Empire in the late 1800s to early 1900s, was credited with being one of the first female foreign correspondents. Even in the 1970s and ’80s, female correspondents such as CBC’s former Beirut bureau chief Ann Medina, who covered mostly the Middle East, were a novelty.

The types of conflicts journalists cover have been transformed too. “Things started to change in the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the end of formalized conflict,” says Paul Knox, a former Globe foreign editor and reporter. In an email, Sherry Ricchiardi, senior writer for the American Journalism Review and professor at Indiana University’s School of Journalism, explained the implications of the shift from wars between states to wars within them. In Libya, for example, the conflict originated within the country between opposing factions. Thanks to “no designated front lines or definite chain of command,” she says, “danger, including sexual violence, is far greater.”

Though Matloff agrees, she emphasizes that rape can happen in all kinds of situations. “Most of the cases I documented occurred in hotel rooms—from Russia to Iraq—or in rowdy crowds in such places as Pakistan and Egypt,” she says, adding that journalists can also be abused when detained.

How aggressors perceive journalists generally has also changed. Knox notes that there used to be an unwritten rule that journalists, male or female, weren’t targets. One example he gives from his days reporting in Latin and Central America is the practice of pasting the letters “TV” (an international code for journalist) on vehicles. To do that today would be like painting a “target on your back,” Knox says, because reporters are no longer viewed as independent or as likely to provide fair coverage. “They’re seen in many ways as agents of one side.” This also translates into greater peril for female reporters, according to Melissa Soalt, a women’s defence expert who was inducted into Black Belt Magazine’s Hall of Fame in 2002. The combination of reporters viewed as targets and blurred enemy lines means more risk. “When all bets are off and chaos prevails and men are armed and law and order and conventional boundaries break down, you have prime conditions for attack against journalists,” she says. “And for women that means targeted for sexual assault.”

Still, Tony Burman suggests that journalists who live and work in the developing world are more apt to be aware of the risks. The former CBC News editor-in-chief and, more recently, Al Jazeera English managing director says, “From the Al Jazeera perspective, some of our most prominent and most experienced correspondents are women and they [have been] dealing with these challenges for years.”

For everybody else, there’s hostile environment training.

To prepare their staff for modern-day conflict, many major media outlets send newbie foreign reporters to training conducted by former British Royal Marines and U.K. Special Forces who work for companies such as Centurion Risk Assessment Services Ltd. and AKE Ltd., respectively. Journalists learn how not to die of dehydration, how to identify certain weapons just by their signature noise and how to be a good hostage—essentially, how to stay alive. At Centurion, they also undergo mock kidnappings. In her 2011 book, Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zone, Michelle Shephard, national security reporter for the Star, recalls the week she spent in Virginia at Centurion’s U.S. camp in 2006. She writes of the instructors’ “Oscar-worthy performances” as they “threw burlap sacks over our heads and then had us march, kneel, lie motionless face down in the dirt in a drill that felt all too real.”

Such verisimilitude isn’t cheap: AKE charges $3,950 (U.S.) for a five-day course; Centurion’s fees are $500 to $800 a day. But what these courses don’t offer is much—or any—training on how to deflect or, at worst, come to terms with sexual assault. AKE takes female journalists aside for a live video chat with a female representative to address rape and sexual assault; Centurion will offer “extended closed sessions about rape and sexual assault for female journalists if wanted,” according to Carole Rees, the company’s business development manager. Since the attack on Logan, she says, there have been a lot of inquiries as to whether sexual and gender-based violence is offered in Centurion’s hostile environment training. However, according to “Unspoken,” the BBC, which Matloff calls “a pioneer in trauma awareness,” is the “only major news organization that offers special safety instruction for women, taught by women.”

This omission isn’t always the trainers’ fault, according to Matloff. Since the responsibility is on the employer to request any specific training, she says, “We can’t blame Centurion and AKE for not offering it if it wasn’t requested.” Scott White, CP’s editor-in-chief, for example, did not ask for any specialized sexual assault training beyond the regular hostile environment courses before sending his reporters to Afghanistan. The female reporters who covered that war encountered dangerous situations, but he says, “I don’t think they encountered them because they were female.” CP’s Stephanie Levitz, who did two rotations in Afghanistan, is dubious about what specialized training would look like. Is it “How not to get sexually assaulted?” she asks. “That’s impossible.”

But Matloff disagrees. She is one of the primary organizers of a new course, Reporting in Crisis Zones, recently launched by the continuing education department of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Specifically designed to fill the gaps in training journalists receive elsewhere, with an emphasis on conflicts and “avoiding unnecessary peril,” it first ran last November. Topics in the first two days included cybersecurity, risk assessment, situational awareness, dealing with emotional trauma and emergency first aid. But the third day, open only to women, addressed rape and assault prevention (the pilot version of the course cost $795 for the first two days and $895 for all three days). “The goal is to provide rape prevention training for foreign correspondents so that they can avoid situations like Lara Logan’s, and better cope should the unmentionable occur,” Matloff says. The website lists delay tactics, basic self-defence and healing as part of the third day’s curriculum. Matloff explains the reasoning behind this specialized instruction: “[A]s we saw with this horrible incident with Lara Logan, where her male colleagues were beaten, she was beaten and sexually assaulted.”

Obviously passionate about the issue of women’s safety and the need for addressing the issue of sexual assault, Matloff recalls a friend who was raped while on foreign assignment but felt too uncomfortable to tell her editor. Fearing that she might have contracted AIDS, the reporter told a convoluted cover story to her boss so she could leave the country where she was stationed and then spent a fortune on anti-retroviral drugs in another country. Had she divulged the rape, her employer could have covered her expenses. “I never want to see that happening to another colleague,” Matloff says with conviction.

CP’s White calls the fledgling course “a welcome and needed addition to this type of training.” Although CP has no immediate plans to send any staff into conflict zones, White says he would consider the program in the future. And Colin MacKenzie, the Star’s political editor, says, “The rape-prevention module is overdue.”

Still, some female reporters aren’t sold on the Columbia course. Medina is skeptical about the program’s aim to teach participants how to work effectively and safely in volatile situations. “The only way to do that,” she says, “is to not work effectively or to stay home.” She’s also wary about attention given to the threat of sexual assault: “The more the academics and media and articles, perhaps, such as this [story], talk about rape and sexual assault, the more journalists will fear it,” says Medina. “If you go into a situation wearing that fear, you can invite it.”

Meanwhile, Corinna Schuler, a former Post correspondent who served in Africa, believes the course is not practical “for people who are already working as full-time reporters,” partly because when a journalist is in the field, a lot comes “down to instinct and learning on the job, on the fly.” And Stephanie Nolen says, “I think it’s really dangerous to frame this as a conversation about the vulnerability of women in this job when I don’t think women are any more vulnerable than men,” although she concedes women may sometimes be “differently vulnerable.”

One reporter who does believe Matloff’s program could teach her something new and valuable is Sonia Verma. She notes that when she did training in Kingston, Ontario, about 10 years ago, she was only one of three women in a class of about 20, so she didn’t think specific training for women made sense in that context. (She does recall that the instructor did mention sexual violence, but it was regarding male journalists being raped in Mogadishu.) Verma thinks the Lara Logan incident is a wake-up call for the industry. “There isn’t really specific training for women—the unique situations that women might find themselves in,” she says. “The question should be how can we better equip women to do their jobs.”

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A box full of private emails, handed over at a gas station across from Collins Bay Penitentiary in Kingston, helped change what Canadian journalists think of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network news and current affairs division. APTN National News, which first went on air in 2002, positions itself as an alternative to mainstream broadcast news and has a target audience of First Nations, Inuit and Métis. Later, the network added two other news shows—APTN Investigates and APTN InFocus—but continued to broadcast in relative obscurity. As it turns out, though, that was a major advantage because it helped APTN Investigates break the Bruce Carson scandal, which started with that box of emails. And thanks to that story, more people, viewers and journalists alike, are taking notice of APTN news.

Freelance journalist Kenneth Jackson received a tip about the box because of his previous investigations intounderage prostitution. The private emails were from Carson, head of the Canada School of Energy and Environment and a former top advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Jackson organized the emails by date and uncovered the beginnings of a story involving the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), an escort service, a water purification company, First Nations communities and alleged illegal lobbying by Carson.

Jackson took the story to his friend and APTN reporter, Jorge Barrera. Working for APTN Investigates, the two approached Carson and H2O Pros, the water company involved, after aboutthree weeks of research. If they had been with a more recognizable brand, such as the fifth estate or The Globe and Mail, the company would have wanted to know, “‘Why the hell are you here?’” says Jackson. “They’re going to get their back up right away.” About 10 minutes after he and Barrera emailed their request, the company agreed to the interview and offered to bring Carson. Whether H2O Pros believed it was getting free publicity or not, it underestimated APTN Investigates.

The scoop showed that the network was capable of handling high profile news and breaking big stories. “It means in some ways we’re leading now,” says Paul Barnsley, executive producer of APTN Investigates and APTN InFocus. “We’re getting a lot more respect.”

Of course, APTN National News had broken stories before—it just didn’t generate as much attention. For example, Barrera convinced WikiLeaks to give APTN about 800 diplomatic cables from the U.S. embassy and consulates in Canada. This was part of the 250,000 U.S. State Department cables from around the globe distributed by the whistleblower website to select media organizations worldwide. To obtain the cables, Barrera used old-fashioned persistence and modern social media. He first messaged a WikiLeaks contact over Facebook in early December 2010, heard back in February and then, in late April, received confirmation that he’d be getting cables classified as secret or confidential. Even though the cables do not specifically relate to aboriginal issues, APTN has rolled out 18 WikiLeaks stories since then. CBC was the only other Canadian news organization to receive the full batch of cables.

Still, before Carson, Barnsley heard veteran reporters working for APTN say that reporters from CBC and other outlets didn’t take them seriously and even accused APTN news of bias. But he argues the network’s focus on aboriginal-related issues is in contrast to what he sees as a mainstream bias that means journalists represent aboriginal issues unfairly or not at all.

Now, though, more journalists are pitching him stories. And APTN Investigates has a working relationship with CTV’s investigative show, W5: the two exchange information that would work better for the other. CBC investigative reporter David McKie is not surprised APTN Investigates is doing so well. He and his colleagues followed APTN’s coverage of the Carson story for months because it was so credible and because the amount of work APTN journalists put into it was obvious.

Despite the success of the story, Barnsley does have some regrets. APTN Investigates went to the PMO too early, allowing Ottawa to preemptively act and address the evidence. The story was meant to air on March 25, 2011, but the third interview with Carson, when Jackson and Barrera cornered him, was on March 13. Within 48 hours, APTN Investigates invited the PMO to look at the documentation it possessed. Later that week, the PMO publicly released letters calling for three investigations, one of them by the RCMP, into the Carson case. By March 18, the story was out.

Other major news organizations launched their own investigations. To be the first to cover the story, APTN National News reported only a few lines in the evening broadcast, and then posted an online article. The next day, APTN Investigates ran a three- or four-minute piece, following up for the next few days until the entire story aired on APTN Investigates. McKie says the way APTN handled the situation showed sophistication.

With lessons learned, APTN National News still faces the challenge of reaching Canada’s vast array of aboriginal communities. There are nine bureaus across the country, but a lot of communities are in remote locations. Geography makes it difficult to cover breaking news in real time and Barrera likens APTN’s reporters to domestic foreign correspondents.

APTN’s viewers want to see more breaking news on the channel in between newscasts and not just on the website because many aboriginal communities have easier access to television than the internet. Henry Naulaq, a producer for the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation in Iqaluit, wants the network to broadcast more local community meetings and special events such as the governor general’s visit to Nunavut. And Pamela Palmater, a lawyer, professor and chair of Ryerson University’s Centre for Indigenous Governance, wants to see investigations that are longer than half an hour and says, “The people that I’m associated with in the legal and political realm rely on APTN more and more.”

APTN National News is not that visually polished, but what it lacks in gloss, it makes up for in talent. The investigative team gave Jackson and Barrera space to work: “Obviously they had questions for us, but that’s a real good sign of a news organization that knows what they’re doing,” says Jackson. “You don’t micromanage reporters.” He stresses that Barnsley and APTN Investigates supported them, even when “shit hit the fan” and lawyers got involved.

Barnsley’s goal is to shine a light on the questionable practices in aboriginal communities that everyone knows about, but isn’t willing to speak about. His advice: “If journalists are the type that want everybody to be their friend, then they’re really not very good. They’re probably not ever going to be very good.” That attitude should keep APTN breaking big stories—and from fading into obscurity again.

Journalism students are criticized for using the tweet greet—asking a source for an interview via Twitter—as a first attempt at making contact. Dan Reimold, assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa in Florida, blogged that the tweet greet—not to be mistaken for crowdsourcing—must be the last resort, if resorted to at all. But tweeting for an interview can, at times, be the best option and, dare I say, should sometimes be the first.

When it works

Sonia Verma, correspondent for The Globe and Mail, tweets locals for interviews when she’s in Egypt. This is practical in a country under political unrest where activists aren’t willing to advertise their full or real names, their traceable email addresses or their phone numbers. But if you tweet them and they are willing to speak with you (because your Twitter profile leads them to legitimate and trustworthy information), then let the sharing of information begin.

Tweet greeting could easily be used domestically to ask witnesses of any event for an interview; not every person worth interviewing links to their blog via Twitter and subsequently their email address—the route Reimold blogged  journalism students should follow to contact a source. And there are a lot of tech savvy professionals who respond more quickly to Twitter than email.

When marketing or PR people stand between you (the journalist) and the person you want to interview with little to no hope of budging, you are what I refer to as being “j-blocked.” But luckily, said source manages her own Twitter account. The key is to gauge based on Twitter activity, whether the source will respond. (I would rather call or email for interviews with celebrities, government officials, CEOs and the like.)

When it fails  

The major problem with tweet greets, even when proper etiquette is followed, is the journalist risks broadcasting her story and sources to her competitors. Journalists do follow other journalists on Twitter. A colleague of mine who works for one of Canada’s national dailies told me he used Twitter to find another angle on a story his competitors already had; so, the story was already out there. I tweeted Michelle Shephard, the Toronto Star’s national security reporter, to find out if she ever used Twitter to ask a source for an interview. Yes, she has, but she usually messages the person directly, which is private. The flaw is that the person has to already follow her on Twitter for direct messaging to work, a problem that is non-existent with email or Facebook.

But at the end of the news cycle, journalists—students or not—will do what they need to do to get that interview. I hope they do it well.

@RuaneRemy

I tweet; therefore, I exist.