Lara Logan and life on the frontline

By Robyn Burger

The battery and sexual assault of Lara Logan, SA-born CBS News correspondent, while reporting on events in Tahrir Square, Cairo, illustrates the risks taken by those who bring us reportage from the frontline. While violence is not unusual in such situations, as a “sideshow” to the main event of the revolution in Egypt, the attack on Lara highlights the dual jeopardy for woman reporters.

When tension is running high, battery, although unacceptable, is commonplace and tends to add to the credibility of the journalist. Sexual assault/rape, however, can become a career-limiting event for female journalists. The Dart Centre for Journalism & Trauma provides a transcript of a discussion on the unique challenges, including making the disclosure of sexual harassment/rape to management, by women reporters.

Bodily functions, physical attributes and social constructs are gender specific in some respects. Hence, just as our ANC-led government has recently become sensitised to the provision of tampons and sanitary towels to increase the school attendance of girls, it behoves our male-dominated newsrooms to become aware of gender issues for the female journalist.

South Africa prides itself on its constitutional guarantees for non-discrimination. Further, as a society we are a work in progress for the management of gender relations, reparative economic restructuring and cultural value clarification. When it comes to freedom for the media, these are all broad matters for debate. The devil, however, for female colleagues is often in the detail. The women who participated in the Dart forum consistently raised the risks and inconveniences endured by themselves while on assignment simply because their media houses were frequently unaware of their needs. The women conceded, however, that they were complicit to this lack of consciousness as they were wary of seeking special consideration lest these needs be read as a requirement for added protection. Their fear was that this could then compromise them for being assigned choice stories and postings in the future.

Television footage of the protest and pillage at Wesselton, Ermelo, demonstrated the risks taken by reporters. Both the police and the protesters were said to be using live ammunition, although, this time, the shots were deliberately misdirected by both sides. To the journalist’s credit she delivered her story amid the chaos. Should the situation have degenerated, however, it would have been comforting to know that her editor has sent her out equipped with both a condom and a sani-pack in her pocket. As suggested by the Dart Centre panellists, when not used as fit-for-purpose, in extremis, a tampon can be used to staunch a bullet hole, a sanitary towel as a dressing and the condom can be used as a tie-down or tourniquet.

Though neither SA journalists nor their editors are likely to have had spontaneous conversations about these more intimate issues to date, the Dart survey clearly pointed to these latent curbs to the freedom to practice for female journalists. The forum panellists were also able to suggest a number of interventions, other than a sani-pack, that would make the world of work a safer place for these brave women.

Flak jacket made to size and proportion, personal threat assessment skills, self-defence strategies and debriefing sessions were all mooted as helpful considerations that would not detract from their hard-won place at the side of their male colleagues when bringing home the breaking news. Well, what do you think, gentlemen?

Robyn Burger is a retired educational psychologist