Women journalists tell of experiences of harassment, stalking and online abuse
By Julia Benko
“Sometimes I don’t promote my work at all because of the abuse it will generate.”
It’s no longer uncommon for women to be succeeding in the world of journalism. But what is still all too frequent is that they are target of abuse and harassment - often aimed at their appearance or gender.
That’s been the experience of Jane Hamilton, a Scottish crime reporter, who said she once had to take redundancy partly due to online abuse.
She said: “Since [the start of] social media, harassment has been a regular occurrence. This has ranged from rapists stalking me because of stories about them, angry campaigners targeting me because they did not like my stories and football fans [being] furious because of stories about their team.
“Sometimes I don’t promote my work at all because of the abuse it will generate.
“Just recently there have been slurs against my age, my weight, my appearance and using filters on my profile pictures, [which] I don’t. Men usually attack women’s appearance or their gender [and say] I must be prostituting myself for stories or [that] I am a police ‘bike’.
“Men do not get targeted in this way.”
Jane (pictured right) also said that in the newsroom she had “encountered male journalists who said crime is a man’s job and women should do light-hearted features, such as make-up and fashion.”
A 52-year-old freelance journalist, who preferred to remain anonymous, told how she was once stalked by a male musician she critiqued for a review the year prior.
“[He] cornered me in the bar [of a jazz festival] once everyone had gone back to their seats. He leaned right into my face and said something along the lines of: ‘I'd better never see you at one of my gigs again…’
“What angered me was the fact that he had never written to me to complain, or to my editor; he just launched into this verbal attack when he managed to get me cornered. He would not have done this if I had been a male critic, I’m sure.
“My editor took it seriously and he took it to the overall editor, but in the end the guy simply denied it and they felt they couldn't take it any further.”
In 2023, Women in Journalism completed a research report on the online harms committed against women working in the media. 403 women participated, all based in the UK.
From this sample, 75 per cent said they had experienced a threat to their safety during their work. Almost half declared they publicised their work less online due to the threat of online abuse, and nearly 20 per cent said the threat of online mistreatment had made them consider leaving the media industry.
It was also noted by multiple participants that references about their age were layered into the online abuse, and that hate speech, retaliation and personal comments were the most reported problems in the past year.
"Don’t feel ashamed if you need extra help.”
The report also exposed that nearly half of the respondents said they had faced misogynistic harm or abuse connected to their gender or gender identity.
In their research, Women in Journalism concluded that without any staff support, there is a “real risk that women working in journalism will leave their roles or choose to fade into the background online.”
“There is still significant work to be done to make spaces safer for women working in journalism.”
Meanwhile a Statista report depicting the distribution of journalists in the UK between 2016 and 2022 shows that more men have been employed as journalists than women. 2020 is the only year that marks a change from this trend; 53 per cent of journalists employed were women and 47 per cent were men.
In all of the places Jane has worked more recently, she said “there have been a large number of women”, including in senior and specialist positions.
The freelance journalist this has changed since she started working in the industry in the early to mid 1990s, when “the [work] culture was different”.
“We were just used to men dominating the workplace and having the senior positions and most of the women we saw were secretaries,” she said,
“There are more women [journalists] now than when I first started.”
But her advice for those women journalists who do face abuse and harassment is not to “suffer in silence”.
She said: “Seek out colleagues and let your employer know what is happening. Make sure your safety is a number one priority.
"Don’t feel ashamed if you need extra help.”