Iraqi women’s prison

Arwa Damon is one of my favorite CNN journalists. I have been impressed by the reporting she conducts while embedded with US soldiers, but her biggest contribution to CNN’s coverage of Iraq has been her ability and willingness to tell the personal stories of Iraqis. This story is a particularly good example of reporting which allows women to tell their stories and it highlights one unfortunate aspect of the lives of women in Iraq.

The Punishment of Virtue

Sarah Chayes was a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio. After spending 2002 reporting from Afghanistan, Chayes left NPR to run the non-governmental organization Afghans for Civil Society. She has since opened a cooperative in Kandahar called Arghand which produces soaps and body oils and offers Afghans an alternative to growing poppies.

What really attracted me to Chayes’ work on Afghanistan was her book The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. This book offers more than a reporter’s perspective on post-Taliban Kandahar and clearly lays out some of the mistakes the United States made in its efforts to support the Afghan government. She is also interesting to discuss in the context of this blog because she is unlike the female war correspondents I discussed in a previous post. Rather than use her gender to gain female sources, Chayes avoided the traditional clothes of women while reporting from Afghanistan, and instead donned the traditional clothing of Afghan men. She described this decision on page 31 of her book.

“It was in Chaman that I made a decision that people have been asking me about ever since. I began to dress in the traditional clothing worn by Afghan men: cast trousers gathered at the waist with a woven belt, a flowing calf-length tunic of the same fabric, and a large shawl, embroidered at both ends, wrapped around teh upper body, draping to a point between the heels. The decision was based on a rudimentary notion of optics, nothing more sinister…If I wore men’s clothes, I figured, then idle observers, from a distance anyway, would “see” me as the man they expected and leave me alone. It worked more or less, and I could get on with my job.”

Despite formally taking on the role of advocate, she still writes on Afghanistan and in February 2008 discussed her view of the country on Bill Moyers Journal.

Her efforts to help rebuild Afghanistan were also chronicled by Frontline World and can be watched at http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/afghanistan.

Gaining sources in a war zone

When interviewed, most female reporters reject drawing gender distinctions in how they and their male colleagues report on war. Both male and female war correspondents write compelling features on non-combatants and both write stories that focus on the tactical maneuvers of soldiers. Despite these similarities, female war correspondents have developed their own tactics to gain sources and argue that in war zones, a place where it might seem their gender could be a distinct disadvantage, they have found advantages in access to sources.

Anne Garrels (2003), a veteran war correspondent who recently reported for National Public Radio (NPR) from Baghdad, said in her memoir, “I have only benefited from my sex reporting from overseas, especially, ironically, in societies where women are sequestered. Whether in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, I can walk both sides of the street, talking the talk with male officials while visiting the women’s inner sanctums, which are often off-limits to foreign males” (p. 31).

Female journalists say that they are often approached and trusted by women, wanting to tell their stories.

Betsy Aaron of CBS said she was approached by an Afghan woman while she was among the Mujahedin. The woman told her, “We women of the world must stick together since we know what’s right-but no one listens to us” (Flander, 1990, p. 40).

In Iraq, Andrea Bruce Woodall, a photojournalist for The Washington Post, found women and their husbands tended to allow her to shoot scenes of domestic life her male colleagues could not access because the men did not mind if she was alone with their wives (Lens on Iraq, 2005).

In recent war zones female correspondents have worn the local dress to enhance their ability to travel inconspicuously through country with the local women. Some women refuse or struggle with the decision to cover themselves in the modest, sometimes restrictive, clothing required in traditional societies, but most find the choice to do so is beneficial.

Jackie Spinner of The Washington Post said, “As a female reporter in Iraq, I did feel like I could disguise myself better than some of my male colleagues. In a scarf and abaya, with the right shoes, purse and even makeup, I could blend in fairly well. Whenever someone said to me, ‘Wow, you really look Iraqi,’ I took that as a compliment, and it made me feel more secure” (Gibbons, 2005, ¶17).

Anna Badkhen, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, decided to wear a burqa to get an “eyewitness perspective of Kabul” (Katovsky & Carlson, 2003, p. 11). She described her struggles with the garment. “I learned that the burqa is the most uncomfortable piece of clothing known to womankind…The mesh, I discovered, was at the level of my eyebrows rather than my eyes, so I couldn’t seen anything directly in front of me that wasn’t level with my head or higher…Since I couldn’t see my feet, I slipped in the mud. The tail of my burqa got caught on the door handle as I was trying to climb into the back seat of our car” (Katovsky & Carlson, 2003, p. 11).

Deborah Amos, who also covered the Middle East for NPR, chose to regularly wear a chardor, a garment which hides everything but a woman’s eyes (Flander, 1990). She said that dressing like the local women in the country she was covering helped her gain access. “In Iran, my male counterparts go about dressed as Westerners, and they stand out. In a chador, I can go anywhere. I don’t look like an American reporter. I look like an Iranian. I can talk to women, and they can talk to me” (Flander, 1990, p. 40).

References

Flander, J. (1990). Women war correspondents: On the fields of macho. Washington Journalism Review, 38-41.

Garrels, A. (2003). Naked in Baghdad. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Gibbons, S. (2002). Women, war and war correspondence: Veterans show us lessons to be learned. Media Report to Women, 4-5.

Katovsky, B., & Carlson, T. (2003). Embedded. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press.

Lens on Iraq. (2005, February 9). News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Transcript retrieved, March 6, 2008, from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june05/lensoniraq_02-09.html

Very brief history of women war correspondents

Women, and particularly American women, have reported on all of the wars of the last 200 years. During World War II, 125 women were accredited as war correspondents. By the Vietnam War combat reporting by women was increasingly common. Access to the Vietnam War was unprecedented; “If one possessed a visa and a plane ticket, one could go” (Beasley & Gibbons, 1993, p. 223). The US military granted accreditation to 467 female war correspondents, including 267 American women (Beasley & Gibbons, 1993). Taking on a wide range of assignments throughout Vietnam, women proved they belonged as war reporters and many women have followed in their footsteps. A Brookings Institution report found, “Before 1970, only 6 percent of foreign correspondents were women. By 1992, that number had soared to more than 33 percent” (as cited in Dietrich, 2002, p. 12). In recent conflicts, women have taken more dangerous assignments. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, between 1996 and 2005, 19 female journalists were killed on the job (CPJ, 2005). 

References

Beasley, M. H., & Gibbons, S. J. (1993). Taking their place: A documentary history of women and journalism. Washington, D.C.: The American University Press.

Committee to Protect Journalists. (2005). Journalists killed. Retrieved March 6, 2008, from http://cpj.org/deadly/index.html   

Dietrich, H. (2002). Women in war zones. Quill Magazine, 90(8), 12-15.