Making the Invisible Visible: Intersectional Gender Guides For Protecting Women Journalists

"Applying an intersectional gender perspective requires time and resources. Our three guidelines compile ARTICLE 19's experiences and good practices from around the world, which can be helpful to make both time and resources count."

This set of three guides provides recommendations on how to mainstream an intersectional gender approach into an organisation's work to protect journalists and social communicators, with a specific focus on: monitoring and documenting attacks against journalists; advocating on emblematic cases for advocacy (in order to raise awareness nationally and internationally on the issue); and organising protection training. The guides from part of ARTICLE 19's project Equally Safe: Towards a Feminist Approach to the Safety of Journalists, which seeks to help civil society, journalists, researchers, and policymakers apply an intersectional feminist approach in their work. (See Related Summaries, below, for the project research report).

The intersectional gender approach promoted in the guide means they begin with gender at the centre, analysing the systemic oppression resulting from the social construction of what it means to be "feminine" and "masculine". Yet, for ARTICLE 19, a gender approach is intrinsically an intersectional one, as gender is part of the various systems of social oppression under the umbrella of intersectionality, which considers people who identify as women, men, and non-binary. As ARTICLE 19's experience and practice have shown, individuals also face multiple, overlapping discriminations on the basis of race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, sex characteristics, gender identity/expression, and religious beliefs, among others. An intersectional analysis should therefore be adopted to understand how other social categories influence, and thus exacerbate, violations of journalists' and social communicators' right to freedom of expression. "An intersectional gender approach starts with the fact that differences between the roles of women and men - in terms of their relative position in society and the distribution of resources, opportunities, constraints, and power in a given context - cannot be analysed in a separate silo. Instead, such differences must be placed within a systemic framework of intersectional inequalities, overlapping gender discrimination with other forms of discrimination."

An intersectional gender approach is considered important in the context of protecting journalists for the following reasons:

• To deepen our understanding of risks that journalists and social communicators, in all their diversity, face;
• To highlight how freedom of expression is connected to other rights of groups subjected to intersecting oppressions, and to uphold those rights;
• To make naturalised aggressions visible, especially those that affect the freedom of expression of journalists and social communicators, in all their diversity; and
• To avoid replicating the oppressive relationships that, for many years, have been reproduced - even by civil-society organisations.

A core commitment of ARTICLE 19 is to defend and promote the right to freedom of expression of journalists and social communicators, in all their diversity, so they can exercise it freely without interferences - including those imposed by gender norms and discrimination. ARTICLE 19 believes that to achieve this, it is essential to mainstream an intersectional gender approach in three areas:

• Monitoring and documenting attacks against journalists and social communicators - this allows for understanding the complexity of attacks suffered by journalists and social communicators, in all their diversity, and for adopting better responses to each case.
• Emblematic cases of attacks against journalists and social communicators - this allows for in-depth case analysis and advocating for: (a) the protection of journalists and social communicators; and (b) the elimination of the systems of oppression that intersect their cases.
• Protection training for journalists and social communicators - this allows for building meaningful spaces for journalists' diversity and is strategic for capturing cases that would otherwise go unnoticed or be dismissed.

These three guides have therefore been developed to support the integration of the intersectional approach in the above three priority areas:

1. Guideline 1: An Intersectional Gender Guide to Monitoring and Documenting Attacks against Journalists and Social Communicators [PDF]
2. Guideline 2: Advocating on Emblematic Cases of Attacks against Journalists Using an Intersectional Gender Approach [PDF]
3. Guideline 3: An Intersectional Gender Guide to Protection Training [PDF]

The guidelines were created based on qualitative research, including interviews with ARTICLE 19 staff worldwide and outside gender experts, and on a review of specialised literature and ARTICLE 19 documentation. This information was mapped, systematised, and analysed to identify practices, experiences, and gaps (or doubts) within ARTICLE 19 offices around the world.

The guidelines are designed so that they can be read together or as standalone documents. They are intended to address a wide range of needs: from a beginner who is just starting in this kind of practice to a more experienced person who wants to further refine their knowledge and expertise. As explained in the guidelines, they were written to strengthen ARTICLE 19's practices but are being made available to the public, as they could also be useful for other organisations.