FJA Series of webinars “Winning Stories”
January 22th, 2026
Moderator:
Aidan White
Speakers:
Dr. Julie Posetti
Shada Islam
Maja Sever
Mimma Caligaris
Nadezhda Azhgikhina
Full transcript
Aidan White:
Welcome to this the latest webinar in this series that’s organized by the Fetisov Journalism Awards. Our webinar program is designed to stimulate interest in some of the best journalism being produced around the world, through the focusing on the work of the winners of the FJA. This year, we’re going to look at some thematic issues, and trends in journalism, which, we believe, are really worthy of further scrutiny and study, and are really important in understanding how journalism is developing, and issues that are of critical importance.
The production of good journalism is not easy these days, and it’s not without risks. Very often, it comes at a price. This pressure, as we know only too well, can be physical, but it can also be psychological. Acts of violence or intimidating threats and abuse are common ways to try to stifle truth telling journalism.
The issue we focus on today is the question of online violence which is now a major barrier to women’s participation in journalism, and public debate, and, indeed, a threat to democratic life. Coordinated harassment campaigns aim to silence women journalists, or activists, and human rights defenders. When digital abuse escalates into online intimidation or physical danger, there is a “chilling effect”, it deters women from reporting freely, undermines newsroom diversity and limits the public’s access to information.
Studies shown how online vitriol directed at women themselves and not just their journalism has become a global phenomenon, putting women journalists at risk right around the world.
This FJA webinar examines the roots of the crisis and points towards possible solutions.
We’ve got a panel today of distinguished journalists, and experts: Julie Posetti, a leading journalist, researcher, and academic, Shada Islam, one of the most celebrated journalists operating within the European Union, and based in Brussels, Maja Sever, the President of the European Federation of Journalists. And also, Mimma Caligaris an Italian journalist and campaigner on these issues. Finally, I'm really pleased that my good colleague and friend, Nadia Azhgikhina, will be winding up our discussion. She is well known and distinguished in Russia, as a press freedom campaigner, and a feminist, and is a leading advisor with the Fetisov Journalism Awards.
Our debate illustrates why forging a viable future for journalism requires that there is an environment in which women can work safely, where gender rights are respected, and where there is zero tolerance of online abuse. This discussion will help us to understand what is being done and what more needs to be done.
And one of the thoughts we have had is about how the Fetisov Journalism Awards, perhaps working with one of its major partners, the Ethical Journalism Network, could develop a practical project, to provide women journalists, media organizations, and those interested in creating a safe environment online with practical support and options for improving the situation.
We want to know how can we work with newsrooms, locally and worldwide, to strengthen gender safety protocols. How do we work with governments and local actors to reinforce national safety mechanisms? And how do we help users to identify bias and stereotypes and risks?
So let’s get started. I’m happy now to introduce Julie Posetti, who is a remarkable researcher, academic and journalist. She has been published by leading media, and has done an extraordinary amount of work with the international community to raise awareness of this issue. She is currently the Director of the Information Integrity Initiative, a project of The Nerve. This digital forensic lab was established by Nobel Peace Prize–winning journalist Maria Ressa, whose work and reputation are known worldwide.
Julie, you’ve got a remarkable CV and a few years ago, you were very much the lead person in putting together reports, which highlighted and drew the attention of the international community, to the seriousness of this question. I’d like you to tell us, where we are now and where are we going, and what can we do to alleviate the crisis as it exists? Julie, over to you.
Julie Posetti:
Oh, thanks for that very kind and flattering introduction, Aiden, I really appreciate it. I’m going to share my screen because I think it’s helpful to show you some of the data, to visualize, is useful. And it’s also kind of shocking when you stack it up. And I’m going to do this in somewhat of a chronological way to show you how this issue has evolved.
So, Aidan was referring, I think, to work that I actually began back in 2011, when I was still in Australia, as a journalist and an academic, looking at the ways in which women were being targeted in the context of what, believe it or not, I was referring to then as the “Twitterization” of journalism. In those early years, where there was a lot more engagement and interaction directly with audiences on social media platforms, and then we were starting to see, even back then, the targeting of women journalists, in particular, online in highly gendered ways.
But the report that I think Aidan was referring to was “The Chilling”, which was published in 2020 initially, and with iterative publications, through to 2022 by UNESCO, based on a study that was commissioned in 2019. So “The Chilling” was the umbrella title for this series of reports, reflecting what Aidan suggested, which is “the chilling effect” of gender based online violence towards women journalists.
And I’m going to take you from 2020 through to the end of 2025, where we’ve just had a new study published by UN Women as part of an active and ongoing project. The data is very sobering. The opportunities for intervention, I’m afraid, have narrowed since we first began this work, but let’s see what we can do to try and, you know, move the needle on this collaboratively.
This is just a brief overview, um, so that you have these resources at hand. UNESCO’s publications are freely available online, and I did this work when I was still with the International Centre for Journalists, and so you’ll find a repository of this research there as well. I’m very much a participatory action researcher, which means that what I do has a lot more in common with investigative reporting than it does with some of the more inaccessible forms of research in the communications field. And I deliberately wrote these reports with a narrative approach that was designed for accessibility, broadly. I think that’s one of the reasons, speaking as a journalist, that they found an audience, and it wasn’t just about finding an audience, of course, it was about trying to set the policy agenda at the international level and the state level, to defend and support women journalists who are coming under horrendous attack and continue to do so.
Those are the resources that you can dig into, and some data I’ll share comes from those resources, published, as I said, from 2020 to 2022. Critical to this work was a very novel at the time, methodology, which saw, my team and me, in collaboration with computational linguists from the University of Sheffield, analysing large data sets. We also were partnered with The Nerve, where I now work. Looking at the experience of women from the perspective of being at the core of an online violence storm.
So, being able to analyse, at relatively real time, the torrent of gendered and disinformation laced abuse that was experienced by two women in the first instance, on whom we produced big data case studies, as we call them, Maria Resa, now my boss, and also, somebody I call a friend, who was probably the most prominent early case, in terms of international recognition, of gender based online violence, experiencing attacks that were coordinated through the palace of the then authoritarian leader of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte. And Carol Cadwalladr, who, you know, in a Western Liberal Democratic setting, was being targeted with some connections to Kremlin aligned trolls, in what we termed a sort of networked gaslighting attack.
In both cases, these women were targeted with a view to criminalize their activities as well, to shame, to harm, to discredit, and effectively to criminalize. And in Maria’s case, we were able to trace gender based online attacks against her back to 2017, where the hashtag “bring her to the Senate”, and “arrest Maria Resa”, another hashtag, were being deployed by a palace embedded blogger, while he was on tour in Moscow.
So this work was about, not just as important as it is, foregrounding the voices of women journalists under attack, but also presenting the data that demonstrated the scale, and the, you know, the atrocious nature of these attacks, and the ways in which they were networked. And we produced timelines of escalation that showed the ways that these attacks were starting to morph with offline harm.
And so we have now produced another six or seven of these big dated case studies, focused on emblematic cases of women journalists experiencing online violence around the world, and that has supported our ongoing work, which I’ll tell you about, which is part of the solution, I think.
So, just to bring you up to date, first of all, I think it’s important that we understand the data as it’s evolved. So back in 2020, based on a survey which we produced in association with the chilling studies, it was a global survey of around 1,000 journalists internationally, and we found that 73% of the women journalists in survey had experienced online violence in the course of their work. That statistic that was to be used, by UN organizations, you know, member states, other intergovernmental organizations, and advocacy groups. It’s a devastating statistic, but also it’s been a very effective one, in terms of triggering change, at least in attitudes.
Really, alarmingly, we found that 20% of the women journalists who’d experienced online violence said that they had experienced offline attacks, abuse, and harassment that they believed was directly connected to the online violence campaigns they were exposed to. So that’s one in five of the women journalists experiencing online violence. Identifying significant offline impacts, not just in terms of the personal consequences, but in terms of physical realm, impacts of these online attacks.
Important also to understand the function of political actors, which we continue to see around the world, from, you know, from Trump in the US, to Duterte, who I already mentioned, and Bolsonaro in Brazil. We have seen the ways in which the most senior political leaders have weaponized, gender-based online violence, and the ways in which they have actually looped these narratives through, you know, physical realm addresses to the press, triggering additional pylons, if you like, in an online context. And so we found that 37% of the women journalists had experienced online violence said that political actors were the top perpetrators.
Part of our work, informed by this early research, has involved developing online violence monitoring guidelines, and monitoring is an essential and often missing element of dealing with the crisis of online violence, and its chilling effects. And we found that one of the significant indicators for online violence escalation to offline harm is this point of, you know, empowered powerful perpetrators, if you like.
The other really important point to understand is that gender disinformation is a significant feature of online violence. So 41% of the women journalists we surveyed, said that they had experienced online violence in the context of disinformation campaigns, often coordinated campaigns that were specifically designed to discredit them, either as individual women within their societies, where there are particular cultural sensitivities, or specifically to discredit their work.
I mean, in Maria Ressa’s case, classic, she was frequently portrayed as a liar, the queen of fake news, and so on. So it’s the upside down, as she would say, using disinformation, as a tactic, as part of gender-based online violence, and also seeing gendered disinformation campaigns, targeting women who cover disinformation. So you are more likely to be exposed to online violence if you are reporting on disinformation, so there’s a there’s an access there. And again, this is one of the indicators for online violence escalation that we have produced.
And very importantly, we need to understand that while gender, misogyny, and sexism are the primary features of gender based online violence. The exposure and the impacts are worse at the intersection of other forms of discrimination. In that original survey, we found, as you can see, that black, indigenous, Latino, and Jewish respondents were more likely to experience online violence than their white journalist colleagues. We also found, alarmingly, a much higher rate of exposure to the trajectory from online violence to offline harm among the Arab-speaking women, for example. So this is an intersectional lens required.
Right, bringing us up to the end of 2025 in December, we published on the commission of UN Women, a new study called “The Tipping Points: The chilling escalation of online violence against women in the public sphere.” Now, we’ve expanded the work to focus not just on women journalists, but on women in other roles that are around advocacy, activism, and human rights defence because we see the same kinds of patterns, impacting women in those fields.
I will focus explicitly on the data connected to the women journalists respondents. But I want to point out that women journalists really are the proxies for targeted attacks on women in public life, more broadly. There are distinctions in the ways that these groups are targeted, but many of the patterns are the same, and so are the exposure levels, the challenges around addressing these issues.
So we did this survey in Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish covering 119 countries. And we found that there had been a slight increase to 75% when it comes to the women journalists who reported experiencing online violence in 2025 compared to 2020, and it’s important to note that we conducted this survey with the same partners and during the same time frame as the survey was conducted in 2020. So, five years on, and we can see, although we can’t, you know, say that these are necessarily directly comparable because there’s a different cohort of respondents. It’s very indicative of a situation which shows how stubborn that statistic is and how it is, you know, it has increased since then, very slightly.
What is incredibly alarming is that the number of respondents among the women journalists who said they had experience offline abuse, attacks, and harassment, that they directly linked to the online violence campaigns against them, has more than doubled from 20% to 42%. It’s staggering, and very alarming. And really, that statistic needs to drive, I think, what we do now.
And one of the reasons that so is because in the course of our research, over the past five years, or six years, we have identified a range of other indicators for online violence escalation, which trigger offline harm, including this new phenomenon of targeted attacks on women journalists online, being leaked to or associated with impunity cases, historic impunity cases. So we see, for example, the case of Daphne Caruana Galizia which cannot go unmentioned. The assassinated Maltese investigative journalist, who herself endured the most horrific, gendered online attacks before her assassination. Important to note she was not even on social media. The attacks against her, the exposure that she faced in terms of offline harm connected to online violence, was being practiced in chat rooms on Facebook. So on Facebook groups, predominantly, actually. And in online spaces where she was being discussed, where photos were being shared of her, where she was being effectively stalked. But this highlights the fact that the older adage of, you know, just get offline, if you want to protect yourself from online violence does not work.
And, of course, the public inquiry in Malta, into her assassination, directly linked that online violence she experienced with the situation that led to her murder with partial impunity. And we see now that Caroline Muscat and other journalists in Malta, trying to follow through with the work that Daphne was doing, are being threatened with reference to Daphne’s assassination. “You’ll be next” – that kind of scenario.
We see, there’s also, in India, in the case of Rana Ayyub, with reference to Gauri Lankesh. And in fact, in Northern Ireland, Patricia Devlin, who was a crime reporter, in Northern Ireland, being threatened by online trolls associated with, in fact, paramilitary groups, being threatened in connection with the murder with impunity of Martin O’Hagan, one of her former colleagues.
The other important point to note is that all of this is happening in an environment in which, as you will be well aware, notification tools have taken this to new levels. In other words, where women journalists are not now just being threatened, abused, harassed, where sort of cheap fakes and deep fakes of old are misrepresenting the women and exposing them to increased risk. We now have the sort of instantaneous ability to strip them there, to humiliate, and to excoriate these women in ways that are incredibly venal. And one of our findings from this last report was that over 19% of the women journalists who had experienced online violence, at the end of 2025, said, so nearly one in five, said that they had experienced AI assisted abuse.
Now, this is a statistic that, if we were to do this survey now, even just four or five months later, we would probably find is significantly worse, because of, you know, the Grok effect: the ways in which the tools have morphed at such speed and with such devastating impacts.
So, we are in a much more challenging environment, both at the intersection of increasing authoritarianism, and the AI-fuelled abuse environment, which sees abusive materials, and disinformational content linked to them, you know, being able to be produced much more quickly, much more cheaply, much, you know, easier to distribute content as well in this context and much more easily produced.
I think that that points to these two recommendations for actions with regard to AI-assisted abuse. We need to develop better tools that identify, monitor, report, and repel AI-assisted violence. That’s easier said than done, of course, but it’s essential that we at least clock that that’s necessary. And it’s vital that, in parallel, we develop legal and regulatory mechanisms designed to require big tech companies to prevent their technologies at the design stage, being deployable against women in the public sphere.
And I have been banging this drum on big tech accountability for a decade, or more. It is really devastating to see the waves in the past 12 months, since Donald Trump came to power again in the US, the ways in which the capitulation of big tech, and, you know, the profiteering orientation of these companies has resulted, not in an improvement in their approach, which had started to occur, but rather a rolling bat of all the work that they had previously done on trust and safety, in response to this work, and many others important work in this space.
And to pick up on Aidan’s point, and then I’ll conclude, Aidan’s point about what we do here, I think we can possibly take use from Mark Carney at Davos, the Canadian head of state, who discussed the fact that, you know, we need to find more robust responses to the real politics, the new world order that we’ve been delivered, where the international standards and norms on which we rely on for defence, in cases like this, at the UN level, for example.
And one of the things that, I think, is absolutely imperative, is that we apply pressure to individual states and to intergovernmental groups, to be more determined, more robust, to stand up against what we refer to as the broligarchy, which would be nexus of power and power abuse, coming out of the US, where you see, you know, big tech actors, all men. Some of whom have, in the case of Elon Musk, directly attacked women journalists in gendered ways themselves. A number of whom have expressed the most heinous, sexist, misogynistic perspectives, and who have incredible power to influence not just the future of our democracies, but the status of women in society and the ability of journalists to do their jobs freely and safely.
So we need to be bolder and louder, more direct, much less evidence of capitulation would comfort me. And I leave it there.
Slides are here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ARR4NArM5rRwXJ9ewLZh3HBxYC4h2Xqe/view?usp=sharing
Aidan White:
Julie, look, thank you very much for that brilliant exposition. You paint a gloomy picture of where we are, and I welcome your challenge, to confront the neglect, and lack of action by the international community, and to raise awareness on this issue. We will follow this up. Thank you very much.
Your presentation, which was extremely good, will be circulated. It’s important that everybody know exactly what’s going on.
I want to move on quickly to Shada, Shada, you are a working journalist with a tremendous reputation for challenging the orthodoxies of modern politics, particularly on a European level. And you do so in an environment which is extremely challenging, in which you, yourself, are subject to, online criticism, and harassment. You also experience problems of bias because of your ethnic and cultural background reflecting other elements of discrimination.
So, what’s your response to what Julie says? And what are your thoughts about how we can move this forward?
Shada Islam:
Thank you very much indeed, Aiden, for inviting me. Yes, I have to say, what Julie has informed us about this amazing, very well research, devastating, and very alarming, indeed. I’d like to preface what I’m going to say in two things. First of all, we’ve been in this business, all of us here, for quite a long time, and we’ve seen the development of good and bad in our profession.
And while I always insist that online abuse is a huge problem, it can lead to threats, and even murder, for many of my colleagues in the Global South it has also been extremely empowering. In the right hands, social media platforms can give women visibility, power, and a space they did not have before in legacy media, in many parts of the world, including the Global South.
I would also like to preface this by saying that everything we are discussing sits alongside what our women colleagues on the real firing line are suffering in wars such as Gaza and Ukraine. I always like to preface anything I say about journalism by acknowledging and paying homage to our sisters in battle, literally, without whom we would not be getting an accurate picture of what is happening in these terrible, terrible conflicts.
Yes, so I’m going to share my experience from the home of liberal democracy, Brussels, the headquarters of the European Union. The issue of online harassment, and attacks targeting women, is slowly climbing the agenda. We have the necessary laws, the regulations, the directives, and all the EU bureaucracy has offered us. There is a directive that has been discussed, and it is critical, it is on combating violence against women, and domestic violence, and it includes an explicit reference to digital forms of violence, which is, of course, very relevant to our conversation here. This directive talks about cyber harassment, cyberstalking, and there’s also, of course, this very famous, much referenced, Digital Services Act, which also, of course, obliges the platforms to be more transparent and to tackle illegal content and to act quickly. There’s also a code of contact, etc.
Now, the enforcement is, of course, matching, and I think Julie has pointed out why we’ve got the tech pros, the powerful, political factors behind them, so it would seem how angry the American grows are about what the EU is developing in terms of protection online. And, of course, you know, this is part of this transatlantic model at the moment. There have been European Commission efforts to find Meta and Twitter, etc., and all of that is ongoing.
But I think there are 3 uncomfortable realities that we need to face about what the EU is today in terms of its ability to protect gender based online violence. First of all, and Julie did reference it, it is the lack of any consideration, any attention, really paying to what we call now intersectionality. And that’s the one thing that I think the European Union is way behind in recognizing when it comes to online violence, you know.
Yes, and Julie has mentioned it, there is, of course, not just one, you know, average woman. I, myself, have been targeted, of course, online when I write articles that are considered to be slightly provocative. And that violence is based on your race, ethnicity, your religion, whether you’re Muslim or not. My name, of course, signals very much my Muslim heritage, and, of course, I can vouch for the fact that the slurs that come online, with my articles, all reference the fact that I am a foreigner, not a real European.
And a lot of my friends there, with similar experiences, Rokhaya Diallo is one, and Rana Ayyub has been mentioned as well, the fact that we are of Muslim decent sort of colours the view of ourselves as journalists. In our case, Rokhaya Diallo and I are European journalists, and Rana that she is an Indian journalist.
So I think when I talk to my friends in the institution, and I bring up the question of intersectionality, I often, unfortunately, still get a blank look, and some of my friends have actually admitted that the word intersectionality hasn’t really been understood in what I call a hashtag “Brussels so white.” And that is not a reference to pigmentation, it is about Eurocentric approaches, so the fact that women of colour, women of Muslim descent, are more prone to attacks online, it’s something that is still considered a very personal problem. All you have to do is be nicer online, and it’s only very-very few editors, and I work only with those editors, who are conscious of the fact and then have ways of protecting you when this gets out of hand.
Now, the other thing is also, you know, we’ve talked about disinformation, as fake news, and all of that, and I absolutely agree that there is a lot of that going on. But the lines between constructive criticism of the EU by journalists like myself and others, is being blurred with fake news and disinformation. So we’re living, you know, we’re living in a Europe that is gradually moving to the far right. I think we all agree with that. We’ve seen how the creeping, so the rhetoric of the far right is now become part of the mainstream conversation than many part of the EU. We’re not just talking about hungering and fallen, where the media freedom is openly being undermined.
But I would argue that in many parts of Liberal, Western Europe, dissenting voices, voices that criticize government policy, or in my case, EU policy, that talk about genocide in Gaza, to give you an example, are often labelled as fake news, disinformation, misinformation, and, of course, always been called anti-Semitic. So those are the dangers that, I think, are European colleagues who are in the business of protecting its citizen, their citizens, are really not very much aware of.
And we’re seeing this, I think, in many newsrooms also, are that voices of people of colour, people, especially of Muslim descent, are being silenced, and, you know, sometimes it’s just being openly fired from their jobs. There have been some cases of that, or sometimes just being sidelined, being shadowbanned, on online platforms, and generally just being cancelled in a very kind of subtle way.
What happens in the EU and Brussels is not what happens in the U.S., also, not what happens in Britain, it’s a very technocratic environment. So when people start talking about European values, that’s a dog signal to the dog whistle to the far-right narratives. That’s the kind of argument that is used. You are not reporting it in conformity with European values. So I think there is a real danger that this technocratic sort of definition of acceptable speech, and this value-based language makes it mixed up the situation for people who dissent, and who argue in favour of different goals and ambitions for the European Union, for a different kind of European Union, which is really about its values, makes it very difficult.
I think the three points I’ve made are the ones that, I think, are the most endangering currently, for people who do not conform to a certain view of Europe, and intersectionality to be, is one of the most important points that has to be brought forward when we talk about online violence, and which is generally, unfortunately, still ignored in European contexts. Thanks.
Aidan White:
Thank you very much indeed. You highlight how, if we’re going to take forward this discussion, we have to know what we’re talking about, but also, we have to make sure that the people we’re talking to, or talking with, also understand the language that we use. Thank you very much indeed. You’ve put into the mix some really important issues, which we’ll pick up later on in the discussion,
I want now, if I can, to move to Mimma Caligaris from Italy. I know, thank you very much for being with us.
Gor those who don’t know, she is a very well-known journalist in Italy. She is also a campaigning activist with the Italian journalists’ union, and has worked extensively with the International Federation of Journalists and the European Federation of Journalists as an activist on many of these issues.
She is really well placed to talk not just about the European and international situation, but perhaps to give us experience of how it is in Italy, is this issue being talked about? Is this issue being dealt with? Mimma, over to you.
Mimma Caligaris:
Yes, thank you. I would like to say that the role of women in Italian journalism is very strong, but quite uncertain, and I try to explain that because many wonders what space now is still reserved for female journalists.
Social command conducted an analysis showing that women remain underrepresented in leadership roles, receive less recognition, and have lower public visibility. The data is staggering: out of 38 publications, only six are led by women. No news programme has a female director. And online, we also found that male anchors attract more followers than female professionals. This is very difficult to accept.
Also, this is what we have in Italy, often we ask ourselves for the reason of such disparity in Italy. And for some, this disparity is rooted in sexism; for others, in the conservatism that still characterises Italy today, perhaps even more than in the past. Flavia Perina, who you will know, was a newspaper editor, one of the directors of a major newspaper, and is now a well-known columnist for an important Italian paper. She points out that in Italy there is a strong tendency never to deviate from established patterns, men are placed in positions of power, and women are not.
Why? Because people stay within this ‘algorithm’ without exploring different possibilities. The algorithm says this is how things are done, so the system continues in the same way. As Flavia argues, and I agree with her, this is a matter of limited imagination and limited consideration of the added value that different perspectives can bring. What is not represented often falls outside our imagination and outside our discussion.
Data from the National Federation of the Italian Press also shows that in Italy there is near parity at the start of a journalism career within newsrooms, roughly 50–50, or 48–52. However, as careers progress, advancement overwhelmingly benefits male colleagues, and the top of the hierarchy is almost exclusively reserved for men.
In Italy, there is only one woman, Agnese Pini, who is the editor of a national newspaper. Italy has three national newspapers, and only one of them is led by a woman. Among local newspapers, Il Giornale di Brescia stands out, having been led for 11 years by Nunzia Vallini. These are exceptions rather than the rule. There are currently no women leading television news programmes in Italy. None.
In Italy, in the major private groups, there is an even worse situation. A few months ago, I think it was in November, the first deputy directorship was given to a woman, Arianna Ravelli, at the main sports newspaper. I mean, this is the second newspaper in Italy. This newspaper was founded 130 years ago, and she is the first vice-director.
So I think we commented on this news as wonderful news. I think true equality will be achieved when this is no longer news, when this is no longer news but normality. These missed, or in some cases limited, opportunities for progression generate a constant gender gap. This gender gap exists both during working life and at pension level because lower salaries also correspond to lower pension benefits. It is a disparity that always accompanies female journalists and also applies to freelancers because today freelancers in Italy make up 70% of journalists. We also have a 50–50 balance of female and male journalists, but there is a difference. They have very low salaries, and there is a difference because women’s salaries are lower.
Research conducted by the National Federation of the Italian Press, particularly by the Equal Opportunities Commission, during the four years I was president of this Equal Opportunities Commission of the Federation, showed that women, even in journalism, have paid a higher price, higher than men, in the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. After the COVID-19 pandemic worsened the crisis of the publishing industry in Italy, women, female journalists, were demotivated, and forced to accept different contracts under threat of dismissal. This is really, I think, really, a form of violence, for me.
A survey made by the Equal Opportunities Commission of the National Federation, together with GiULiA Journalists, and I will explain to you GiULiA Journalists, and the Order of Journalists, in 2018-2019, emerged that 83% of female journalists working in newsrooms have experienced, during their working life, physical, psychological, economic, and verbal harassment.
In 2025, the Equal Opportunities Commission developed a handbook to help recognise and defend against harassment, with contributions from forensic criminologists and lawyers, as well as using data from the survey carried out by the Gender Council of the European Federation of Journalists. I am part of this work, and the findings are very similar. So we need to recognise these forms of harassment, including online harassment, but not only online harassment, and to understand how to defend ourselves, how to protect ourselves, and how to protect our female colleagues.
Another issue is the use of gender language and storytelling, especially in cases of violence. Founded by FNSI, together with trade unions and the Order of Journalists, we have a very important document, the Violence Manifesto, the Manifesto di Venezia, created in 2017. It contains recommendations for journalistic reporting that does not discriminate and does not generate secondary victimisation.
To monitor, it is another very important part of our work is to monitor the correct application of these recommendations, thanks to Sapienza University of Rome, in particular Professor Flavia Zecchi. Together with all the Equal Opportunities Committees of journalism in Italy, we founded the STEP Observatory, STEP Observatory, Research and Information on Media Coverage of Gender-Based Violence, which publishes reports every six months.
In the working team, alongside the academic world, there is also representation from journalism, allowing for a comparative analysis aimed at becoming a useful tool for all journalists to promote respect for women, their dignity, and their freedom.
Women in Italy, according to the results of the latest Global Media Monitoring Project, make up only 25% of the main subjects of news stories in newspapers. Front pages feature very few women. Often, this 25% appears mainly in connection with serious or negative news events.
The National Federation of the Italian Press also participates in the Rewriting the Story project. This is a project of the International Federation of Journalists for journalism free from prejudices, stereotypes, and bias in the reporting of women in politics. But this idea of ‘rewriting the story’ is useful for everything, not only in politics, but in sport, in economics, in all fields.
I also want to, well, finishing my speech, to mention the great work for equality carried out by the association GiULiA Journalists. GiULiA is an association of Italian women journalists, autonomous and independent, which is engaged with language, roles, careers, ethics, hate speech, and stereotypes, including those linked to AI language.
Another serious issue is attacks against women journalists, also in Italy, and, together with the National Federation of the Press, complaints and legal actions which are really dangerous for journalists, for all journalists, and particularly for female journalists, a lot of colleagues, female colleagues, live under protection because of all this hate speech, because of all this hate speech online because it is impossible to work freely. On the contrary, they have to work every day under attack, from the mafia, or from political parties, or extremist political parties. This is very difficult, and women are really under attack, really in the firing line.
This is one of the struggles for the Gender Council of the European Federation because the number of colleagues, the number of female colleagues under attack, is increasing, it is increasing in this period, I think also because of the political situation in Italy.
Aidan White:
Mimma, thank you very much indeed.YouI have really added to the sum of knowledge about this issue. The national experience is incredibly important, and I think if we’re going to develop the practical program or some action after this discussion, I think your experience in Italy will be very useful.
Certainly, what you’ve said shows how the issue we’re talking about, sexual harassment, explicit threats of violence, the online threats that women receive, in many ways reflects entrenched problems of gender inequality and harmful social norms. And we have to be aware of that. Thank you very much indeed for that, that was really very helpful.
I’d like now to move on to Maja Sever, the European Federation of Journalists, President Maja, thank you for joining us. It’s fantastic to have you here. You come not just as a leader of women journalists, and women in media on a European level, but actually, as a representative of those fighting across Europe for journalists rights.
But I really like to know how we can contribute, in practical terms, to building more solidarity and more practical work, which will confront this problem. So, please, let’s have your thoughts.
Maja Sever:
Thank you very much, thank you very much for the invitation, and thank you for bringing us together on this webinar around this critical topic. A topic that it’s not only professional, but also deeply personal. What we are discussing today, it’s not something that’s happened somewhere else, nor it is an issue that we can push to the margins of the journalistic lives. Gendered inequality, the violence against women in journalism, is not an isolated incident. It’s a pattern, unfortunately, and we can see it from Julie’s research and all those witnesses and speakers who have spoken about it. It is a reality that directly shapes our profession, journalism, and, of course, female journalists.
If we want to speak seriously about the future of journalism, then we must acknowledge something we too often avoid saying out loud. We cannot build free media if part of our profession works under fear, pressure, and constant threat. We cannot defend freedom of expression and journalism while women journalists are punished simply for being present, for speaking up, or for being visible. And we cannot claim to protect democracy while we normalize violence as a part of the job.
The European Federation of Journalists has recognised this as one of the key challenges facing our profession today. And we try not to stop at words. That’s why, at the European level, the EFJ acknowledged the problem and created a dedicated structure to address it. We formed the Expert Group for Gender Equality and Diversity, GENDERT, because we do not want to deny that what we are dealing with is not a series of individual cases, but a structural problem that requires structural solutions.
Our expert group within the European Federation of Journalists works on gender equality policies, on fighting discrimination, harassment and violence, and on practical ways for newsrooms, unions, and institutions to build safer working environments for women, who are so often the first and most frequent targets.
I also have to add that at the last EFJ General Meeting in Budapest, we adopted the strongest resolutions to end inequality and violence against women journalists. And these are not symbolic documents. This is a commitment and a message that we, as professionals, as an organisation, have decided to stop tolerating the normalisation of violence, discrimination and inequality, and to make this issue a priority that must be reflected in collective agreements, newsroom policies, all documents, protection mechanisms, accountability systems, training, and in our everyday professional practice.
And now I want to bring this big European picture closer to home, to Croatia, where I come from, and to this region where I come from. You should know that in this part of the world everything is often a little, let’s say, harsher, a little harder. Our public space is smaller, but people know each other. Pressure is usually more direct, and violence often comes from multiple directions at once. It is not only anonymous accounts and bots. It is also people with names and faces. We know each other. And in an environment where women in the public sphere are still punished for being outspoken, for being brave, or for asking questions.
That’s why our union in Croatia, and unions in other countries, are now involved in a very large project, Women in the Media. We are trying to bring together female journalists from Croatia and the region, and associations and unions from the region, from Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina because we know that we are facing the same patterns, with similar pressures, and often the same silence around these attacks and pressures.
So we tried to unite, and we were united by the feeling that we speak too little about the problem, but also that we do too little to stop it. And we are aware that it’s not enough to say that violence exists. We have to do something together. We want to show how it looks, how it begins, how it spreads, who tolerates violence against female journalists, and what remains after the violence. And through our project, we try to come together to offer solutions and support.
So we carried out, as I say, research in the Balkan region, and the findings from our joint research were really alarming. We found that every second woman journalist in our country reported experiencing violence inside the newsroom. I am not talking now only about online abusers, but about violence inside the newsroom, within the workplace. I want to say that in our research, every second woman journalist experienced violence in the newsroom, from colleagues or from editors-in-chief, or somewhere within the workplace, in environments that should be professional, safe, and supportive. So, can you imagine what it is like online, under anonymous abusers, and in the online space?
Our colleagues, female journalists, describe harassment that begins as a joke, as a remark about appearance and sexualisation, as dehumanisation, and then escalates into direct threats, organised attacks, and attempts to silence them. And what is especially painful is that many women never report it, not because it is not serious, but because they know what often happens after reporting. They become even more isolated. Someone mentioned this victimisation, and the second layer of victimisation that most women face. They are asked if they are serious, and they are told to ignore it, to become quieter, less visible, less present, as if the solution is for women to disappear from public life, rather than to punish abusers.
And then we wonder, and it is not that we do not understand why women leave the profession. They leave because they would rather not pay a price that is not part of the job, but part of the violence.
Now I will just say a few words, and I will speak personally because I believe it is important to say what is often left unsaid. Very often, even these days, my friends call me or message me and ask, ‘How do you endure it all? How do you survive?’ Because they read on social media so many comments, attacks, abusers’ comments, on almost everything I publish. And they ask me, they try to give me some kind of support. They ask me how I survive those comments, attacks, messages, and threats.
And I have to admit something to you now. When I try to calm them down, I used to say, well, you know, I mostly don’t read these comments anymore, and I almost never open message requests. But to be honest, I read them, and I know that I am mentally not doing well when I catch myself reading those comments, when I see my hands go to the screen and open one more comment, another message, and one more wave of abuse.
And I have to admit, truly shocking me, how many people and what people are really capable to write publicly, and what are those people around us, how dark and cruel they are? How dehumanising. But then I realised that this is not the right way, to lie, neither to my friends nor to my family because it is important that we are aware that these witch hunts do not end well. They are never just words. They are never something we should ignore or not read because when hate is repeated, organised, amplified, it becomes a threat, and it becomes a signal, some kind of guideline and some kind of preparation, unfortunately.
Daphne Caruana Galizia is always with us in our thoughts. She was exposed, before her murder, to a campaign of hate speech and organised attacks. They tried to silence her first with words, and then, unfortunately, it finished with violence. And that is why we cannot accept the idea that online abuse is something we simply have to ignore and learn to live with. It is not a test of strength, it is an attack on press freedom itself, and a personal attack.
And that is why we must fight, and that is why we must speak, why we must have this webinar, why we must have this research, and why we must try to find some concrete measures of support. And we also have to be honest: for an individual, it is extremely difficult to face this evil alone.
It’s hard to stand alone against the crowd that attacks you. It’s hard to be alone when you are threatened, mocked, when you are told that it is your fault because you are a public figure because you published some story or some text because you are asking questions, or because you are warning even about this specific problem.
And we need, and women in the media need, help and support. And I hope, and I believe that this is why we are here today, you, me, colleagues, representatives of other organisations, and this community because together we refuse to leave women journalists alone. We must build a shield, we must build a system, support mechanisms that respond quickly, clearly, and directly to show the person that we are here with them. A system in which a woman who is attacked does not first wonder whether anyone will believe her, but knows exactly whom to contact and what will happen next.
Every newsroom has to have a clear zero-tolerance policy for harassment. But not just that. And not just policies on paper against violence. There must be safe reporting channels, clear procedures, and protection against abusers. It must never be normal that after reporting abuse, the woman becomes the problem.
We need legal support and clear protocols for online threats, not only in newsrooms, but also with institutions at the national level. We cannot pretend that rape and death threats are not serious. And this is very, very important.
We need psychological support. Living in this world, in this job, under constant attack, leaves consequences. It is not shameful to say that we are broken. What is shameful is the system that breaks us and then tells us that this is normal and try to sort it out.
We have to find a way to support newsrooms, but also organisations such as unions or NGOs that protect journalists, to have the resources to offer psychological help for free to media workers. Because if we allow violence to win, that’s it. Then we are no longer talking about free media. We are talking about a profession where only those who can endure the worst survive. And journalism must never become a competition about who can tolerate more abuse. Journalism must remain a profession where it is possible to work freely, safely, and with dignity.
And in the end, I want to say this: it is not women who must adapt to violence. It is our responsibility to stop the violence. We must strengthen solidarity in our profession, not symbolic solidarity, but real solidarity. When one woman journalist is attacked, she must not be left alone. An attack on one of us must be understood and treated as an attack on all of us.
And we must ensure that women do not leave journalism because women are outstanding journalists and their work matters. And I can really proudly claim and say that I think we, female journalists, bring perspectives that society needs. And I really think that society and journalism need us, female journalists. But we have to ensure protection and support.
So when we talk about solutions, we talk about the responsibility of employers, of institutions, of platforms, and, of course, of society. But also our responsibility as professionals, as organisations, not to look away, but to say, enough. Let’s really build concrete mechanisms to support female journalists in every small newsroom, not just in Europe, but all around. Because we need it now, not just to defend journalism, but we need it now to defend, let’s say, freedom and democracy.
Thank you for listening, and thank you for gathering all those brave women, and of course man. And let us try to build a shield that will allow women in journalism to stay and to continue their brave work.
Aidan White:
Maja, thank you very much indeed, that was such an inspiring contribution. It was a great analysis, a call to arms, and very moving testimony personally. It is just fantastic to listen to you, particularly your demand that we must end the scourge of women suffering in silence, being told to ignore the problem, being asked to go undercover, or to otherwise bury the issue. Thank you so much for that.
Nadia, my goodness me, you’ve listened to some tremendous contributions in this panel about an issue which I don’t think has been talked about enough. And about a problem that is getting worse and where we actually do need to be doing something. Please, what are your thoughts?
Nadezhda Azhgikhina:
Thank you very much, and I should tell you that I’m absolutely happy to hear to those fantastic presentations, to those courageous women, scholars, professionals, colleagues, and friends. And I think we are in the starting point of important development of not only discussion, but probably also some practical stuff in media development today.
And I felt very impressed by all presentations, but if I could, I would like to remind you some historical points because it’s important that the awareness, raising awareness about women in the media, had some history.
I do remember, fortunately, I was lucky to take part in some of them. And my personal impressions, about the first gathering, about women and journalism, in March 1995, in Toronto, arranged by UNESCO, was absolutely extraordinary because we from Russia, we got four people, from 100 and something more women journalists from all over the globe. It was something unique, it was very strange, we never thought that women in our profession, not only make difference, but have any importance, it was very interesting.
And since that, the discussion about women and journalism started, and I don’t remember how enthusiastic all of our colleagues, I would like to tell you that many male professionals felt very enthusiastic about Internet as a measure of democratization of information field. And many people believed, male and female, that Internet development, finally, make available all voices to be heard: women, minorities, everybody, so on and so forth. It was 1995, I think it was 31 years ago.
Very soon in September 1995, global conference on women, conducted by UNESCO, took place in Beijing, it was the biggest conference on women. 40,000 women from all over the globe gathered, and it was important that several sessions were focused on women and the media. I would like to mention CIDA in Sweden and the FOJO Institute. They arranged a session for women journalists accredited to the conference. The International Women’s Writers Organization also arranged a gathering, and a couple of others.
And, you know, nobody was prepared for this discussion about women and journalism, what it was about. Journalism is journalism, it’s for everybody. What does it mean, women’s voices in journalism? But it was very important.
And after that, UNESCO decided to study the issue, and Julie mentioned the recent survey conducted by UNESCO. It was fantastic, but I would like to mention the first survey, which was presented in 2001 in Seoul at the International Federation of Journalists Global Congress. And thanks to that UNESCO survey, 40% of all representatives, of all delegates sponsored by UNESCO, were women, and this was something very unusual at the time.
And after that, the Gender Council of the International Federation of Journalists was established. This Gender Council started working on gender balance within unions, integrating it into union development, which was very exotic for many countries, including my country, Russia. Russia was at the beginning of its democratisation at that time. We were moving very fast, we were very inspired, and so on.
I, together with colleagues, established the Association of Women Journalists. We had many activities, cooperating with UNESCO and other UN agencies, and we conducted surveys about women and journalism. We understood that in former Soviet countries, and in Eastern Europe as well, women constituted the majority of media professionals, but they were very low-paid. And, of course, discrimination, which we never expected because we grew up in a society of formal gender equality and so on, began to grow. And discrimination in the media field was very strong.
And the first UNESCO survey, in 2001, Russia and the former Soviet Union did not participate, showed that women journalists face strong discrimination, and that less than 30% of women are media professionals, despite the fact that in Scandinavian countries they were more than 40%. In some countries, like Korea and Japan, not more than 2 or 3%, and not more than 20% in media management, and so on. Since then, the interest of scholars has been focused on media management and salaries, and the interest of media organisations and professional unions has been focused on wages, and so on.
It is interesting that in some countries, like Norway, I was struck by the fact that Norwegian men in the profession went on strike demanding equal wages for women journalists. Norway is a small country. Of course, it has a very strong traditional democracy and so on, it’s a very wealthy country, but it was a very interesting experience. I was happy to write about it, I was writing about it, it was a very inspiring example for us.
But very soon we faced the problem of the safety of women journalists. And Maja mentioned Daphne Caruana Galizia, who is a symbol of female journalistic dedication, but we also have the name of Anna Politkovskaya. She was not the first. When we discussed an impunity day with international organisations, we suggested her assassination day as the International Impunity Day, but it doesn’t matter. Everybody knows her name, but she was not the first. There were other women before. And the safety of women journalists became an issue.
And I do remember that we had a very important conference, also supported by UNESCO, in 2009, in Moscow. It was an international, global conference on women journalists in conflicts, and on their impact and their contribution to peace communication as an issue because peace communication was articulated as an issue from that moment. Unfortunately, after that, the United States stopped its sponsorship of UNESCO, and this project, which was very successful, was frozen.
What about digital safety? Digital safety is a special issue. I do remember that in 2014 the OSCE organised a conference devoted to women in the digital world. And for the first time, this discussion took place, and it was a shock for everybody, that women not only in developing countries or in Eastern European countries, but globally, face digital harassment, intimidation, and threats.
For the first time, I do remember it very well, women, very well-known hosts from Swedish television, came forward and spoke openly, almost like a coming out, saying that they had faced these intimidations. For people from other countries, it was something very unusual, very strange. How could this happen? It is democracy, but it happened. And since then, discussion about the digital safety of women has become an issue within the OSCE.
In 2015, a special project on women’s safety online, the SOFJO project, started (https://projects.osce.org/fom/safety-female-journalists-online). Since then, a couple of initiatives took place, like surveys, which presented an awful level of online violence against women. There were no exceptions. There were examples from Great Britain, Spain, the United States, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia – everywhere.
And what was interesting was that women journalists faced intimidation and threats online three times more often than men, everywhere. So there was no difference, across democracies, across different experiences of freedom of expression or lack of freedom of expression. So this showed that our understanding of the media environment is not perfect.
Unfortunately, this project had a long life. There were several surveys published under the umbrella of the OSCE (https://projects.osce.org/representative-on-freedom-of-media/554098). There was a manual for organisations. There were several discussions about them.
And in 2019, a documentary, “A Dark Place”, about women’s safety online, was presented (https://projects.osce.org/representative-on-freedom-of-media/410423). I would like to quote from the trailer: “The online safety of women journalists goes beyond gender equality and press freedom, directly impacting the quality of our democracies and the right of society to access plurality and information. This simple truth unfolds in a dark place through first-hand experiences shared by journalists targeted with online abuse and experts in the fields of human rights, gender, and media freedom.” This film was powerful. I was part of this film, and it was filmed in many countries of the EU, and not only the EU, and it showed that this is an issue that must be discussed.
After that, there was a very important conference in 2023, and in the autumn of 2025 there was also a conference devoted to this issue. But what I would like to say is that, of course, there were different ideas and experiences. The Italian experience, with the Venice Declaration and so on, is important. But what we face today is this: media freedom is challenged, journalism is challenged, professional associations are challenged. Maja gave a fantastic presentation, but we should admit that professional associations are not so well respected everywhere. So we do understand the situation. Public opinion is fragmented, it is confused. Right-wing opinions are very strong. And those people who produce this violence feel that they live in impunity. And public awareness of this issue is very low.
So what did people suggest during our conferences? There are good examples from Denmark, and from some other places, where journalists’ organisations, together with the police, focused on offenders and punished them. It happened. Even in Russia, there were several examples, but they are very few.
I think that we must work on public awareness and education. And that is why I am so proud of our idea to establish a special project. I do believe that we can manage it. We have such a strong intellectual and practical background for that. Let’s try to arrange a project to promote awareness about this, about shame, about naming and shaming, about values because we cannot do anything else but promote values: values of respect for women and for other people, values of zero tolerance for gender-based violence online. And if we can promote this, I am sure we will succeed.
And I would be happy to discuss with all of you the details of this project. I am very proud, again, that the Fetisov Journalism Awards, Aidan, and our whole team are focused on this issue, which, I believe, is crucial for the future of democracy itself, not only for women, not only for freedom of expression, in a serious way. Thank you very much.
Aidan White:
Nadia, thank you very much indeed. You've added quite a lot to our understanding of actions that have been taking place for decades, and in recent years. That has been very stimulating.
We have had a call to action from Maja and your call for a project, will take this forward, I think this is an unstoppable idea, which we should work on.
One of the follow-ups from this webinar will be for us to bring together the people who have taken part here, but also others who are friends to try to build a project which will promote solidarity, and which will seek to achieve the objectives we have set out.
We have to look for really practical actions, not just well meaning declarations and wishful thinking. With that in mind, we can move forward.
Look, Maja, Shada, are there any last words you’d like to add to what we’ve talked about so far and from what you’ve heard?
Shada Islam:
Yeah, I think, thank you, Aidan, I just, really, this has been a very, very informative and, I think, a very useful session and a good prelude to what we hope to launch as a project in the future.
There are a couple of things that I think we perhaps need to be aware of. I think it needs to bring in younger journalists as well. All of us around the table are experienced, well, experienced, and I think the problem is really facing many of our young colleagues, and I can see this. Many are shying away from journalism, many are freelancers.
So as Maja has said, freelancers are doubly punished, freelancers, and there is also, I think, what saves many of my young colleagues that I work with: social media. It hurts them, but it also saves them because it allows them a certain visibility. They can be on TikTok, they’re good on TikTok, they’re good on certain platforms. So there is, as I said initially, a double-edged sword, you know, it’s not just bad. I think we need to highlight that.
The other thing is, it was said, you know, anonymous trolling. Yes, there is a lot of anonymous trolling, by bots based in India, in Budapest, Hungary, wherever, there’s a lot of that. But I have been trolled by people I know, people in the Brussels bubble, men and women, who cannot put up with different views on the state of the world and the state of Europe.
It’s not just anonymous, faceless people who are trolling people like myself. And the same thing is true for Rokhaya Diallo. It’s the same thing for Rana Ayyub. So when you are a person of colour, when you are of Muslim descent, the field is wide open to personal attacks, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and not only from trolls. And I think that is something I would really like to insist on.
Finally, I would say there is no time to lose. Seriously, no time to lose. We, you and me, and a few others, were pioneering in the first post-caricature days with this initiative that we launched. And I think we don’t need to wait for it to be perfect in all these different dimensions. I think we can have, we already have the headlines, and we can launch it. In today’s world, you don’t really need a lot of funding to get something started, people can come in as we go along. So I wouldn’t waste time trying to find the perfect format, the perfect thing.
Aidan White:
I’m absolutely with you. Absolutely. There’s no time to waste at all. I couldn’t agree with you more. And we will pick it up and run with it. Maja, do you have something to add to that?”
Maja Sever:
Just a few words. First of all, I want to tell you that this is so interesting, very valuable. We have to stay in touch, I agree, of course, with the colleagues, with Nadezhda, and of course, I agree with you about your words on associations, unions, and organisations.
You know that we also, in this part of Europe, face criticism, and I think this is happening everywhere. But one thing I want to say, and I also agree with Shada, is that this is a point where our organisations can build cooperation and strengthen their ties with members and other colleagues, especially younger ones. I will give you just one short example.
In my small union in Croatia, we started a small project. The name is Zagorka, that’s the name of the first female journalist, very well known here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HFQ1TOgZ-Y8tAIhwsL4Ymxt19y3i2kw3/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=111780558385460053729&rtpof=true&sd=true). She was, like, a hundred years ago, a woman journalist. And the idea is to build a mentorship network between, let’s say, as you said, not ‘older’, but ‘in the best age’ journalists, awarded ones, respected ones, and we invite young journalists, students, or young journalists at the beginning of their careers.
And I really cannot explain to you how this idea started to grow, because of harassment, and because of the situation with young journalists, which really opened my eyes. Because if I tell you that everything I face is less than what they face in the newsroom, on the field because they are unknown, they are young, we call them like ‘minors’. They work as minors all day under the computer. They have to just cut, and it’s like, wow, for me.
And we try, in this, let’s say, soft project, but communication, working together, we go on voices together, or something, to strengthen this intergenerational cooperation in our ecosystem and try to strengthen them. It opened my mind and my eyes, and I faced a whole new bunch of problems that young journalists face. But I think that, as I said, step by step, we don’t try to be perfect, a small project. Let’s cooperate, let’s share it, let’s share.
And we don’t have a choice. We have to, but I think that on this webinar we heard some really concrete things that we can develop. From my angle, I will just again, in conclusion, emphasise that I really think that we all, all of us together on this webinar, but also all of us in the journalist world, need psychological help.
And we have to try to find a way to secure some resources and to organise some kind of system, in cooperation with, I don’t know, some organisation that provides psychological help. Because I know that in my country, in my media environment, very often people ask me, “Can you ensure anonymity?” Because people don’t want to go into the system. They don’t want to go to their doctor and have this, it’s also, I don’t know if it’s the same in your countries, but in my country people want to find a way to speak with an expert, with a psychologist, but without being formally registered in the system. I understand that. So let’s try to find, for example, a way to do something about this.
Aidan White:
Look, Maja, thank you very much indeed. Shada, thank you very much. And Nadia, as usual, you have been absolutely fantastic. I’m very, very pleased that we’ve been able to have this session. We’ve done incredible work here, and I think that by the end of it we’ve come up with some real, practical ideas.
And now we have a responsibility to carry on and make something happen. And Shada, you’re absolutely right, we have no time to waste, and we shouldn’t be too focused on the idea that we need to put together a big, perfect pre-project. Step by step, as you suggested, Maja, is absolutely the right approach.
We are small, we are modest, but we have an issue that really needs to be addressed. And Maja, in your introduction you said very clearly, you can’t have press freedom, you can’t have decency in journalism, you can’t have independent news media, you can’t have an information democracy that truly functions unless women are respected as part of that process.
Thank you all for taking the time to be with us. This has been a truly inspiring session.
Thank you all very much. Take care, and see you soon.