Document details

Violence Against Female Journalists in Indonesia: A Threat to Journalism and Freedom of the Press

Pemantau Regulasi dan Regulator Media (PR2Media);USAID (2022), 110 pp.

ISBN 978-602-97839-8-8

Institution of author: PR2 Media

"This research was conducted through a survey (involving 1,256 respondents) and interviews (six informants) of female journalists in 191 cities, representing western, central, and eastern parts of Indonesia. This survey included 25 questions about the respondents’ violence experiences related to their work in the digital and physical world. The forms of violence asked in the questionnaire cover all forms of violence that we could find in literature and case records in Indonesia and abroad, including various policies and practices of discrimination for female journalists in the workplace related to salaries, reporting assignments, and so on, which we included in the categories of violence in the physical domain. [...] According to the statements from the female journalists, as many as 1,077 respondents (85.7%) had experienced violence during their journalistic career. Of these, as many as 70.1% of the respondents had experienced violence in the digital domain as well as in the physical domain, 7.9% of respondents had experienced only violence in the digital domain (online), and 7.8% of respondents had experienced only violence in the physical domain (offline). Meanwhile, only 179 respondents (14.3%) never experienced any form of violence at all [...] Although the survey data do not show a strong relationship between the acts of violence and the topic of the journalists’ reporting, interviews show that female journalists are more vulnerable to violence when covering issues considered risky, such as gender and sexuality (LGBTIQ) and the environment. The latter finding is in line with the statement by the Committee to Protect Journalists, which classifies environmental investigations in developing countries as dangerous, second only to reporting of armed conflicts." (Executive summary, page 9)
1 Introduction, 11
2 Violence in the digital domain, 25
3 Violence in the physical domain, 51
4 Mapping of ways to address violence against female journalists, 75
5 Conclusions and recommendations, 99