Risk Perception and Negotiation of Safety Among Ugandan Female Journalists Covering Political Demonstrations
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Date
2020
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Journalist Safety and Self-Censorship
Abstract
On March 1, 2016, one and a half weeks after Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was re-elected for the fourth time in a row, Bahati Remmy, a popular Ugandan female journalist was brutally arrested by police. The arrest happened during a televised live report. Bahati and her colleagues had been covering a public protest at the home of the opposition leader and four-time presidential candidate (2001, 2006, 2011, 2016), Kizza Besigye. During her report, Bahati was surrounded by police, sprayed with pepper, arrested, and bundled into a waiting police van. She was then driven to an unknown location detained for hours and later released without charge. Bahati was one of the many Ugandan journalists who were caught up in a deliberate government crackdown on the media following a riotous election period and contested results. A year later, another female television reporter was kidnapped and beaten over coverage of an online protest by a famous social media activist against Uganda’s first lady. Such intimidation has been seen as open victimization of women journalists which has become a usual occurrence, and which may push women to refrain from covering riots. Unlike other forms of violations against journalists, victimization of women is peculiar because in many cases a victim is at risk because of their gender. Yet, it is unknown how women journalists covering unruly political environments perceive their safety and how they negotiate the risks they encounter. The goal of this chapter therefore is to explore the safety risks that confront women journalists covering political protests in Uganda. It will assess the perceptions and experiences of journalists before unpacking the strategies for dealing with such risks. Understanding (potential) victims’ perception of risk of future violations may be important for informing interventions to protect women journalists, and to prevent them from avoiding reporting certain topics or withdrawing from journalism altogether. Based on a qualitative study, the chapter sets out to answer two research questions: (1) How do women
journalists perceive their safety when covering political demonstrations and do safety risks push them to self-censor? and (2) What mechanisms do women journalists use to negotiate risk and to avert self-censorship when covering political demonstrations? This chapter was inspired by the need to contribute to scholarship on the importance of gender in understanding the safety and security issues that confront women working in the media across the world. In the following sections, the chapter progresses by giving a brief contextual and historical background on the state of the media as well as safety and security of journalists in Uganda. It further describes the status of women in media employment in Uganda, before the methodology of the study is briefly discussed. Thereafter, the analysis is presented, including the perception of risk, the effect of risk and the mechanisms for negotiating risk among Ugandan female journalists, and discussion of these vis-à-vis their linkage with self censorship and resilience. In the conclusion, I argue the importance of an indulgent understanding and recognition of the nature of safety threats that women journalists face and the need for deliberate efforts to prepare journalists to handle such threats and to build collective resilience as a way to forestall self-censorship
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Nakiwala, A. S. (2020). Risk perception and negotiation of safety among Ugandan female journalists covering political demonstrations. Journalist Safety and Self-Censorship, 130-147. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780367810139-9