28 October 2026
“Every woman journalist driven
out of a conflict zone is a peace process that loses its
witness,” said Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa,
addressing the United Nations this week.
She urged
governments to move beyond promises and take concrete action
to protect women media workers in the field.
“When
the messenger is a woman, it is sexualized, it’s
dehumanizing, and it is relentless,” said Ms. Ressa,
co-founder of the Philippine news organisation
Rappler.
As part of Women, Peace and Security Week,
she was speaking at a high-level event organised by the
Permanent Mission of Greece, gender equality agency UN Women, and the UN
education and culture agency, UNESCO, which champions
journalist protection.
‘Fight before it’s too
late’
Ms. Ressa, who has faced arrest, legal cases
and sustained online attacks, reiterated how intimidation
can wear down journalists’ credibility and confidence,
threaten their safety and ultimately kill their
determination to continue reporting.
At the height of
the attacks against her, she received 90 hate messages an
hour.
The attacks illustrate how gender-based abuse
can be used to discredit women who challenge those in
power.
“Kill the messenger to kill the message,”
she explained to the event – Every Voice for Peace
Counts: New Perspectives on the Women, Peace and Security
Agenda.
AI enabler
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Artificial intelligence
is adding to the threat, enabling deepfakes, fabricated
sexual images, cloned voices and coordinated attacks to
spread at scale.
According to UN
Women data, nearly one in four women human rights
defenders, activists and journalists reported experiencing
AI-enabled abuse which in time can manifest as physical
violence.
Recent research highlights how online
attacks – once dismissed as “virtual” problems – are now
spilling offline, affecting women’s safety, well-being,
and ability to participate freely in public
debate.
Ms. Ressa called for online violence to be
treated as such, arguing for stronger accountability for
perpetrators and technology companies that amplify abuse,
sustained funding for women-led journalism, and the
inclusion of women journalists in peace and security
discussions.
‘This is the moment’
Invoking
the words of Mzia Amaglobeli, a Georgian journalist who
remains imprisoned, Ms. Ressa described how she had held up
a copy of How to Stand Up to a Dictator in court when
she was unable to speak freely.
“What she said from
her cell is, fight before it’s too late,” Ms. Ressa said.
“We’re getting there. This is it. This is the
moment.”
She called on journalists, civil society,
governments and international institutions to stand together
against a system that allows attacks on women journalists to
go unchecked.
“We refuse to be the victim,” she
said. “The women here turned the attack into the story,
and every time one of us stood up, others stood with us.
Courage is contagious. But courage isn’t a protection
strategy – the nations of the UN are”.
The meeting
took place 26 years since the adoption of Security
Council resolution 1325, which affirmed the importance
of women’s full participation in conflict prevention,
resolution and peacebuilding.
Keeping Afghan women’s
voices alive
For Afghan journalist and media
entrepreneur Hamida Aman, protecting women journalists means
ensuring that millions of women are not shut out of public
life altogether.
When she launched Radio Begum in
March 2021, her aim was to create a space where Afghan women
could share their experiences and access information
relevant to their lives. Since the Taliban takeover,
restrictions have made that work increasingly
difficult.
Citing figures from the International
Federation of Journalists, Ms. Aman said the number of women
journalists in Afghanistan had fallen from about 2,800
before the takeover to fewer than 700.
“Being
allowed to operate doesn’t mean being free to operate,”
she said, describing the scrutiny and administrative
obstacles facing Radio Begum. The organisation has been
threatened and temporarily shut down, and some colleagues
have been jailed for more than six months.
“If these
journalists disappear, who will speak about the lives of
Afghan women? Who will make their voices heard?” Ms. Aman
asked.
Silencing collective stories
Protecting
women journalists is not only about individual safety. It is
also about whose experiences of conflict are documented,
whose voices shape public understanding and whose
contributions to peace are recognised.
“When women
journalists are silenced, the women whose stories they are
telling are also silenced,” said UN Women Deputy Executive
Director for Normative Support, UN System Coordination, and
Programme Results, Nyaradzai Gumbonzvanda. “So, it’s not
just the silencing of the journalists, it’s the silencing of
our collective story.”
Women in conflict settings
are often portrayed as victims, she noted, despite their
roles in preventing violence, mediating disputes, sustaining
communities and rebuilding societies. When their experiences
go unreported, the public sees only part of the reality of
war, “half of the picture of peace”.
The scale of
the problem is stark. According to a recent
study by UN Women and UNESCO, 75 per cent of women
journalists surveyed had experienced online violence.
Forty-two per cent linked online attacks to abuse or assault
in the physical world, up from 20 per cent in
2020.
Meanwhile, between 2013 and 2023, coverage of
conflicts grew more than sixfold, yet only 5 per cent of
published articles focused on women’s experiences of war.
Just 0.04 per cent mentioned women leaders in peace
processes, according to figures presented at the event.
“We are not invisible”, Ms. Ressa told the room of women
in New York.
Begoñã Lasagabaster, Director of
UNESCO’s Division for Gender Equality, recalled the
exhibition They Told the World About It, documenting
almost 200 women journalists from more than 25 countries who
reported on the Spanish Civil War 90 years
ago.
“While much of the world counted battles, these
women counted lives – they wrote about hunger,
displacement, about what war does to a mother, a father, a
child, a city, a country,” she said, and with that “they
changed the way the world saw war”.
Protection must
become action
International frameworks for protecting
journalists already exist. Yet women journalists continue to
face physical violence, legal harassment, psychological
trauma and online campaigns designed to discredit their
reporting.
As the International
Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists
approaches on 2 November, UNESCO is preparing to launch a
new campaign – Threats Evolve, Impunity Endures –
alongside new findings on journalist safety and
impunity.
“Every voice for peace counts,” said Ms.
Ressa, “but a voice only counts if it is heard, if that
woman survives being
heard.”
