“I screamed in his face at this point and left the station headquarters with my nerves collapsing”, says Arras, raising her eyebrows and raising her voice as if to regain the tone of her director’s speech.
Before joining the channel affiliated with the Kurdish parties represented in parliament, Aras, 29 years old, participated in a training workshop on television and radio presentation skills. Once the training was completed, the department manager asked her to join a one-year contract. “He told me he was looking for broadcasters blessed with beauty and a good voice. Of course I accepted the show. It was the dream of my life to be a broadcaster”.
In the final weeks of her work, which lasted about seven months, the director’s requests were accompanied by attending meetings that had no professional justification. “I enter the meeting and I find no one else in the office. I sit and he stares at me and flatters me. More than once he offered to me to travel with him out of the country, and I was making excuses in order to decline his requests”. “The last time, he grabbed my hand and pulled me towards himself, and when I pushed him away, he started talking to me like a madman telling me that I had no future in this profession”.
Aras did not tell her family about the reasons for her resignation, and she did not communicate with the channel’s management to clarify the situation. “If I spoke up, I would not be given any consideration, and the director would not be fired from his job. I would lose my reputation as well”, she says.
This journalist is one of dozens of women journalists who have faced similar situations, according to an investigation of harassment in the media industry. The results of a survey, the largest of its kind in the Kurdistan region and the disputed governorate of Kirkuk, show that sexual harassment – from looks, verbal expressions or touching to explicit sexual harassment – is common in the media environment, no matter if the media is partisan or civil.
Aras’s story is repeated in slightly different detail with reporter Dilovan Azad, also a young woman, who was asked by the Head of the Department to go to his house to spend a “beautiful day”.
“He whispered words in my ear that almost made me drop to the ground”, says Dilovan Azad. She didn’t leave her job though. Instead she keeps the texts and voice messages her Head of the Department sends her on her phone – but without any clear purpose or plan. “I do not intend to file a lawsuit with the judiciary”, says Dilovan Azad, who asked us to conceal her real name and work as a condition for her to talk to us.
“When I go to work I try as hard as I can to maintain a low profile, avoid attention and ignore all the disturbing words I hear”, she says. “What matters to me is that I keep working and get my salary at the end of the month”.
A sensitive questionnaire
Aras and Azad took the road of silence. This is the case for most of those surveyed in the investigation, which consisted of a questionnaire distributed to 400 journalists, most of whom are registered with the Syndicate for Kurdistan Journalists. Sulaymaniyah and Erbil is where most of the headquarters of the ruling Kurdish parties and Kurdish-language media are concentrated, and the majority of the questionnaire papers were distributed here . The rest of the forms went to journalists in Duhok, Halabja and Kirkuk.
The most main questions were whether the female journalists experienced sexual harassment by their colleagues in the workplace, what kind of harassment they experienced, the nature of the job position of the person harassing them and their reactions to their harassment.
Once the results were clear, 127 journalists refused to answer the questions asked in the questionnaire. The three most common reasons for not responding were: first, the sensitivity of the subject and responding may harm their reputation; second, out of fear of blacklisting the media institute; and third, the statement may cause the journalists to lose their job and/or lead to abuse of employees.
In the Duhok governorate, only one journalist out of 16 accepted to answer the questionnaire. The newspaper cited the reasons for rejection on the front page of the form saying: “Duhok is not Sulaymaniyah. We can not talk about such issues at all”.
Dr. Shino Khalil Hassan, an expert on Social Work at the Faculty of Education at the University of Koya commented: “This happens every time we conduct a statistical survey or questionnaire on a sensitive social issue, such as domestic violence, abortion or sexual harassment”.
However, Salwa, a former journalist, was harassed by her manager when she was working for a local media organisation. She contacted the author of this investigative report to share what happened to her and how it has changed her life.
“I was 19 at the time. I was studying in the morning and working in the evening. I was trying to convince myself that it I could improve my abilities and stand out among the crowd. I loved my work and had great dreams for my future. He was always chasing me with his glances. I tried to convince myself that the way he looked at me was normal, and I ignored it. But when he began talking to me and courting me, I stopped him. And hence began the harassment, the arguments and the threats of losing my job”. She talks with a muffled voice, wiping her blushed face and squeezing her pen firmly.
Half of the women were harassed
Many women journalists describe the city of Sulaymaniyah as the most open and receptive to the work of women among the governorates of the region or in Iraq in general. However, 52% of the female journalists who participated in the questionnaire stated that they had already faced explicit verbal or physical harassment by their colleagues at work.
However, this percentage wasn’t very different from the 53% in Erbil’s provincial capital, which is governed by close tribal and clan ties. In Kirkuk, the proportion of victims of harassment rose to 76%, while the number was lower in the newly formed Halabja governorate, where a small number of female journalists were present, with 40%.
The overall survey shows that 140 out of 273 women working in newspapers, television, radio and web sites have encountered explicit sexual harassment – more than half of the respondents.
The survey also reveals that two-thirds of the participants have already been subjected to verbal harassment, while a third of female journalists have been subjected to some form of harassment and the rest of the of female journalists has taken the form of physical contact.
Social workers define sexual harassment as “any form of unwanted words or acts of a sexual nature that violate the bodily integrity, privacy or feelings of a person and make them feel uncomfortable, threatened, fearful, disdainful or insulted”.