Meera Jatav, the co-founder of the award-winning, grassroots feminist media organization Khabar Lahariya, has won admiration for her courageous investigations into gender-based violence and caste in India. Here is the keynote speech she delivered at the Centre for Investigative Journalism’s summer conference in London.
In this GIJN webinar, we bring together three journalists who will offer resources and tips for investigating issues that directly affect women, and that have historically been under-reported. They will offer tips and tools to reporters working in very different contexts, share their advice, and suggest important areas that need to be investigated.
A network of female journalists went undercover in order to investigate what women and girls around the world are told when they approach a crisis pregnancy organization. Some were told they could be killing the next president, others than abortions cause cancer. The investigation revealed the highly sophisticated tactics some centers use to break a woman’s resolve, and how the messaging can be traced back to a Christian charity based in Columbus, Ohio.
Women muckrakers are breaking important stories around the world, but there are still relatively few female investigative journalists. To help them find communities and support, GIJN has compiled a comprehensive list of global resources designed for women journalists.
Khabar Lahariya started as a four-page experiment to educate women who were learning to read and write but has now grown into a full-blown newspaper that exposes corruption and society’s injustices. Staffed with women from rural India, the newspaper is shaking a deeply entrenched system of neglect in the small villages of India.
Although egalitarian societies with a pattern of matriarchy still exist in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, the decline of matriarchal societies in the world has made way for patriarchal domination. Gender discrimination has become rampant. World history is, indeed, “his-story” and not “her-story”. The way we live today is influenced by, and based on, male-derived principles, which bring about male dominance and universal patriarchy. No matter where women live, they do not share equal rights with men. Sensitive and justice-seeking journalists should expose this social malady at every opportunity, so that the lives of women can improve.
