Gharida Farooqi opened up about the harassment she has to endure as a woman journalist in Pakistan and said “when male journalists are attacked, they are just targeted for their political views. When a woman is attacked, she is attacked about her body parts”.
In an investigative report by The Washington Post, These women journalists were doing their jobs. That made them targets., Gharidah Farooqi said that she has been harassed, stalked, and threatened with rape and murder.
She said the male journalists are also “abused but not for their bodies or genital parts”.
Gharidah Farooqi has been a victim of a number of online harassment campaigns: In 2019, she received a number of insults and threats after her Tweet regarding the New Zealand shooting was taken out of context. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) had condemned online abuse.
In 2022, the journalist was again a target of an online trolling campaign after she commented on the arrest and alleged torture of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s leader Imran Khan’s political aide Shahbaz Gill.
Later, PTI chief Imran Khan allegedly stated that Gharida Farooqi was asking to be harassed online as she was “invading male-dominated spaces”.
Gharidah Farooqi shared that during the 2019 hate campaign, she only left the house to travel to and from the office. She nervously scanned her surroundings each time she stepped out of the house.
The report shared that the journalist’s trouble began in 2014 when she started covering PTI’s long march against the government. She said the attacks were largely initiated by PTI members and supporters back when she was covering the PTI march.
She further said that there were not many women journalists covering that political protest. Farooqi added that at first she tried to ignore the online abuse but then it kept worsening until there was no end to it.
In 2016, PTI leader Zartaj Gul Wazir falsely accused the journalist of having affairs with certain politicians to further her career in a video that was widely circulated on social media. The online attacks worsened after Imran Khan became prime minister in 2018. Gharidah Farooqi shared that she sought legal recourse against online trolling several times, but it was to no avail. She said that she also wrote to Imran Khan and lawmakers regarding the abuse but the abuse never stopped.
While talking about attacks on her personal life, Farooqi said: “Men are really obsessed with if a woman journalist is single or if she’s married.”
“And if she’s married, what’s the status of her marriage, and if she’s divorced, then what’s the reason, and if she’s single, then it’s a crime. In the field of journalism, you can’t be a single woman; you’re suspected with all kinds of nasty ideas. If she’s still single, that means she’s having multiple affairs,” she added.
Farooqi also said that she talks to her counterparts in other countries and they all complain of the abuse.
“It’s become a new weapon to silence and censor women journalists, and it’s not being taken seriously,” she said.
The Washington Post report also covered stories of violence and online abuse against other women journalists across the world.
