In a record year of journalist jailings, the number of female reporters being detained for their work rose by a third, a report released Thursday found.
In its summary of press violations in 2021, the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) chronicled a 20% surge in the number of journalists arbitrarily detained. It is the highest figure since RSF began publishing its annual roundup in 1995.
Of the 488 detained, 60 were women — the highest number of female journalists to be jailed that RSF has ever documented. The data, which covers 2021 up to December 1, includes journalists and media workers.
Among those in custody are journalists who work for news networks under the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which also oversees VOA.
With more women working in media worldwide, the risk of arrest or attack has risen.
"Today, being a woman journalist does not protect you at all," RSF's editor-in-chief, Pauline Ades-Mevel, told VOA. "More female journalists have joined newsrooms in recent years. It's a sort of democratization of the job that has put more female journalists behind bars."
A surge in detentions in Belarus and Myanmar resulted in those countries being among the top five worst jailers.
China is the biggest jailer of journalists for the fifth straight year, according to RSF. It also holds the record for detaining the most female journalists, with 19 detained in China and Hong Kong.
Among those is Sophia Huang Xueqin, an investigative journalist known for her work in China's #MeToo movement, who was arrested in September. She's been placed in solitary confinement on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power."
Separately, Gulmira Imin is serving a lengthy sentence for charges including "separatism" and leaking state secrets. The journalist, who ran the Uyghur news site Salkin, has been in custody since 2009.
Others, like Zhang Zhan, who has been detained since May 2020 over her coverage of the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, have developed serious health problems.
Information obtained by RSF shows that Zhang is in critical condition after going on a hunger strike to protest a four-year prison sentence for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble."
The U.S. State Department has raised concerns over her deteriorating health and imprisonment.
Zhang was named RSF's journalist of courage in November.
In Belarus, at least 32 journalists are detained, 17 of whom are women. Authorities there have detained and harassed media since the contested elections of President Alexander Lukashenko in August 2020.
The first two journalists to be convicted in 2021 were Belsat TV reporters Darya Chultsova and Katsyaryna Andreyeva, who are each serving two years for providing live coverage of an unauthorized demonstration.
The country also orchestrated a spectacular arrest when a fighter jet redirected a passenger flight carrying Raman Pratasevich. The popular blogger was arrested when the plane landed in Minsk.
"The fact that a journalist has been arrested in a plane while traveling and for so-called terrorist purposes is something that is completely unseen, so now journalists have to be extremely careful about what they do," said Ades-Mevel. "Authoritarian regimes authorize themselves to do such crazy actions like stopping a plane and forcing it to land."
In Myanmar, where the military in February seized power in a coup, at least 53 journalists are imprisoned, including Ma Thuzar, who played a leading role in covering protests against the new military regime. The freelancer has been held in Insein prison since her arrest in September.
While jailings globally are up, the number of reporters killed in the line of duty decreased in 2021. RSF found 46 journalists and media workers killed because of their work, the lowest figure in 20 years.
RSF attributes this to developments in Syria, Iraq and Yemen and the stabilization of war fronts.
However, in Afghanistan and Mexico, media workers still risk deadly violence.
Mexico has historically been dangerous for media, with reporters covering organized crime and corruption most at risk.
But Afghanistan witnessed a stark change in media rights after the Taliban seized control in August.
Overall in 2021, three female journalists were killed in Afghanistan. The women were attacked as they left work in March, with the Islamic State militant group claiming responsibility.
As well as the risk of violence, female journalists have lost many of their hard-fought rights to work in media.
And several have fled, said Farida Nekzad, the former director of the Center for Protection of Afghan Women Journalists and currently a journalist-in-residence at Carleton University in Canada.
"Unfortunately, the fall of Afghanistan and the coming of the Taliban once again take all the opportunity and achievements from Afghan women and especially from Afghan women journalists," Nekzad told VOA. "It's had a big effect on women journalists, unfortunately … and we don't have independent media now."
Nekzad estimated that 30% of women journalists have left Afghanistan or want to leave, and those still there are mostly at home, not allowed to show up to the news organizations that are still operational.
A decline in women in journalism has an impact on the communities in which they work.
Certain topics are so sensitive that a female victim would only speak about them to other women, Nekzad said. "So, if there are crises with women, no one will know what's going on."
