Advantages of being a woman on the frontline

Last night I chaired a panel discussion hosted by Amnesty International called “Women on the Frontline“. The idea was to get together women journalists who cover conflict to talk about their experiences and thoughts.

My three colleagues – Marie Colvin, Ramita Navai and Christine Toomey – all thought that being a woman could only be advantage. We can cover all the same stories as male reporters, but we also get special access and insight into how war affects women.

The journalists read out these examples of their work:  Marie Colvin’s Sunday Times story about militia attacks on women in Basra in 2007; Ramita Navai’s 2005 piece in the Sunday Herald about women in prison in Afghanistan; Christine Toomey’s Sunday Times story about the children of rape in Bosnia.

UPDATE: A fuller account of the discussion is on the Amnesty website, and Ramita Navai describes it in the New Statesman.

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