From The Atlantic: Eleven years after she was drugged, kidnapped, and gang-raped, a Colombian journalist is seeking justice for women, for journalists, and for herself.
Jineth Bedoya Lima, as a journalist who has survived targeted sexual violence, is in a unique position. She is one of a handful of such journalists who have ever spoken out about their experience and she may be the only one who is publicly seeking justice. Of the more than 50 journalists I interviewed when I was senior editor of the Committee to Protect Journalists, more than a dozen said they’d experienced rape or a serious sexual assault, such as forced penetration by hands. Of those, very few were willing to go on the record for my June report, “The Silencing Crime.” And even fewer were directly targeted with retribution specifically because of their reporting, as Bedoya was.
Yet in the U.S. and much of the world, everyone knows Lara Logan’s name, not Bedoya’s. The February attack on CBS correspondent Logan in Cairo’s Tahrir Square cracked the bedrock that had kept the issue quietly underground. The incident was quickly followed by stories such as Lynsey Addario’s, a New York Times photographer who was repeatedly, violently groped while held in Libya in March with three colleagues; or the story of a West African journalist, who described to me how she’d been beaten and gang-raped by members of an armed rebel group while on assignment in 2007. She’d chosen not to tell her editor or report the attack to police, thinking they would not take it seriously, or might even mock her or ask for a bribe. Before we’d talked, she had only ever told her doctor about her ordeal. We also learned of stories of forced sodomy. Pakistani journalist Umar Cheema revealed he’d been stripped naked by men in police uniforms and violated with a wooden pole in 2010.