Laila Al-Abd, a 44-year-old mother of three, still remembers when her middle son phoned her, his voice full of pain, to ask questions she could not answer and telling her what a friend had told him: “Someone’s abusing Auntie Laila on Facebook. We’re trying to report him, but we can’t.” Leila says, in a voice weighed down with grief: “All I’d built up over years was ruined in an instant.”
Laila, a former journalist with the Ahl Masr website, had no idea that a single Facebook post would be a turning point in her career. She says that a few weeks before the Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate (EJS) elections in 2025 she had joined an online group run by a journalist known for his hostile and insulting behaviour towards women journalists.
She says this man’s behaviour was unprofessional: “He would attack everyone. I took him aside more than once to ask him to stop, but it was no good.” This prompted Leila to leave the group. On her page, she wrote – without going into details – that she would write about EJS issues on her personal page. She was surprised when he put an insulting comment on her post, accusing her of “crying” to him more than once and asking the management for “protection.”
Laila deleted the post to avoid escalating the issue in public, but the attacks from this male journalist did not stop. He put up posts mentioning Leila by name, which provided material for gossip. And a few hours later, with no warning, the management stopped Leila’s editorial access and took down all her work. ”The management believed him and it turned into a war.”
Laila’s story is no one off, but part of a “recurring pattern” of often gender-based digital violence faced by female journalists because of their work. Studies indicate that women journalists are disproportionately prone to digital violence, including threats and harassment, compared to their male colleagues. Figures show that three out of every four female journalists have faced online violence. According to a UNESCO survey, 75 per cent of female journalists (out of a total of 354 respondents) have experienced online violence at work.
Digital violence is not limited to “abusive language” on social media, but can lead to real physical harm. The percentage of female journalists who linked actual assault to digital violence rose from 20 per cent, in an earlier UNESCO study in 2020, to 42 per cent in a survey done in 2025 – showing an escalation in the risk of “digital violence turning into real harm.”
The faces and the details may differ, but the experience is essentially the same: an attack that begins on screen and then becomes a professional and psychological reality, with fearful consequences that go beyond the abuse itself and do not stop with the victim alone.
Reham (not her real name), an investigative journalist, was working on a story about a factory when she found herself inundated with phone calls and messages on her social media accounts that she described as “disturbing and dirty”.
These messages were not just verbal abuse against her, but were also sent to her family.
Reham says, “He started by telling me details about where I live, my children, my husband… even my extended family.” Reham says she received a death threat and messages that clearly showed the abuser knew where to find her. What Reham told us shows that the experience had a direct psychological and physical impact on her. She temporarily lost the ability to speak and there was an atmosphere of constant fear at home. Describing the situation, she says: “I just collapsed physically and mentally. I couldn’t speak for nearly a week… I was terrified and hysterical. I’d go and lock the door to the flat three or four times.”
Reham did what she could to protect her family from harm. She even left her son alone rather than send him to nursery, fearing that something bad might happen to him. She says: “I had to leave my baby alone at home… I’d put a mattress on the floor for him and put blankets all around him in case he moved,” she says. “It’s not that I’m a cowardly journalist, it’s just that I’m a cowardly mother who’s frightened for her children.”
As the threats did not stop, Reham had to change the type of work she did at the newspaper, choosing to cover less sensitive subjects and steering clear of investigative reporting. The psychological and physical impact of abuse was evident in the case of all the women we interviewed. And that was directly reflected both in their relationships and their journalistic work.
Journalistic institutions are supposed to protect their employees and provide them with clear claims of securing fairness and accountability if they are subject to any abuse. But what we were told by female journalists shows a very different reality.
While Reham does not accuse her employer of being directly involved in the threats against her, she found they offered no clear means of protection or support. She describes the management’s response as merely offering verbal reassurances, while continuing the commercial relationship with the firm that harmed and threatened her. She says: “He just said it was nothing and I shouldn’t be scared and then he sent the advertising rep round to them and ran one of their adverts.” Reham thinks what happened was more than just negligence, it was a way to profit from her predicament: “He sold me out… he turned it into a commercial deal.”
In Laila’s case she has no qualms about accusing her employer, because she faced not only losing her job but seeing them publish confidential information about her. She says they spread details of her social life, including her marriage, her divorce, and her health, which she had kept secret even from those closest to her.
Laila and Reham both told us they had not gone as far as making a complaint within their organisations, since there was no-one safe to complain to.
Yasmine, however, tells a different story. Coming from a rural background, she was in her first year at university and a novice (trainee) journalist who saw journalism as her dream job. She says: “I thought journalism was perfect for me; I thought it was where I belonged.” One of the managing editors began to get close to her, under the guise of training her and giving professional support.
This “support” turned into daily messages, then he pushed things further until, while they were both covering an evening seminar, he grabbed her hand and stopped her from leaving without his permission. Later on, he sent her a photo of himself naked and offered to give her a promotion if she “had sexual relations with him.” There was no ambiguity about the offer. He made it quite explicitly, exploiting his authority at work and the fact that she was young and mentally fragile at the time.
Yasmine decided to go to senior management, encouraged by a male colleague who stood by her. But the biggest shock of all was the reaction of her editor-in-chief. He saw the matter as simply one of “supply and demand,” implying that she could simply have said no, and dismissing the harassment as simply a case of “personal choice.” In doing so he sought to absolve the company of any responsibility, as if the victim were just a party to a hypothetical deal. Yasmine says he even sent her some lingerie himself as a gift, and followed that up with a message checking she had received it.
The worst thing is these acts are going unpunished. Years ago, a journalist accused this same man of harassing her. He was only a senior editor at the time, but today he has more power and still mistreats women. It is as if he is being rewarded for what he does!
“These Institutions just sweep under the carpet anything to do with women.”
Nafisa Al-Sabagh, a journalist and feminist activist, maintains that what women journalists are facing goes beyond the odd individual case. She points out a fundamental paradox in that abuse online is “easier to prove” than physical abuse, which goes unpunished because victims are, for the most part, reluctant to take legal action themselves for fear of losing their jobs and therefore their source of income.
Nafisa al-Sabagh took part in drafting a “protection policy,” but she says she faced “resistance” to producing such a policy from within the general assembly of EJS. She says many people in media institutions and the union itself have called for policies and mechanisms to handle complaints and provide protection, but without anything concrete being done.
The protection of media organizations and journalists is enshrined in the Press and Media Regulation Law No. 180 of 2018 and the Supreme Council for Media Regulation. Protection includes legal guarantees for institutions (like protecting intellectual property) and for journalists in the course of their work. But the law does not spell out what institutions should do in cases where a journalist is facing harassment, for instance, or threats as a result of her work.
Eman Aouf is a member of the EJS and head of its women’s committee. She says that not having protection mechanisms is the rule rather than the exception in media establishments: “Over 90 percent of press organisations don’t have protection policies” she says, arguing that this absence is indicative of the attitude towards issues related to women, who are not given priority.
Eman sees a link between this vacuum and the rise in digital violence against women journalists. This increase, she observes, has not been reported on and there has been no proper holding to account: “The truth is there’s no mechanism to handle complaints and no protection for whistleblowers or witnesses.”
Hussein Al-Zanati, Secretary-General of the EJS, admits there are shortcomings when it comes to protection policies within the journalistic community, especially in cases of online abuse. But he thinks state institutions are more in a position to exert control and accountability. Based on his experience as an editor-in-chief, he says: “Over the course of five or six years, I didn’t have a single such incident.”
He acknowledges, however, that the situation is radically different in private companies, especially those with single owners, where policies are dependent on the values of the proprietor. Al-Zanati says that the EJS has only a limited role when it comes to enforcing protection policies, acknowledging that it does not take the initiative, but acts only once complaints are received.
Journalist and feminist activist Nafisa al-Sabagh, however, points out that other state institutions do have protection policies in place and argues that the problem lies in the refusal of the journalistic community itself to follow suit. She thinks there are no protection policies, complaints procedures or investigation mechanisms within journalistic institutions, because “they just sweep under the carpet anything to do with women.”
In April 2025, Laila al-Abd went to the EJS for help and filed official complaints with full details and witness statements. The first was against the journalist who defamed her. But to this day, she says, there has been no real result. And this journalist in fact went on appearing in live broadcasts on his online page and continued to defame her.
The second complaint she made was against the person in charge in her organisation, only to learn after a long wait that the EJS had no power to intervene in the case.
When asked why the union had no jurisdiction in the case of Al-Abd, Hussein Al-Zanati, head of the EJS investigation committee, said that it was not able to look into this case because “the person concerned” was not an EJS member. He stressed that all journalists should be informed at the start whether or not it would be worthwhile going down the EJS route: “It shouldn’t have to go all the way up to the secretary-general, and from there to the council of the EJS, which may be too busy with other things to know the details of the case, and so refer it for investigation, only to find out it wasn’t the syndicate’s responsibility in the first place.”
Al-Zanati acknowledges that existing mechanisms are a real obstacle for female journalists, especially given how long drawn out the process is, which puts women off complaining. He recognises that there is a need for a different mechanism, outside the traditional bureaucratic structure, and proposes that the EJS’s women’s committee be given the power to become a direct and secure channel for receiving such complaints.
Eman Aouf, chair of the EJS’s women’s committee, thinks that safe complaint mechanisms for female journalists have been lacking so far in the EJS. She cites the case of one female journalist who decided to make a complaint, but it rebounded against her: “The result was that she was the one who had to leave, and the other person is still there.. it was so difficult to prove anything and there were no witnesses.”
Eman explains that the investigation committee has not prioritised digital issues. And she says that complaints from women journalists who are not members of the EJS are not treated as seriously, which means those working outside the umbrella of the union are in an even more precarious situation. The administrative process the EJS follows for dealing with complaints is flawed, according to Eman, because reports are handled by dozens of staff, which leads to leaks. As such,female journalists consequently come under pressure.
Reham moved on to working on less sensitive issues. But for Yasmine things reached a point where she felt her life itself had become meaningless and attempted suicide more than once. She stepped away from journalism altogether for a while, then came back to it in less secure ways: working freelance or for small outfits, without union protection or financial stability.
Laila al-Abd says she not only suffered loss of morale, but had to contend with the label of “troublemaker” within media organizations, which has stopped her progressing in her career. Her children, her mother and everyone around her also experienced pain and fear. Laila is being punished even though she “has done nothing wrong.” The perpetrators of abuse in all these accounts, meanwhile, go on with their lives as if nothing has happened.
* Pseudonyms used
The images were created using AI.
This investigation was conducted with the support of ARIJ.
