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Thousands of men blocked the road, surrounding the SUV of the
chief justice of Pakistan, a national hero for standing up to military rule. As
a correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, I knew I couldn’t just watch from
behind a car window. I had to get out there.

So, wearing a black headscarf and a loose, long-sleeved red
tunic over jeans, I waded through the crowd and started taking notes: on the
men throwing rose petals, on the men shouting that they would die for the chief
justice, on the men sacrificing a goat.

And then, almost predictably, someone grabbed my buttocks. I
spun around and shouted, but then it happened again, and again, until finally I
caught one offender’s hand and punched him in the face. The men kept grabbing.
I kept punching. At a certain point – maybe because I was creating a scene – I
was invited into the chief justice’s vehicle.

At the time, in June 2007, I saw this as just one of the realities
of covering the news in Pakistan. I didn’t complain to my bosses. To do so
would only make me seem weak. Instead, I made a joke out of it and turned the
experience into a positive one: See, being a woman helped me gain access to the
chief justice.

And really, I was lucky. A few gropes, a misplaced hand, an
unwanted advance – those are easily dismissed. I knew other female
correspondents who weren’t so lucky, those who were molested in their hotel
rooms, or partly stripped by mobs. But I can’t ever remember sitting down with
my female peers and talking about what had happened, except to make dark jokes,
because such stories would make us seem different from the male correspondents,
more vulnerable. I would never tell my bosses for fear that they might keep me
at home the next time something major happened.

I was hardly alone in keeping quiet. The Committee to Protect
Journalists may be able to say that 44 journalists from around the world were
killed last year because of their work, but the group doesn’t keep data on
sexual assault and rape. Most journalists just don’t report it.

The CBS correspondent Lara Logan has broken that code of
silence. She has covered some of the most dangerous stories in the world, and
done a lot of brave things in her career. But her decision to go public earlier
this week with her attack by a mob in Tahrir Square in Cairo was by far the
bravest. Hospitalised for days, she is still recuperating from the attack,
described by CBS as a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating.

Several commentators have suggested that Logan was somehow at
fault: because she’s pretty; because she decided to go into the crowd; because
she’s a war junkie. This wasn’t her fault. It was the mob’s fault. This attack
also had nothing to do with Islam. Sexual violence has always been a tool of
war. Female reporters sometimes are just convenient.

In the coming weeks, I fear that the conclusions drawn from
Logan’s experience will be less reactionary but somehow darker, that there will
be suggestions that female correspondents should not be sent into dangerous
situations.

It’s possible that bosses will make unconscious decisions to
send men instead, just in case. Sure, men can be victims, too – on Wednesday a
mob beat up a male ABC reporter in Bahrain, and a few male journalists have
told of being sodomised by captors – but the publicity around Logan’s attack
could make editors think: “Why take the risk?”

That would be the wrong lesson. Women can cover the fighting
just as well as men, depending on their courage.

More important, they also do a pretty good job of covering what
it’s like to live in a war, not just die in one. Without female correspondents
in war zones, the experiences of women there may be only a rumor.

Look at the articles about women who set themselves on fire in
Afghanistan to protest their arranged marriages, or about girls being maimed by
fundamentalists, about child marriage in India, about rape in Congo and Haiti.
Female journalists often tell those stories in the most compelling ways,
because abused women are sometimes more comfortable talking to them. And those
stories are at least as important as accounts of battles.

There is an added benefit. Logan is a minor celebrity, one of
the highest-profile women to acknowledge being sexually assaulted. Although she
has reported from the front lines, the lesson she is now giving young women is
probably her most profound: It’s not your fault. And there’s no shame in
telling it like it is.

Kim Barker, a reporter
for the investigative journalism website ProPublica, is the author of the
forthcoming memoir The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and
Pakistan

© 2011 The New York Times