There Is a Better Way to Cover Allegations of Sexual Violence Than Whatever the NYT Is Doing Right Now
By stacy lee kong
Image: Shutterstock
Content warning: this newsletter contains mentions of sexual violence.
A note on language: As I have explained in many previous newsletters, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to characterize critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers has argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace as well as academics who study genocide and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.
No one really teaches you how to report or edit stories about sexual violence. Or at least, no one taught me. In journalism school, I remember learning about interviewing and nut grafs and libel law. As an intern, one mentor instilled the basics of fact-checking by literally leaving the office to stand outside (in the depths of winter, btw) so I could call her and pretend to confirm all the facts in an article before I had to do it for real. And in my early years in magazines, senior editors showed me how to write great display copy, recognize what parts of a story can easily be cut for space and identify the qualities of a strong pitch. But I don’t remember anyone ever sitting me down and explaining how to handle these kinds of stories with care.
To be fair, I wasn’t covering them at the time, so it genuinely didn’t come up. But that gap in my knowledge and experience became super evident in 2017, when the #MeToo movement exploded and sexual violence became almost like another content pillar at Flare, where I was the acting managing editor. As I’ve written before, we eventually published dozens of stories about various aspects of #MeToo—including, sometimes, first-hand stories about people’s experiences. Suddenly, I needed an approach that balanced fairness, accuracy and journalistic integrity with sensitivity and care for the writer and/or source, who would have to relive what was likely the worst experience of their lives over and over again during the editorial process. I remember having so many conversations with my colleagues about how to do that while also protecting our writers, and ourselves, from allegations of libel. I landed on an approach of radical transparency and informed consent. For me, it was important to be clear about what the editorial process might look like, what questions I might ask, and why those questions would even come up. I wanted our contributors and sources to know that they could change their mind about telling their stories at any point, and that no one would be angry if they did. And, I tried to give them an idea of what might happen after publication, to ensure they were prepared for any negative backlash on Facebook or what was then Twitter.
At the same time, there were things I couldn’t compromise on. My job was to make sure the stories we published were clear, fairly reported and above all, accurate. Of course I personally believed all of the writers and sources I was working with, but I couldn’t publish a story unless I was confident I could prove it, which meant we needed to be able to back up everything. So while I wholeheartedly believed women, as the #MeToo slogan implored people to do, I also believed in an older maxim: trust, but verify. (Which, okay, is actually a Russian proverb that became a political adage during post-Cold War negotiations around nuclear disarmament. But it also works really well as a journalistic rule.)
I say all of this because sexual violence has been a flashpoint in discourse around Gaza since Oct. 7, and as someone who’s thought a lot about the ‘right’ way to tell these stories, I don’t think the reporting has been careful enough—and I mean that in several aspects.
There’s not enough credible reporting in the New York Times’ Oct. 7 exposé
Perhaps the most obvious example of this lack of care is the New York Times’ December 2023 article, “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” which has been the subject of intense criticism, including an article published in The Intercept in late February that casts serious doubt on the reporting it contains. Anat Schwartz, the Israeli filmmaker who, alongside her nephew, Adam Sella, assisted the Times’ foreign correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman, on the story, had previously been criticized for her social media likes, which included a post calling for Israel to “turn the [Gaza] strip into a slaughterhouse… Violate any norm, on the way to victory.” But, reporting from The Intercept makes it clear that the entire editorial process was flawed.
In a Dec. 31 podcast interview translated from Hebrew by The Intercept, Schwartz said the Times approached her, and “had to convince [her]” to take the job, something she wasn’t sure she was qualified to do given her lack of journalism experience. Still, she did eventually agree to the assignment. Before she got to work, she says Gettleman instructed her to “get at least two sources for every detail we put into the article, cross-check information. Do we have forensic evidence? Do we have visual evidence? Apart from telling our reader ‘this happened,’ what can we say? Can we tell what happened to whom?” So, she made “extensive efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery facilities, and sex assault hotlines in Israel, [but was unable] to get a single confirmation from any of them.” She also called kibbutzes that Hamas had targeted on Oct. 7, but she says there was “nothing. No one saw or heard anything.”
In the end, Schwartz wasn’t able to speak to a single survivor. Instead, the story revolved around “the woman in the black dress,” whose body was filmed “lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed.” Her name was Gal Abdush, and the Times’ thesis—that Hamas systemically used sexual violence as a tool of war—hinges on her story. However, in the days after the article was published, her family members said there was no proof Abdush had been raped, and worse, that the Times reporters had interviewed them under false pretenses. The Abdush family weren’t the only people they interviewed, of course. But there are questions about the credibility of those other sources. For example, the story included testimony from Zaka, the “ultra-Orthodox Jewish organization whose members retrieve bodies after terror attacks,” which made horrific claims about seeing “40 dead babies” in the aftermath of Oct. 7, which a Dec. 2023 Haaretz article later debunked; Israeli officials who claimed to have testimony from more than 1,000 witnesses describing horrific acts of sexual violence that would soon be backed up with forensic evidence—but which has not yet materialized; and a paramedic from the Israeli Air Force medical unit 669, who said he’d opened a bedroom door in a home in Kibbutz Be’eri to find the bodies of two teenage girls, both dead, one naked with semen on her back. However, as Mondoweiss reported, “no pair of Israeli teenagers meeting that description were found dead together.”
This is not to say there was no sexual violence on Oct. 7, or afterwards
According to the UN’s office on sexual violence in conflict, there are reasonable grounds “to believe that multiple incidents of rape, including gang rape, occurred in and around the Nova festival site during the 7 October attacks” and “to believe that female hostages were also subjected to… sexual violence.” Importantly, this conclusion is not based on survivor testimony or forensic evidence, but on witness testimony and “information… sourced from Israeli national institutions,” which the report notes is because of “the absence of United Nations entities operating in Israel, as well as lack of cooperation by the State of Israel with relevant United Nations bodies with an investigative mandate.” Still, this fits with testimony from Israeli hostages. In a Guardian article published on Sunday, Chen Almog-Goldstein recounts the time she spent as a hostage in Gaza, including interactions she had with six other Israeli women who were also being held captive. “Three of the women were wounded,” she says. “Some had complex injuries, and some spoke about sexual assaults.”
Clearly, some Israeli women and girls experienced sexual violence at the hands of Hamas militants, which is unsurprising only because it is tragically and disgustingly common during wartime. It’s just impossible to tell how widespread or systemic this sexual violence was, due to the lack of forensic evidence and first-hand survivor testimony, as well as the difficulty of authenticating photos, video and audio due to the rise of generative AI. Plus, as Vox notes, “investigating [conflict-related sexual violence] is often extremely difficult, including in this case. In addition to the stigma in many communities around sex and sexual violence—including among those victimized—it can be difficult to collect evidence while conflict is ongoing, especially if the country or community where the violence occurs doesn’t have the right medical, psychological, and legal infrastructure to address the crimes and also support survivors.”
But this is all the more reason to ensure the reporting media outlets publish around sexual violence is unimpeachable. Our job is to tell the truth—this is the core tenet of journalism. That means if we can’t confirm something, we should not publish it. I understand that’s a challenge in a conflict like this, because it might take years to ‘know’ the full scope of sexual violence on Oct. 7 and afterwards, but we still have a responsibility to corroborate information as best we can, to choose our sources with care and integrity and to explicitly acknowledge in our stories when we have not independently verified information that we’re publishing.
This is always the case, but especially when it comes to Palestine and Palestinians, because stories about rapacious Hamas militants have been used to justify Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza since Oct. 7. And I do mean that literally; according to The Grayzone, two prominent pro-Israel lobby groups, UJA-Federation and Jewish Community Relations Council, have been meeting with politicians and public figures in New York City to “coach [them] on how to influence public opinion in favor of the Israeli military’s rampage in Gaza.” These presentations “urge politicians to avoid trumpeting America’s supposedly shared democratic values with Israel, and focus instead on deploying ‘The Language of War with Hamas.’ According to this framing, they must deploy incendiary language painting Hamas as a ‘brutal and savage… organization of hate’ which has ‘raped women,’ while insisting Israel is engaged in ‘a war for humanity.’”
Where is the reporting on sexual violence against Palestinians?
While mainstream media outlets have published dozens of articles about allegations of systematic rape, there is also credible evidence of IDF soldiers subjecting Palestinians to sexual violence or threats of sexual violence, which is not receiving anywhere near the same amount of attention. Last week, the Associated Press reported a woman named Nabela, who spent 47 days in Israeli custody, had been subjected to repeated strip searches at gun point. In February, the UN issued a press release expressing their alarm over “reported human rights abuses of Palestinian women and girls,” saying, “‘We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence,’ the experts said. They also noted that photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances were also reportedly taken by the Israeli army and uploaded online.”
And it’s not just women and girls; in an interview with the U.K.’s Channel 4 news earlier this week, Palestinian activist and social worker Munther Amira detailed the sexual violence he experienced while imprisoned in an Israeli jail, including being forced to strip naked in front of soldiers, who he says may have taken photos of him. In early December, photos began circulating online of Palestinian men stripped to their underwear and kneeling on a street in Gaza City, while IDF soldiers look on. Another video that emerged around the same time show a group of Palestinian men and boys, including children as young as 15, again stripped to their underwear, kneeling and blindfolded. This is sexual violence, too—and it’s part of a long pattern. A 2015 issue of the journal Reproductive Health Matters analyzed 60 cases of verbal sexual harassment, forced nudity and physical sexual assault that occurred between 2005 and 2012. A 2020 article in Feminist Inquiry in Social Work explored “Palestinian women’s experiences with sexual violence by prison personnel as they visit their detained loved ones,” finding most “experienced some sort of unwanted verbal and nonverbal sexual comments or gestures, forced nudity, or forced touching by prison personnel.” And in 2021, an article published in International Feminist Journal of Politics documented further examples of sexual torture against Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prison and jails.
Also, all those photos of IDF soldiers posing with Palestinian women’s underwear, which they’ve looted from the homes of people who may already be dead or dying? That’s 100% sexual humiliation with the goal of dehumanizing an oppressed group.
So, when I say Western journalists have a responsibility take more care in their reporting on sexual violence, I don’t just mean getting the facts right about what Israeli women and girls have experienced. I also mean judging the sexual violence Palestinians face as newsworthy and important, and treating these victims with dignity and humanity, too. Otherwise, the biggest takeaway from their articles isn’t the truth of what is happening to people; it’s who journalists think are people deserving of care.
And Did You Hear About…
The return of the tramp stamp.
This excellent piece on fashion and media’s obsession with hijabs.
All of this niche tea. (As in, the drama, not the beverage.)
Writer Magdalene J. Taylor’s newsletter on why we’re all having less sex—and perhaps more instructively, why we’re so defensive when she says the reason is simple: it’s our phones.
New Statesman’s fascinating deep dive into Disney Adults, and the company’s long-running strategy to make more of them.
This beautiful and thought-provoking essay about why rest actually is not resistance.
Former Buzzfeed News royal reporter Ellie Hall on the Kate Middleton conspiracy theories that have taken over the internet.
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