New Delhi: Award-winning Delhi-based journalist Neha Dixit on Wednesday shared a harrowing experience of receiving death and rape threats from an anonymous person who, she said, has been stalking her for quite some time.
“Since September 2020, I am being physically stalked. The stalker identifies my exact physical location on phone calls and threatens me with rape, acid attack and death, clearly bringing my profession as a journalist into the conversation,” she wrote on her social media.
She also stated that someone tried to break into her house on January 25 at 9 pm, following which she filed a complaint in a local police station.
“Over a dozen phone numbers are used to make calls through three-four different voices. The stalker also indicates whereabouts of my partner, Nakul, who is a documentary filmmaker and threatens to kill us both,” the journalist wrote.
She wrote an elaborated post where she addressed how many artists, journalists and activists today face violence and some of them even get killed for just doing their job.
“Looking at the recent precedents where so many journalists, artists, filmmakers, activists, academics have faced violence, some killed, for doing their job, it is imperative that we start paying attention to violence beyond the online world,” Neha wrote in her statement.
Neha further stated that she didn’t want to make it about herself, but was putting her experience on record so that “there will be a push to demand more action and conviction in cases of physical threats against media professionals globally.”
The journalist who reports on politics, social justice and gender in South Asia, has faced harassment both online and offline for her work, which includes reports on child trafficking.
According to The Hindu, two criminal cases were filed against her after her report in 2016 on the trafficking of 31 tribal girls from the Northeast by two Sangh Parivar organizations to “Hinduise” them.
Neha Dixit was one of the several recipients of the 2019 International Press Freedom Awards. During the acceptance speech, she spoke about how she also received threats from top police officers for her stories on extra-judicial killings.