How structural and cultural violence shape journalists’ experiences and coping strategies: An intersectional analysis

While many studies have focused on direct and external attacks threatening journalists’ safety, this article examines how journalists experience and cope with structural and cultural violence emanating from within the journalistic field itself. This study analyzes 33 in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of journalists in French-speaking Belgium – including freelancers, journalists without press cards, and minority journalists. The analysis reveals how intersecting identity markers (gender, race, age), organizational factors (employment status, beat), and newsroom culture shape journalists’ experiences of three forms of structural violence: discrimination, trauma exposure, and economic precarity. Discrimination experienced by minority journalists elicits primarily resilience strategies; trauma exposure associated with certain beats leads to emotional withdrawal and mental health conditions; while economic violence, particularly acute among freelancers, results mostly in compliance and avoidance strategies, which can result in burn-out or exit from the profession. Crucially, cultural violence emerges as normalizing these harms by dismissing microaggressions, framing trauma as inevitable, and presenting precarity as vocational sacrifice. The study reveals that journalists face these difficulties largely in isolation, with individual coping strategies proving exhausting and unsustainable over time, highlighting the need for institutional support.