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From investigating violence alleged to have been committed by famous and powerful sports stars in Germany to uncovering the realities of femicide in Brazil, and unravelling digital clues to find out how the online celebrities of the "manosphere" have created a real-life hub in the Spanish coastal city of Marbella — reporters around the world are digging into gender-based violence, sexism, and discrimination.

They are tracing the legal loopholes and cultural norms that allow such harm to persist, and reveal how gendered power dynamics play out in these different lived realities.

For International Women’s Day this year, GIJN spoke to the reporters behind these three investigations, to find out how they ran their projects, what they uncovered, and where relevant, their tips for working on stories of this nature, particularly how they prioritise source safety to ensure that exposing injustice does not replicate it.

It is worth adding that even as women report on these stories, they too, are facing abuse, particularly online. A Council of Europe report released earlier this month noted how "women journalists have been disproportionately targeted by abuse as they face a double risk, being attacked on account of their work and due to their gender." The report cited a 2025 Stand up for Journalism survey that found that up to 87 per cent of women journalists have experienced online violence related to their work, and that "women journalists are routinely exposed to gender-based violence, including threats of rape, misogynistic abuse, stigmatisation, stalking, and death threats."

Technology is also playing a role in the kind of online attacks that reporters, and other women, are facing.

Polina Bachlakova, technology reporter for the Fuller Project, has been tracking the global rise of surveillance technologies, noting that women and gender-diverse activists at the forefront of protest movements are often targets. Bachlakova’s report on gender-based digital transnational repression showed how easy and relatively cheap it is for governments and individuals to procure spyware that can hack a woman’s phone and computer to surveil, intimidate, and harass.

"Laws, regulations and protections that are supposed to protect women from being repressed transnationally and get some sort of justice exist on paper, but they are absolutely not accessible," said Bachlakova.

Investigating violence against women and professional footballers

It was a chain of personal contacts that linked investigative reporter Gabriela Keller to the first source. The woman she was introduced to said she had been subjected to extreme violence by her former partner, a top-level footballer. According to her account, he continued to stalk her even after their breakup.

"She had this very pressing sense of injustice, but nobody was interested in what she had to say," said Keller, a senior reporter who was at the time working for the Berlin-based investigative newsroom CORRECTIV. "Not the police, not the court, and not the management of the football club."

In many ways, going to the media was her only chance to be heard. "Women abused by famous, wealthy men have little incentive to speak. They have nothing to gain — practically nothing — and a lot of risks," she told GIJN.

But as Keller and her colleagues started to dig into the case — and others that they came across during the course of this project — they came across a roadblock: non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) limiting what many women who had alleged violence and intimidation from partners and former partners were able to say, and a fear of facing repercussions for speaking out. "My........

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