As the number of women war correspondents grows, the focus of combat reporting is shifting to the toll that today's conflicts take on the civilian population especially women and children according to the female reporters at the front lines.

War reporting dominated by tactical questions, political infighting and policy disputes can obscure the trauma experienced by women and children who live in areas targeted for attacks.

In recent conflicts, civilians read mothers and children accounted for as many as 90 percent of all casualties, compared with 65 percent in World War II and five percent in 1900, according to Save the Children's annual report on mothers, released in May.

The stories of this type of pain and displacement are most often brought to the fore by women reporters, whose contributions are changing the fundamentals of war reporting.

Their voices are rising now in the forms of a collection of memoirs and an awards presentation.

The memoir is War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam , written by nine long-time journalists who reported from Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The prizes, given last month, are the Courage in Journalism Awards, sponsored annually by the International Women's Media Foundation.

Women worst victims

The physical threat to civilian women, and the destruction of their lives, is achingly obvious in conflict after conflict, says Kathy Gannon, The Associated Press bureau chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, one of this year's honourees.

"In every war, the worst victims are the women," she says. "In the Balkans, who are the biggest victims? The women. In any conflict, you'll find that's the case, if you just look."

Before 1970, only six percent of foreign correspondents were women. Today, The Brookings Institution estimates that more than one third are female and they have increasing influence on the content and tone of war coverage.

Several of the War Torn authors, who were panellists at a National Press Club discussion in Washington, said they would give the personal toll of war much more exposure if they were writing today. In Vietnam, women journalists were determined to prove they could go into combat and get their reporting on the front pages and the six o'clock news.

"We were trying to prove we could do what the men were doing," recalls Denby Fawcett, then with The Honolulu Advertiser . Bored with her job in the women's section ''where I covered parties the society editor didn't want to go to" she went to Vietnam.

Being stereotyped

The first time she asked to accompany a unit into combat, a lieutenant colonel told her, "I could never let you do that. You remind me too much of my daughter."

After such experiences, Fawcett acknowledged she was leery of being stereotyped if she did a "woman's story" about the impact of war on women, families, communities and the survival of ordinary people. Today, she would not hesitate, she says.

"I regret very much that I never wrote a story about the Vietnamese," says Jurate Kazickas, at the time a freelancer. "It was an 'American' war and people wanted to read about their boys."

Edith Lederer is The Associated Press 's chief correspondent at the United Nations. She went to Vietnam in spite of the foreign desk editor's firm opposition to having women there. She remembers being told "the only way I could get a story in print on the impact of war on Vietnamese civilians was to find a woman who had lost a lot of children. So I did."

Lederer's subject had lost three of four sons in the war and had no idea where her husband was.

More balanced

Lederer ran AP 's operation in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War. Her plan for covering conflict now is to "be more balanced in trying to put forth the notion of the other side, the impact on ordinary people, or to delve more deeply, if possible, into what American soldiers really believe''.

"That is the hardest, because the US military can bottle up and control access and spin what soldiers say to people like us," she says.

That means that journalists' access to civilians as well as military people could be difficult, even impossible. The relatively free rein given to media in Vietnam brought us the searing photo of a Vietnamese girl running naked after a napalm attack.

Kate Webb, then UPI 's Cambodia bureau chief, still remembers "the terrible innocence of children running toward the pretty napalm". Webb and her colleagues would tackle them to keep them away. "It is one of many terrible images that stayed with me," she says.

Hard to make sense

Those images evolve to today's: burn victims in Bali, carnage in Manhattan, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon; bombing sites in Afghanistan; funerals in the Middle East. Journalists interpret these events to the best of their ability, but making sense of it all is very hard. Few whose home becomes a battleground will understand why it is happening.

"Because the Taliban didn't allow television, people in Kabul were glued to their radios after the Sept 11 attacks," Gannon says. "They had no idea what the World Trade Center was. Even today, a lot of people aren't clear about what it meant. They just know that a lot of people died."

Women who write about war believe there will be a lot of explaining to do to the people on the ground especially to the non-combatants, the women and children and the women journalists may take the lead in doing it. IPS

SHEILA GIBBONS is editor of Media Report to Women and a correspondent for WomensEnews filling the gap in news coverage about women.