For four months, Nigerian investigative journalist Tobore Ovuorie posed as a sex worker determined to shine a light on the plight of women trafficked for sex, only to become trapped by the very people she sought to expose. Her report, published in 2014, revealed the full horror of her experience. She had uncovered a network of violence, murder and organ harvesting.

Rana Rahimpour has faced death threats, rape threats, travel bans, asset freezes, and online smears since starting work for the BBC’s Persian service.

Born and raised in Iran. She has a bachelor’s degree in English-Persian translation from Islamic Azad University and another in accounting from Al- Zahra University. When she aspired to work for the UN, she chose journalism, believing it would be ‘a good gateway into humanitarian work’.

In 2019, journalist Izabella Evloeva, then aged 36, left Russia for what she thought would be a two-month break.

Three and a half years later, she has yet to return after being placed on a watch list for covering protests in Ingushetia on her news website Fortanga.

Imagine you’re the type of person who never gives up fighting for the truth. You receive the most prestigious award in your field, but you can’t receive it in person for no reason other than that you were born in occupied land and the occupying forces have issued a travel ban against you.

Ukrainian journalist Anna Babinets, 37, is used to controversy, and to being on the receiving end of threats. The investigative agency Slidstvo.info, that she co-founded ten years ago, specialises in investigating high-level crime and government corruption.

Vietnamese journalist Pham Doan Trang knew she would be arrested at some point, and even wrote a farewell letter, but she didn’t know when – until, on 6 October 2020, police turned up in the middle of the night at her flat in Ho Chi Minh City.

Bettie Johnson-Mbayo might not have expected a month-long prison sentence for parking her car. And yet, after Bong County representative Marvin Cole took issue with her and her husband parking near his home in January 2022, an argument erupted. “You need to take control of your wife,” Johnson-Mbayo claims that Cole told her husband.

She believes that what happened next was an attempt to silence her, an investigative journalist who roots out corruption in Liberia, West Africa and puts it under a spotlight.

At the time of writing, 37-year-old investigative journalist Rana Ayyub is afraid to leave her Mumbai home for fear of being attacked by armed gangs or by the government whose agents sit and watch from nearby streets.

On a grey afternoon in Minsk in November 2020, journalists Katsiaryna Andreyeva and Daria Chultsova were filming from an apartment. It looked down onto a courtyard, colloquially known as the ‘Square of Change’, where hundreds were gathered to peacefully demonstrate and demand justice for the death of pro-democracy activist Raman Bandarenka in police custody.

“We’re like war correspondents in our own country. We never have to leave the country to cover a war to learn how to be war correspondents - as we feel as if we’re covering one, and that’s terrible,” says investigative journalist Marcela Turati.

Caroline Muscat lives her life next to the shadow of her former journalism colleague, Daphne Caruana Galizia, the prominent Maltese investigative journalist who was assassinated in 2017 by a car bomb.

In 2000, Jineth Bedoya Lima, 49, was a 26-year-old reporter. She had been covering a story on weapons, human trafficking, and corruption at the infamous La Modelo prison in Colombia for three years, during which the threats against her and her mother intensified. When she feared for her safety, the Colombian state told her she was not entitled to protection.

“Jineth was one of the first journalists investigating how the armed conflict had moved into the prison system,” Claudia Duque, a Colombian investigative journalist, International Women Media Foundation (IWMF) Courage in Journalism award recipient, and Bedoya’s friend, says. “Jineth uncovered many stories about massacres inside prisons. That made her a target for threats and, later, her attack.”

On the evening Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy newspaper sent its last edition to press, its deputy chief editor Chan Pui-man left the newsroom to join colleagues on the rooftop as they waved to crowds gathered five floors below. Hundreds had journeyed in the rain to the Apple Daily offices in a remote, industrial part of the city to bid farewell to the popular tabloid, brutally shut down by the authorities after 26 years in print.

They shone torches, blinking like beacons in the dark, and thanked Apple Daily workers with cheers of “We won’t forget you!” and “Add oil!” – a rallying cry used by pro-democracy protesters to fuel their comrades. The staff were emotional, and shouted back to their supporters. But Chan, recalls one former colleague, stood silently by her side for ten, maybe 15 minutes. Then she went back to work.