Barker Profile

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From Wyoming, she made her way to Northwestern University and graduated from the Medill School of Journalism in 1992. She then worked at papers in Indiana, Spokane, and Kansas, before moving on to win several investigative reporting awards for the Seattle Times.

While at the Seattle Times, Barker made a name for herself among her peers, especially with Eric Nalder, now the chief investigative reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

“Kim is a very bright young reporter,” Nalder said. “She was very eager to get information. She organizes her material well, and does a good job interpreting events with bright writing.”

Nalder worked with Barker on a series of articles titled ‘Throwaway People’. It was the kind of work Barker said made her sorry to leave the Times: reporting on her ‘dream beat’ of social issues, everything from mental illness to child abuse.

“I still look at some of my stories there as my best work,” she said.

While being a woman has made her somewhat of an ‘oddity’ in countries where women are considered the lesser sex, Barker debunked myths that women reporters can’t get a story.

“Being a woman does present different challenges,” she said. “Any woman who says otherwise is in complete denial. I’m an oddity, a third sex, neither Muslim woman nor a foreign man. They’re curious. So the men talk to me for that reason.”

While some are eager to share, others aren’t as open. One Islamic leader in Indonesia refused to speak with Barker unless she was hidden behind a sheet; other men refuse to shake her hand.

While her first time wearing a burqa liberated her with the anonymity it provided, Barker still holds issue with the idea behind it.  

“As a feminist, I hate being forced to wear certain clothes when I go to Iran, for example, or just for safety reasons in Afghanistan,” Barker said. “But I do it out of respect for other people’s culture, and because it’s smart.”

But being the ‘third sex’ has helped Barker get stories she feels men can’t get, allowing her to cover the entire realm of what’s happening in Afghanistan, rather than just half.

“Check bylines, photo bylines on stories about women from Afghanistan or Iraq,” she said. “I’d bet that most of them feature women authors and photographers.”

Gwen Florio, a reporter for the Great Falls Tribune and USA Today, agreed with Barker that women reporters have been critical in showing a new side of war. Florio pointed out that the biggest stories from war-torn countries have had female bylines—like the New York Times’s Carlotta Gall.

Florio reported from Afghanistan in both 2001 and 2002.  Warfare today, she said, has become more guerilla-like, taking more civilian casualties and affecting families in increasingly deeper ways.

“If you’re not able to talk to civilians, to women and families, you leave out a huge part of the story,” Florio said.

Like Barker, Florio said reporting from Afghanistan isn’t easy. Wearing a burqa is almost always out of the question in terms of being a functional reporter; Florio instead wore a scarf, often pulled up to her eyes when talking to sources.

“You have to hold it (the burqa) closed with one hand,” she said. “It’s impossible to take notes. You try to be as respectful as possible.”

Sending a woman to a country where women are restricted in their freedom to move around and communicate isn’t an easy choice for an editor to make. Florio said she learned that there had been a huge discussion about whether to send her to Afghanistan after she returned from her assignment.

But even from behind a burqa or head scarf, even despite the danger of rape, kidnapping and death, women correspondents are finding ways get to the heart of stories their male counterparts can’t quite reach.

Barker’s stories about forgotten wars and forgotten soldiers, a 78-year-old Afghan Guantanamo Bay prisoner, and the people coming to Afghanistan to teach children show that women are more than capable—if not better—of handling the rigors of war correspondence.

“Many people outside of an Islamic country may think that being a woman makes it impossible to report, as the men won’t talk to you,” Barker said. “I’ve found it be completely the opposite.”