Unbowed reports on abuse that is often denied, distorted or fabricated. That places a particular obligation on us to get things right. This page sets out how we work and what you can hold us to.
Accuracy
We verify before we publish. Being first is not a reason to be wrong.
We read primary documents: the filing, the judgment, the statute, the study itself, not a press release about it or another outlet’s account of it. Where we have only seen secondary reporting, we say so.
We distinguish between an allegation, a charge, a conviction and a finding of liability. These are different things and we do not blur them.
We are careful with numbers. A figure means little without knowing what it is a proportion of. Where a statistic comes from a company or a campaigning organisation, we say whose figure it is.
Quotations are what people actually said.
What we don’t know
Where a story turns on something we could not confirm, we say so on. We set out what is established and by whom, what is a claim rather than a fact, and what we asked for and did not get.
We would rather publish a story with a stated gap in it than one that sounds more certain than it is.
Fairness
Anyone facing criticism or an allegation in our reporting gets a genuine opportunity to respond, with a reasonable deadline.
We represent people’s arguments as they would recognise them.
We do not present evidence and a flat denial as though they carry equal weight. Being fair to people is not the same as being artificially even-handed about facts.
Sources
We name our sources wherever we can. Where we grant anonymity, because of legal jeopardy, employment risk or personal safety, we explain to you why.
We credit other outlets by name when they reported something first.
We identify our sources by name and date in the text, so you can find them yourself. We do not link to material that harms people.
Reporting on people who have been harmed
We are careful with language. For instance we do not use the term “revenge porn”, which could imply someone brought in on themselves. We use image-based sexual abuse, or non-consensual intimate images.
We do not identify anyone who has been subjected to abuse without their explicit consent, and we check that the details we do publish could not identify them in combination.
We ask people what they want to be called.
We do not publish sexualised images of victims, including obscured ones.
We describe what perpetrators did, rather than writing as though abuse simply happened.
Independence
Unbowed is a not-for-profit publication, editorially independent. No funder, partner or advertiser sees our copy before publication or has any say in what we cover.
Where a story touches an organisation connected to us or to our funding, we say so in the article.
Artificial intelligence
We use AI tools to help draft from material we have gathered and checked. Every factual claim in anything we publish has been verified against a source by a person. We do not use AI-generated images to illustrate real events.
Corrections
We correct errors promptly and openly. A correction appears on the article itself, dated, saying what was wrong. We do not quietly edit a page and leave it looking as though it was always right.
We distinguish corrections, which fix factual errors, from clarifications, which address something accurate but open to being misread, and updates, which add new developments.
If you think we have got something wrong, tell us.
Guidance we follow
Our standards draw on the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, the International Federation of Journalists’ Global Charter of Ethics, guidance from the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, IPSO’s sexual offences guidance, and UNESCO’s handbook on reporting violence against women and girls.