| By Sarah Little, Editor in Chief, More to Her Story I met Mary* on a humid day in Kakuma Refugee Camp in northern Kenya. My translator and I walked 45 minutes through mud and swamp to reach her home. Mary was my age, 21, and soft-spoken. She sat on a red bucket, her hair wrapped in a yellow scarf. She had fled the war in South Sudan on foot, responsible for her four younger siblings. Along the way, she was raped. In Kenya, she soon had a child to feed and few ways to earn money. She began having sex with men in exchange for food and basic supplies. Her community cast her out. That was eight years ago. Since then, I have sat with hundreds of young women and girls around the world who, like Mary, live in circumstances they did not create, with little or no freedom to choose the course of their lives. Those conversations led me to start More to Her Story, a newsroom covering the lives and freedoms of women and girls around the world. People often ask me what it means to report on women and girls who lack basic freedoms. It means listening. Listening to what life is actually like and what freedom means to them. Often, it is not what you would expect. Freedom might mean going where you want, choosing what to wear, speaking without fear, living without violence, or deciding whether and when to have children. A 16-year-old Syrian girl told me it meant riding a bicycle, because where she lived, girls did not. Another told me it meant choosing if and whom to marry. The news media is good at covering extraordinary events. It pays less attention to daily realities that shape millions of people’s lives: restrictions they live under and ordinary freedoms they are denied. These stories rarely make headlines, not because they are insignificant, but because they are so common. By the time you finish reading this, roughly 50 girls around the world will have been married as children. You will never know their dreams or names. Press freedom and the freedom of women and girls are not always considered together. Yet how a society treats women and girls is among the clearest measures of its freedom, and an early warning of decline. War, crisis and political repression often disproportionately impact women and girls, yet a 2024 analysis by CARE found that just 5 percent of news coverage of armed conflict over the past decade focused on their experiences. When women are neither asked to tell their stories nor free to share them, the world sees only half the picture. Eight years ago, I sat with a young woman in a refugee camp and asked what her life was really like. Since then, I’ve learned that the people who can tell you the most about freedom are often those who have been denied it. And that perhaps one of the best tests of a society’s commitment to freedom is whether a girl born into it has any real say over the life she will lead. *Names have been changed to protect identities. | 
