Her four children ask why she can't work at their school but Alex Crawford, the award winning Sky News reporter, said on Saturday it was offensive and sexist to even ask whether female war correspondents could juggle motherhood and frontline journalism.

Crawford, whose coverage of the capture of Tripoli made headlines of its own last week, told an audience of television executives in Edinburgh that she considered herself facing pressures no different from those faced by all working mothers.

Speaking live by satellite link from Libya, Crawford told the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival it was "really insulting and very, very sexist" to be asked about how she raised her children – when her Sky News colleague Stuart Ramsay, a father of three, would not face similar questions. "Nobody will say to him – what are you doing?" she added.

Crawford, 49, has worked at Sky News since its inception in 1989, but only became a foreign correspondent six years ago after her husband Richard Edmondson, a racing journalist, left his job at the Independent to help look after their children, son Nat, and three daughters, Frankie, Maddie and Florence.

"Quite often my children don't want me to go away. My husband tries to shield them from what I am doing. It's a dilemma for many single working mothers. I hope I'm a role model for my daughters, although my children say 'Why can't you be a dinner lady at school?'" she said.

The public nature of her job, though, means that at times it is hard to separate the two. In March Crawford was trapped in Zawiyah, where she had gone to filming an anti-Gaddafi protest. A counterattack by Gaddafi's forces left her trapped in a mosque surrounded by hostile troops.

"We thought we were going to die," she said, telling the Edinburgh audience that she had mentally prepared to say goodbye to her family. Meanwhile, having watched her coming under fire on television, her husband also understood that she was in danger. "I was still getting texts, because the mobile network was still working, and I was trying to reassure my husband. 'Don't worry,' I said, 'I'll get out of this' but I didn't believe them."

Her live footage of rebel forces entering Tripoli last Sunday night came about because Crawford, her camera operators Garwen McLuckie and Jim Foster, and her producer Andy Marsh chose to return to the frontline at a time when rival broadcasters had stopped work for the day. They were surprised how easy it was to advance into the city, with jubilant crowds lining the way.

Crawford began by describing events down the phone, but she said "it became evident that nobody was believing what we are saying". So to demonstrate what was happening, her camera crew rigged up a satellite dish the size of a laptop, powered by the cigarette lighter in their pick-up truck. Because of the size of the crowds, the advance was sufficiently slow for her team to be able to constantly reposition the satellite uploader to maintain the live broadcast.

She said it was impossible to remain dispassionate when covering a conflict such as Libya, a conflict where she has routinely seen people with "half their heads blown off". She said that "you can't go through these experiences without being scarred" and added that after eventually escaping Zawiyah after three days she was "for quite a while really tearful, really angry". The only way of coping for her and her camera crew was to "talk a lot, cry a lot, shout a lot and eventually we feel better".

The reporter also said "people who say they can be impartial aren't telling the truth", because it is impossible for war reporters to do that when they witness "defenceless people being terribly killed". But she added that it was already becoming important to start covering some the reprisals, as rebel forces extract vengeance on Gaddafi loyalists.

"I think as a woman you bring a different view to the whole thing … a woman who's been through the same experiences even if it's giving birth, that gives you an empathy. I don't feel gung-ho about reporting at all, a lot of the time I'm feeling very scared," Crawford said, adding: "I feel like I've just started, I've only been doing this for six years."

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