In high school, I had a bumper sticker: “feminism is the radical notion that women are people too.” Now, as a scholar of women’s and gender studies, I realize that this is not a great definition, and neglects a lot of nuance. Still, every time I read or hear someone express surprise that women do things that people do—I want to give them a copy of that bumper sticker and say, “welcome to the real world.”
 
At no time do I get this urge more strongly than when I am reading Western reports about women being recruited by, and joining, Daesh. Sensationalistic titles like “distraught mother of runaway ‘jihadi bride’ says she ‘gave birth to a monster’” pepper print and online media, and a google search finds more than 200,000 results just for the phrase “jihadi bride.”
 
One of the stories that has gotten the most traction is a recent New York Times story about ‘Alex’ (her online pseudonym), a 23-year-old Sunday school teacher who became a Daesh recruit, converting to Islam and adopting radical politics through conversations on Twitter, Skype, and email.
 
I am not saying that the NYT story about Alex is not true. I am saying that the volume and kind of attention that it gets compared to other happenings is problematic, as are some of the inferences it makes about women, politics, religion, and violence.
 
Daesh is a violent extremist organization primarily in Iraq and Syria. While the majority of Daesh militants are from Iraq and Syria, there are a number of foreign fighters in the conflict. Estimates range from 20,000 to 30,000. We do not know a lot about these foreign fighters, but we do know that less than 20 percent are from the West and that between one and two percent are American.
 
High estimates of the number of Daesh female recruits suggest that there are 550 women from the West, five of whom are American. What makes sense about 200,000 Google hits about 550 women—an estimated 360 stories per female migrant, just using a single search term?
 
Had Alex, the potential American female recruit (who ultimately did not join Daesh) joined, she would represent one third of one percent of Daesh’s male and female recruits. Why the disproportionate attention?
 
Simplistic images of Daesh and of Islam portray the group and the religion as abusive of women—not just their women, but our women. In these simplistic images, women are stereotypically feminine. They are peaceful and nurturing. They would not commit political violence unless some evil people or religion manipulated or forced them.
 
These images, however, are wildly inaccurate.
 
I have spent a fair amount of my career researching politically and criminally violent women. I have studied war criminals, murderers, rapists, and ‘terrorists.’ I can tell you that women did not start joining extremist organizations with the rise of Daesh. In fact, compared to some of its predecessors, Daesh continues to hold women to relatively limited roles.
 
Women are not just recruited into, and fighting within, Islamic organizations, but organizations of all stripes: Christian, Hindu, Buddhist; nationalist, fascist, leftist. Women are not just the ‘brides’ of violent extremism. They are, as often as not, the extremists.
 
In other words, some people, regardless of religion or ideology, are violent extremists. And women, unsurprisingly to me at least, are people. Women, as people, have choices. Some of them choose to be violent extremists.
 
Yes, manipulation, social framing, personality, and personal relationships probably play a role in attracting women to Daesh. But so too, probably, does the cause that they will be supporting if they join. The women who join Daesh, like the men who join Daesh, make complicated decisions—even if these are sometimes incomprehensible from the outside.
 
Media pundits emphasize Daesh's predatory treatment of women (and the implicit, and sometimes explicit claim that this is representative of Islam as a whole) but this is equally unrepresentative of the situation. 

Do not get me wrong. The atrocities Daesh has committed towards women (and men) are, in my view, inexcusable, whatever religious or ethical code is applied. And, of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world agree. Daesh’s violence is not representative of Islam. 
 
And while aspects of the ways that Daesh treats women could appropriately be characterized as evil, when media pundits characterize groups who oppose Daesh as superior because they treat their women better, the pundits make women into "things" rather than people.

A story about jihadi brides, then, is about much more than the very few women that Daesh has successfully recruited. It is also about outdated and stereotypical images of women and Islam that have outlived their usefulness, in politics, in religion, and in the public imaginary.
 
Alex, like billions of other people in the world, is a person—one with distinct religious and political struggles and choices. Disproportionate attention to her life, to the exclusion of others’ lives, reflects a conscious or unconscious investment in problematic and oversimplified Orientalist images of the Muslim predator and the white, Christian woman.
 
Daesh is not evil because it tried to recruit Alex. Or because it succeeded in recruiting a few other women from the West. It is not evil because Muslim men are ‘out to get our women.’ It is evil because of the mounting death toll and because if reports of human rights abuses in Syria and Iraq are accurate, Daesh’s actions are unconscionable.
 
Let's not allow our investment in gendered, jihadi-bride stories detract our attention from the real story—Daesh’s death toll, its associated tragedies, the historical context that made Daesh possible, and what happens next.
 
Resources:

Callimachi, Rukmini. “Isis and the Lonely Young American.” New York Times, June 27, 2015, Americas. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/world/americas/isis-online-recruiting-american.html.
 
Teng, Poh Si and Ben Laffin. “Flirting With the Islamic State.” TimesVideo, June 27, 2015.
 
Bennhold, Katrin. “Jihad and Girl Power: How ISIS Lured 3 London Girls.” New York Times, August 17, 2015, Europe.
 
El-Naggar, Mona and Ben Laffin. “The ISIS Conflict: At Home in London, Girls Chose ISIS.” TimesVideo, August 17, 2015.
 
Sjoberg, Laura and Caron Gentry. Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores. London: Zed Books, 2015.
 
Sjoberg, Laura and Reed Wood. 2015. “People, Not Pawns: Women’s Participation in Violent Extremism Across MENA.” USAID, September 2015 | no.1.
 
Ahall, Linda. Motherhood and War: Gender, Agency, and Political Violence. London: Taylor and Francis, 2014.
 
Auchter, Jessica. “Gendering Terror: Discourses of Terrorism and Writing Woman-As-Agent.” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 14:1 (2012): 121-139. 
 
Gentry, Caron. “Twisted Maternalism: From Peace to Violence.” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11:2 (2009): 235-252.
 
Brown, Katherine E. “Religion.” In Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations. Second edition. London: Routledge, 2014.
 
Parashar, Swati. Women and Militant Wars: The Politics of Injury. London: Routledge, 2014.

Image: A picture believed to show Bosnian-Austrian, Sabina Selimovic, 15, with jihadi fighters in Syria; Credit: CEN/EUROPICS.

Author, Laura Sjoberg, is Associate Professor of Political Science affiliated with the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida. She holds a BA in Political Science and History from the University of Chicago, a law degree from Boston College, and a PhD in International Relations from the University of Southern California. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books and almost fifty journal articles, including, most recently, Gender, War, and Conflict (Polity Press 2014).


 

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Comments

Bryce A. Pettit:  

Laura Sjoberg offers an important caveat to the public obsession with women who join Daesh. I am concerned, however, with her closing observation, "(Daesh) is evil because of the mounting death toll and because if reports of human rights abuses in Syria and Iraq are accurate, Daesh’s actions are unconscionable." Could she respond to how she sees the link between jihadist ideology and these reprehensible actions? It almost appears as though she condemns the actions of jihadis without also identifying the religious extremism that inspires it. Is this an attempt to avoid charges of Islmaphobia? I don't believe the two can be separated into neat compartments. Daesh would not be committing these atrocities unless they had an ideological framework that justifies and even glorifies such actions based on a perversion of Islam.

 Laura Sjoberg (response to Bryce A. Pettit):

Terrible things are done in the name of all sorts of ideology – its the fanaticism and will to violence, not the particular ideology it is done in service of – that people who do terrible things share. That’s not saying that one should ignore either the political or religious motivations of Daesh as a  group or its members. But I also think that suggesting that it  is something wrong with Islam is like suggesting that because there are female recruits there’s something wrong with women – its overgeneralized to a fault.