Women in Daesh
By Emily Moran
In recent years, there has been an increase in women’s involvement in terrorist organizations. This has also caused a spike in the media attention surrounding women joining terrorist organizations, and specifically, the Islamic State. The media’s attention largely surrounds Western women who join the Islamic State, which is the focus of most of the research published on this topic. There are many reasons why Western Women join the Islamic State, but there is no clear standard for why women and others from the West choose to join the Islamic State. This is a similar issue to the topic of radicalization; there is no clear, studied set of standards to define why someone joins any terrorist organization or commits a terrorist act. The research exploring why women join the Islamic State is vast, and there are many different reasons that researchers cite for these decisions. Although it is difficult to define specific reasons for why women join the Islamic State, it is clear that women must be studied as a distinct category from the overall population of the Islamic State. It must be noted that women may have largely different reasons for joining than the stereotypical narratives portrayed by Western media sources. Western media describes these women as oppressed and depict that they are manipulated into joining by their husbands, or that they want to join because they want to marry an Islamic State fighter. Once, the stereotype surrounding why women join the Islamic State is disrupted, then there can be analysis into some reasons why women choose to join.
One of these reasons potentially may be the search for a new identity. This is a common theme seen in many womens’ narrative on joining the Islamic State. Many women want a place where they are free from Islamophobia, sexism, restrictive laws, and the lack of representation that they face in Western countries. This is why it is vital to study women separately as a distinct group. It is also important to study how the Islamic State portrays itself as an organization that empowers women, and how they use stories of these women to make them sound better and entice more women to join. It is imperative to fill this gap in existing research and can be argued that if research can pinpoint and combat the narratives that encourage women to join the Islamic State, their involvement could be prevented.
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