The Strange, Complex Story of Women and ISIS Militants
Stories of rape and abuse, and even the selling of women who end up in ISIS prisons are alarming. Those concerning Yazidis have been especially horrific, such as a recent account of a 14-year-old Yazidi girl who escaped being turned into a concubine for an ISIS commander. They represent a humanitarian crisis that demands attention. Unfortunately, such occurrences are common in wartime throughout the world, and certainly not limited to the brutality of Islamic militants. The chaotic and violent conditions of war provide the perfect opportunity for males to vent their fear of and hostility toward women (and sometimes other men). The perpetrators of sexual violence can be otherwise quite ordinary men — they need not be sword-wielding religious zealots. Rumors about what ISIS militants are doing to women are prone to exaggeration and tend to circulate with little evidence, such as a recent tale that captured women were being subjected to genital mutilation which spread like wildfire on the Internet. Several sources, including NPR’s Cairo bureau chief and Shiraz Maher, a senior fellow at King’s College London specializing in the Middle East, have concluded that the story is bogus. Yet such stories, even when we see them debunked, color our interpretation of the news. We may pay less attention than we should to the more mundane forms of misogyny, such as harassment and arrest, when lurid accounts dominate the headlines.
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