The international community is currently confronted by a new wave of migrants, which is threatening the world security and questioning the world order. The circumstance that men – known as foreign fighters, join the new1 transnational religious terrorist group in Syria and North Iraq: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) became common. But since 2014, women from Western states started to leave their families to join the group, which scandalised and horrified the international community […].
From this fact rises the question: who these women are? Even if progress concerning the status of the woman in the Islam has been made, it is still a topic that rises up a lot of controversy within the international community. If we follow the spread understanding: women should have a complementary role to men. This distinction is important, it opens some doors, since there is no mentioned prohibition of equality. Through the mass media and the attention of the whole international community, to become a foreign fighter can be the possibility to introduce a new status of a powerful feminism in Islam. Questionable is if these women fight truly as an ISIS heroine for feminism or if the reason for that is deeper as Elshtain and Ruddick are defending. There are cases of women, which came back and shared publically their regrets. The media demonstrate that within ISIS territories promises made to women during the recruitment have not been hold. On behalf of examples of cases in which women do join ISIS, the hypothesis that women do only fight when they are threatened in their maternal nature: in something they do need or love has been verified. Subsequently religion as the revolt to reinstitute the Caliphate is not a push factor as illustrated in several researches, but it is rather the socio-political situation. Therefore Gender and social psychology are relevant instruments for this analyse.
We have on one hand the Western Gender construct of women which are looking for emancipation and equal rights, they are seductive and careerist and on the other hand we have women, which have a Muslim cultural heritage, are living in Western states and maybe do not fit to a 100% in the typical Western built-up image of women (since they might be wearing the veil).
What happens […] is that prejudices get established. Prejudice can be that blond women are attractive but not smart or men do drive cars better than women. Every person has prejudices even by trying to avoid it. Even the word prejudice itself incorporates the notion of prejudices. The Latin etymology of the word is composed by prae, which means “in advance” and judicium “judgement”, consequently the signification is judging before knowing. Prejudices are useful since they give to people a kind of security, instead of taking the risk to get to know something the prejudice is already spread and we do not need to make our own experience. Although these can be dangerous when they affect an ethnic or religious community (a group), which can lead to discrimination. The issue with prejudice to groups is that it refers to an important number of persons without taking in consideration the credibility of the information. The innovation of this research is that the goal is not to find out how and if women have been manipulated. It is difficult to imagine that women can voluntary join a misogyny and violent group, but the decision was more optional since it took place in European countries, where people have the freedom to choose what to do and it is therefore a mistake to say that manipulation took place. It is of great importance to apprehend who and why women tend to join ISIS. Only this way, states can start to implement measures to avoid the migration process. There are two kind of candidates: the converted fighters and the born Muslim women and among them an important number of teenagers […].
The fact that an important number of teenagers leave Europe to join the terror group can be explained through the identity dilemma. Teenagers are often confronted to the need of “love and belonging” as well as “security and safety”, “cultural acceptance and self-esteem”. These factors can drive them to the necessity to belong to a group in order to build up an identity as explained in the famous pyramid of Abraham Maslow9. Since ISIS is a group with strong identity criteria, becoming a member is even more tempting.
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