Gendered Traumatization: Male and Female Survivors of the Yazidi Genocide and ISIS Captivity

The recognition of the importance of gender as a salient factor for understanding the impact of genocides is a relatively new phenomenon. This shift in approach — an understanding of genocide as entailing gendercide — is particularly important for an understanding of the Yazidi genocide that ISIS undertook in northern Iraq beginning in June 2014. To explore these different gendered impacts, we conducted semi-structured interviews during the summers of 2019 and 2021 with seventeen female and fifteen male Yazidi survivors who currently reside in displaced persons camps in northern Iraq. These transcribed narrative interview texts reveal significant differences in how the female and male survivors narrate the experience of their traumatization. The core of the Yazidi female survivors’ traumatization was their experience of defilement as sabaya or slaves, most often sexual slaves. Yet even in the face of this social death, the female survivors’ narratives relate how they were able to enact strategies for protecting their human dignity, including engaging in various forms of resistance during captivity. Conversely, the core of the Yazidi male survivors’ traumatization was their experience in religious education camps where they were indoctrinated with ISIS ideology and enrolled in physical and combat training for their ultimate deployment as ISIS child soldiers. Precisely because the boys were offered an alternative mujahadeen ideal of manhood, their captivity narratives remain in limbo, ambivalently caught between the seeming failure of the Yazidi male code of honor and ISIS’s hyper-masculinized and violent jihadist identity.