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Presentation:
SUICIDE WARFARE AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
By Rosemarie Skaine
Keynote Speech, Interactive Dialogue, "Dying to Kill: The Allure of Female Suicide Bombers," United Nations Commission on the Status of Women 57: Elimination and Prevention of All Forms of Violence Against Women and Girls, March 8, 2013.
Excerpts:
Women were recruited to become a weapon through the use of varied
techniques. In Chechnya, women chosen for the suicide cadres known as the Black
Widows went through additional intensive training in small, isolated groups.
Recruits who wished to leave the organization were required to complete two or
three years of punishment service. Group identification and bonding were key
influences in recruitment. Tamil Black Tigers and Tigresses were usually small,
tightly structured around practices to maintain and reinforce commitment though
the manipulation of kinship-recognition cues, e.g., familiar forms of family
address, older brother; and the philosophy of sacrificing oneself for the
cause. This philosophy included the use of suicide as a defense, Nandini, a
LTTE Black Tiger fighter talked about the possibility of committing suicide if
she were to be captured. "If I am captured and I give up ten names of
people in the movement, they’ll capture and torture those ten to get a hundred
names, and after capturing a hundred people they can capture a thousand people,
and so it is better one die than tell a secret and many die."UN
Commission, Status of Women 57, Women Suicide Bombers, R. Skaine, 3/8/13 P a g
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Jihadist groups employ tribalism that involves kinship groups that accomplish their minimal economic chores and defend itself and are small enough so that members can remain connected.
Induced altruism is a factor in recruiting. Suicide terror organizations were usually tightly structured around practices to maintain and reinforce commitment though the manipulation of kinship-recognition cues.
In early attacks in Palestine, the strategy was often to characterize women as having insufficient dispositional explanations of motives and emotions. The focus was on attributes of the attackers such as beauty, piety, or purity. Or the attackers would be chara ........