Female Bombers Research Articles

Gender and the Strategic and Tactical Logic of Boko Haram’s Suicide Bombers

Boko Haram is well known for its use of women as suicide bombers. While prior research has examined why this phenomenon is occurring, as well as what makes Boko Haram a unique terror group, the present study examines how their female bombers are infiltrating targets, what types of targets are being successfully infiltrated, and whether the bomber’s gender has an impact on the infiltration tactic and the success of the bombing mission. Utilizing the open-sourced data provided by the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), a complementary qualitative dataset was compiled that included 102 female suicide bombing incidents from 2014 to 2017. Results of content analysis indicate that there was a variety of infiltration tactics used by the female bombers that progressively evolved as specific tactics’ effectiveness waned, and that gender impacted the missions allowing for the female bombers to effectively infiltrate soft targets with high casualties, increasing the group’s overall utilization of females in operative roles.

The tradeoffs of using female suicide bombers

Why are there so few female suicide bombers despite their tactical effectiveness? To explain the rarity of this phenomenon, I examine the tradeoffs that armed groups face when using female suicide bombers. While rigid gender norms make female bombers more effective because security personnel are less suspicious of them, gender inequality also drives down the demand for female suicide bombers. I posit that the tradeoffs of using female bombers induce a curvilinear relationship between women’s status and the prevalence of female suicide bombers. Specifically, I argue that female bombers will be more common in countries with middling levels of gender equality than in highly equal or unequal societies. Using data on over 5,500 suicide attacks, from 1974 to 2016, I find support for this hypothesis.

Martyrdom and the Myth of Motherhood: U.K. broadcast news media’s agential construction of Palestinian female suicide bombers during the Second Intifada (2000-2005)

ABSTRACT During the Second Intifada of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, female-perpetrated suicide bombings emerged as a new proponent of political violence during this phase of Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Prior academic literature demonstrates the gendered nature of these acts—based upon wider debates concerning the male relationship with conflict—as key in predominantly Western print news media analyses of these female bombers’ coverage. Examining the widely unexamined medium of broadcast news, this article addresses the extent to which BBC News and ITV News embrace the “Myth of Motherhood” to communicate the Palestinian female body’s performative status. Via a postcolonial framework, analyses of applied natural (“Vacant Womb”) and unnatural (“Deviant Womb”) biological frameworks shall address whether constructions of Palestinian female suicide bombers’ allegedly deviant femininity impact upon representations of their political agency.

Martyr or Mystery? Female Suicide Bombers and Information Availability

An extensive body of literature examines how the media depicts female suicide bombers. However, there has been little systematic testing of these theories. I test common arguments about how female bombers are portrayed, relative to male bombers. I find mixed support for the notion that information on female bombers relies on gender stereotypes. I find robust evidence that the marital status of female bombers is more likely to be reported on than for their male counterparts, while other characteristics, such as education and occupation, are not. I discuss the incentives media outlets and armed groups have for reinforcing these stereotypes.

Gender differences in combined homicide-suicide with consideration of female terrorist bombers.

Combined homicide-suicide (H-S) is a phenomenon described as an offender committing a homicidal act followed by their suicide. Current literature on H-S is dominated by a focus on men and their particular set of motivations and actions, primarily because females constitute only a small fraction of the cases of completed H-S. This review begins by analyzing this data and integrating females within two subclassifications of H-S: the psychopathology of the actor (or perpetrator), and the actor's relationship to her homicide victims. Within the relational subcategory of H-S, females are: (1) underrepresented when victims are their spouses or intimate partners (consortial H-S); (2) more prevalent when victims are their own children (filial H-S); and (3) with rare exceptions, not represented in extrafamilial, adversarial and pseudo-commando H-S perpetrators. This review includes female bombers in this gender comparison.

Suicide squad: Boko Haram’s use of the female suicide bomber

Boko Haram first began using the tactic of suicide bombings in 2011 and in 2014 started using female suicide bombers. This research focuses on gender differences in the use of suicide bombers. The data were collected using open sources from June 16, 2011 to June 15, 2018. Using this longitudinal data, trends are described over that 7-year period, focusing on the use of females. A majority of the suicide bombings target civilians in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. More than half of the bombers were women and girls, some as young as 7 years old, and there were more than 60 incidents where the bomber was below the age of 15. More female bombers were used to targets civilians, whereas men were used more often to target government, police, and military targets. Female suicide bombers were used in Cameroon, whereas males were used more often in Nigeria. Additionally, females used suicide belts or vests, whereas men carried out the overwhelming majority of vehicle-borne suicide bombings. In many cases, the use of the women as bombers involved coercion. The unprecedented use of female suicide bombers, particularly young girls, should be a focus of policy moving forward.

Framing Boko Haram’s female suicide bombers in mass media: an analysis of news articles post Chibok abduction

ABSTRACT The employment of female suicide bombers continues to be a trend among terrorist organisations. Due to their sensationalist nature, suicide bombings attract extensive media attention and are often covered through different, though intentional, lenses. While existing literature has identified various frames that the media used to portray female suicide bombers, there is not yet a study focusing on the framing of those affiliated with Boko Haram, an organisation known for its high rate of children and women involved in suicide attacks. Investigating media coverage of suicide bombing events carried out by Boko Haram’s female bombers after the Chibok abduction reveals two prominent frames: the liable agents frame, which is utilised mostly in local sources, and the vulnerable and helpless girls frame, in international sources. While a polarised construction of Boko Haram’s female suicide bombers can have both negative and positive implications, a comprehensive portrayal that treats these women as more than either perpetrators of violence or victims is needed. This can only be accomplished if journalists understand the consequences of their news writing routines and the media sources’ organisational pressures and constraints are adjusted to accommodate a more complex representation of the female suicide bombers in Boko Haram.

Killing for Airtime

Killing for Airtime

The Female Bomber's Body in Performance

Following the rules of self-sacrifice for a higher cause, the Palestinian female bomber performs the values of the struggle through and on her body in a farewell video statement. She leaves herself behind to create an image of a strong and victorious soldier. The female bomber's performance of the new self introduces her as a role model for younger generations. Her public appearance in hijab challenges notions of the body, physical beauty, and freedom in the secularist world at the same time as it deviates from the norms of a fundamentalist view of women. It is the dual impact on local and international viewers that politicizes the female bomber's public performance and makes it significant. Rana Salimi has received her PhD from the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. She currently lectures at UCSD and at National University on a variety of subjects, including theatre history and language arts.

Gender, nationalism, and war: conflict on the movie screen

Virginia Woolf famously wrote 'as a woman I have no country', suggesting that women had little stake in defending countries where they are considered second-class citizens, and should instead be forces for peace. Yet women have been perpetrators as well as victims of violence in nationalist conflicts. This unique book generates insights into the role of gender in nationalist violence by examining feature films from a range of conflict zones. In The Battle of Algiers, female bombers destroy civilians while men dress in women's clothes to prevent the French army from capturing and torturing them. Prisoner of the Mountains shows a Chechen girl falling in love with her Russian captive as his mother tries to rescue him. Providing historical and political context to these and other films, Matthew Evangelista identifies the key role that economic decline plays in threatening masculine identity and provoking the misogynistic violence that often accompanies nationalist wars.

Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers: Equal Partners in the Struggle for Liberation

This article deals with a scientifically viable explanation of the phenomenon of Palestinian female bombers, situating it within its proper frame of analysis as an integral part of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination equally involving both genders. It also aims to dismantle the vilification, profiling, typification, and stereotyping of these women, especially by three American feminist writers, as sexual deviants or carriers of some psychological baggage which forces them to participate in these terrorist acts in order to atone for their personal infringements of the normative structure of Palestinian society.The article, furthermore, contextualizes the struggle of Palestinian female suicide bombers within the international framework of other national movements (in Sri Lanka and in Chechnya) whose women have been empowered to fight alongside their male counterparts for independence, freedom, and an end to occupation.

Female Suicide Terrorism in South Asia: Comparing the Tamil Separatists and Kashmir Insurgents

In this article we compare two conflicts in South Asia—civil war in Sri Lanka and the insurgency in Kashmir—to investigate the enabling conditions for female suicide terrorism in the former, and the lack thereof in the latter. We conclude that female suicide terrorism is a product of several inter-related factors that feed into each other: (i) tormented society, (ii) individual grievances, and (iii) a terrorist organisation with an effective indoctrination structure. Thus, rather than focusing on the individual motivations behind the female bombers, it is important to situate them in specific socio-political contexts.

The Emergence of Female Suicide Terrorists

Female suicide terrorists do not differ significantly from their male counterparts in terms of individual motivations. Although societal oppression may play a minor role in their self-recruitment to terror organizations women do not bomb themselves primarily to drive a feminist cause. Instead they act out of motivations inside conflict zones of trauma, revenge, nationalism, expression of community outrage and in non-conflict zones feelings of alienation, marginalization, negative self-identity, and a desire to act on behalf of those inside conflict zones. Groups find it to their advantage to use female bombers as they receive more media attention, increased sympathy for the terrorist cause, are able to pass security measures more easily than men, and are more dispensable because they are rarely in leadership positions.

The path to paradise: the inner world of suicide bombers and their dispatchers

Suicide bombers are often compared to smart bombs. From the point of view of their dispatchers, they are highly effective, inexpensive forms of weaponry, and there is no need to invest in their technological development. Suicide bombers are in fact smarter than smart bombs because they can choose their own target-and they can react to circumstances on the ground, changing their target, or their timing, in an instant, to ensure the maximum damage, destruction, and death. Of course, unlike smart bombs, suicide bombers think and feel, they have histories, stories, beliefs, desires-in short, they have an inner world. Exploring the inner world of suicide bombers has been the focus of Anat Berko's research for years. She has worked to understand the thought processes of a people who can choose to place explosives on their bodies and kill themselves, taking as many other people with them as they can. Do male bombers really believe that death will transport them to a paradise where they will be greeted by virgins? Are they victims of unbearable pressure to commit this act of terror? What are female bombers promised in the hereafter? Is there something that links all suicide bombers? Berko also explores the world of those who drop the smart bomb-the dispatchers: who are these people who persuade others to go calmly to their horrific deaths?

Suicide Bombers as Women Warriors: Making News Through Mythical Archetypes

This study explores how mythical archetypes become a journalistic tool for reporting news about terrorism. Textual analysis of newspaper items examined coverage about seven female Palestinian suicide bombers. Mythical archetypes changed initially from the male suicide bomber as Trickster, to female bomber as Woman Warrior, and finally, to the Terrible Mother when the circumstances of the seventh suicide bomber no longer fit the Woman Warrior mold. Findings suggest that journalists negotiate their reporting within two realms—realities of occurrences and resonance of myths—to accomplish their work.