"How Islamic State uses systematic sexual violence against women" PBS NewsHour 10/7/2014
Excerpt
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): We return now to the Islamic State group and its brutal tactics.
Much is known now about the group, also known as ISIL, and its high-profile beheadings of Westerners, mass executions of civilians and forced conversions. Less well-known is the extremist group’s horrific treatment of women and girls.
Last week, the United Nations reported thousands of women had been abducted by the group, some handed over to fighters as a reward or sold as sex slaves.
The NewsHour sent a crew to meet a 15-year-old girl, a member of the Yazidi sect, who was captured and held by the Islamic State before managing to escape. She now lives at a camp with others who’ve been displaced.
We withheld her identity for her and her family’s safety.
GIRL (through interpreter): They kept us in a house, the girls and the women. And then they killed all the men, including my brother.
GWEN IFILL: She and the abducted women were taken by truck east to a house in Mosul. There, they were ordered to convert to Islam. More kidnapped girls joined them.
GIRL (through interpreter): They separated the women and the girls. Some of the girls were taken by ISIL. They gave some of us to the guards and they sold some of us, too. And some were given as a gift.
If we didn’t do what they asked, they would have hit us. We did everything because we were threatened. We had to. They were very bad to the girls. They were doing bad things to the women, illegal things.
GWEN IFILL: That’s only one story.
To help us understand the depth and scale of the Islamic State’s treatment of women and girls, we turn to Manal Omar, acting vice president for the Middle East and Africa Center at the United States Institute of Peace, and David Jacobson, professor of sociology and founding director of the Citizenship Initiative on Civil Society and Conflict at the University of South Florida.
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