Some Additional Thoughts on Deadly Women

As a brief follow-up to my previous post on Women and Illegal Arms Violence: Victims or Perpetrators? I highly recommend reading a one-year old analysis: Female Perpetrators of Violence: The Case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. The analyst, Haresh Mohanan, does a great job of outlining conventional wisdom and its fatal implications when it comes to women’s role in what I called extra-domestic or organized violence. My emphasis, again, is on women’s growing role as perpetrators, as well as the stereotypes that preclude such an expectation. Mohanan articulates this far better than I can:

“In the field of security studies, there is widespread skepticism of women as perpetrators of violence and as a result their acts of violence are often overlooked and marginalized. The denial of women’s agency in committing violence is detrimental, and will, ultimately, propel the security spectrum of the international system into disarray.

The portrayal of power and violence as generally masculine traits fuels the denial of women’s agency. This leads to a lack of coverage and documentation of information on female perpetrators of violence.”

It also seems that when women’s agency and role in choosing violence is in fact considered, it is framed in sexual contexts. Women, the thinking goes, only engage in such acts when they are involved (by marriage, sex, or family ties) with violent male perpetrators. The phenomenon has been closely examined in the context of terrorism, but is thought to extend to all sorts of organized violence. Mohanan and a few of his cited experts are observant enough to catch on to the counterproductive effects of such limited and narrow stereotypes.

This is where Aafia comes into the picture. Her story is one that defies so many layers of stereotypes about women and terrorist violence. She was clearly strong-minded and mentally sane. She was not evidently married to a terrorist. She was a woman with children’s lives on the line. She was highly educated, with a Ph.D. from MIT in the United States. She was voluntarily a fundraiser and activist for extremist Islamist terrorism. She was brave and daring. And she has become somewhat of a heroine and martyr in the eyes of so many Pakistanis.

Could this spawn even greater female activism for extremist causes? Could imagining such murderous women as heroines undermine all the strides made by Mukhtar Mai and other true heroines?

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