What’s driving teen girls to jihad?

Michael Petrou trying to find explanations where there may be no satisfactory ones: why some are attracted to joining a cult-like organization and others not:

It may be true that anger about proposed polices regarding religious dress in Quebec, or what is perceived to be Canada’s insufficient support for Palestinians or Muslims elsewhere, contributed in some way to the decision of young Canadian women to join a genocidal death cult in Syria. But they seem like inadequate explanations.

Islamic State’s most notable characteristics, after all, are not vestmental liberty or practical support for Palestinians, but filmed decapitations, sexual slavery and mass murder. These elements of Islamic State’s approach to governance are all well-publicized, mostly by Islamic State itself. And they make the Canadian woman’s assertion that her sister—“the sweetest, most innocent, timid person I know”—joined Islamic State because she wanted to do something about the injustice in the world sound hollow.

They also ignore aspects of Islamic State’s attraction that we seem comparatively more ready to accept when it draws in men: the group’s Islamic supremacism, and its fetish for gore and extreme violence. “So many beheadings at the same time. Allahu Akbar [God is great], this video is beautiful,” tweeted one Western woman cited by ISD. Another, also cited by ISD, writes: “I was happy to see the beheading of that kaffir [unbeliever]. I just rewinded to the cutting part. Allahu akbar! I wonder what he was thinking b4 the cut.”

According to Jayne Huckerby, an associate professor of law at Duke University who has advised the United Nations on women in conflict, gender stereotypes distort popular conceptions of why Western women might join Islamic State. “We do still very much operate in a world where the idea that women don’t have agency—that they must be tricked or under the influence or brainwashed or they only joined to become jihadi brides—is very much still a dominant frame.”

There may be an element of brainwashing at work, something William McCants, a Brookings Institution fellow and author of a forthcoming book about Islamic State, describes as the group’s “cult-like pull.” It also appears that skilled recruiters can strongly influence young minds. But these are forces that affect men and women. And yet it is women whom we are more likely to describe as “lost” to Islamic State, rather than as willing partisans. This is comforting, but it is also illusionary.

No Western woman with access to the Internet or daily news can claim ignorance about Islamic State’s horrors, including those it inflicts on women it has captured. But young girls from Canada and across the West are joining the group by the hundreds just the same. “Many of them are going over joyously, with eyes wide open,” says McCants, “absolutely and completely understanding what awaits them there.”

What’s driving teen girls to jihad?.