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The female suicide bomber: Why do we differentiate?
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Iranian women wait to enter the holy Shiite shrine
of Imam Mousa al-Kazim in Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday,
Jan. 4, 2009, after a female suicide bomber
blew herself up among a crowd of pilgrims there
killing at least 35 people and wounding at least 65,
the Iraqi army said. The army said also that many of
the victims were Iranian pilgrims.
(AP Photo/Mahmoud Badri)
I was listening to the radio on Sunday, and I believe the BBC news was on. They were talking about a female suicide bomber. I didn't hear the rest of the story because I got caught up on the gender of the bomber. Why do we care if it was a female suicide bomber? I was trying to think about what relevance it has. I thought perhaps that it's relevant because until fairly recently suicide bombers were primarily men.
Then I did a little research. According to Wikipedia, the first female suicide bombers attacked in 1985. That's recent, but not so recent. I read an article in Marie Claire, of all places about a failed Female Suicide Bomber in Sri Lanka and the tale of how her life leads her to be given up involuntarily by her extended family to the Black Tigers, the suicide commando squad of Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). LTTE is terrorist group that has more female suicide bombers than any other organization in the world.
Initially, as an educated female having grown up in North America and Europe, I thought that perhaps women were suicide bombers because they wanted to be a part of the fight just as men are. I thought it was a bit ironic in some areas where women can't even go to school that they can sign on to fight such a fight, but I can't even begin to understand that thought process where men treat and see women playing such a completely different role in life and women live it. I know this is a bit of an unfair view, but I'm just speaking in general terms about a woman's life that would be so completely different from mine in so many ways.
As I do a little more research, I see a completely different picture. It's not a picture of heroism for a cause or fighting for what she believes in. It's a picture of fear, desperation, and losing the will to live. It's not the female warrior. It's the used, abused, sold, neglected, kicked to the ground complete loss of self-worth hollow shell that gets filled up with a mission and perhaps an ideology. It makes me think of gangs in the US and the children male and female who join them.
Jan Goodwin states in her article, When the Suicide Bomber is a Woman, "Army roles are gender-neutral, and the glory of martyrdom can be bestowed equally upon men and women. But unlike young men who seek the role of suicide bomber with great fanfare from their families, some female bombers gravitate toward the role as a last resort."
But, this is only one picture of the female suicide bomber. As, Lindsey O'Rourke writes in her New York Times Op Ed piece, Behind the Woman, Behind the Bomb, "To begin with, there is simply no one demographic profile for female attackers. From the unmarried communists who first adopted suicide terrorism to expel Israeli troops from Lebanon in the 1980s, to the so-called Black Widows of Chechnya who commit suicide attacks after the combat deaths of their husbands, to the longtime adherents of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam separatist movement in Sri Lanka, the biographies of female suicide attackers reveal a wide variety of personal experiences and ideologies."
This wide variety of personal experiences and ideologies defines the female suicide bomber and sheds light on how little we understand of the motivation behind both male and female bombers. I have learned that women pass through checkpoints more easily and thus can be more effective suicide bombers. Alex Kingsbury mentions, in a US News & World Report, that experts believe the use of women in attacks offers a greater psychological impact against the target population and offers greater publicity to the attackers. My question is why? Why do female suicide bombers offer a greater psychological impact. Is it because of their gender or because of the culture from which they emerge? What gives the female bomber this power?
