A new report reveals surprising reasons young women and girls get involved with radical terrorist groups overseas. The Status of Women report was released in Quebec City Thursday afternoon.
The province hopes the report will help prevent vulnerable women from joining violent jihadist movements in Iraq and Syria.
“They’re not really women who are prone to violence at all. They’re very successful at school, that was one of the elements of surprise,” Immigration Minister Kathleen Weil said.
There is no specific profile for a woman who might join a terrorist organization overseas.
READ MORE: Many factors can contribute to youth radicalization: Quebec report
Researchers interviewed 12 people at a prevention centre in Montreal. The women they interviewed were between 17 and 19 years old. They found a family’s economic situation didn’t play a role. Neither did ethnicity.
Instead, factors included:
- A traumatic event in childhood, such as the death of a loved one;
- The type of female role models in a young woman’s life;
- A question of identity or wanting to belong to something.
“They don’t come from very religious families,” Weil said. “They are themselves Muslim but they’re not particularly religious.”
A McGill University research group released a study with similar findings earlier this week involving 2,000 CEGEP students.
That report showed that religion actually protects young people from violent radicalization.
READ MORE: Ralph Goodale: Canada must work to understand, combat radicalization
The RCMP’s new Terrorism and Violent Extremism Awareness Guide also underscores there is no single profile of someone who is radicalized.
“So it brings home that feeling of despair that their parents have revealed in all of the media; not being able to understand why their kids are going in this direction,” Weil said.
Hundreds of young women from western countries have left for Syria or Iraq since 2012. In February, six teenagers from Montreal and Laval, two women among them, went missing. It’s suspected they went to Syria.
“They are not proposing to women to engage and to fight and to engage into violence,” research manager Benjamin Ducol said. “For example, domestic tasks, the fact that they are going to be put in this kind of caring role.”
Weil said the next step is to share this research with those who work with young people, namely parents and teachers, to better inform them how to prevent radicalization.
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