Gendered Traumatization: Male and Female Survivors of the Yazidi Genocide and ISIS Captivity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recognition of the importance of gender as a salient factor for understanding the impact of genocides is a relatively new phenomenon. This shift in approach — an understanding of genocide as entailing gendercide — is particularly important for an understanding of the Yazidi genocide that ISIS undertook in northern Iraq beginning in June 2014. To explore these different gendered impacts, we conducted semi-structured interviews during the summers of 2019 and 2021 with seventeen female and fifteen male Yazidi survivors who currently reside in displaced persons camps in northern Iraq. These transcribed narrative interview texts reveal significant differences in how the female and male survivors narrate the experience of their traumatization. The core of the Yazidi female survivors’ traumatization was their experience of defilement as sabaya or slaves, most often sexual slaves. Yet even in the face of this social death, the female survivors’ narratives relate how they were able to enact strategies for protecting their human dignity, including engaging in various forms of resistance during captivity. Conversely, the core of the Yazidi male survivors’ traumatization was their experience in religious education camps where they were indoctrinated with ISIS ideology and enrolled in physical and combat training for their ultimate deployment as ISIS child soldiers. Precisely because the boys were offered an alternative mujahadeen ideal of manhood, their captivity narratives remain in limbo, ambivalently caught between the seeming failure of the Yazidi male code of honor and ISIS’s hyper-masculinized and violent jihadist identity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".