Part IV: What is the “Double Persecution” of Women of Faith?

In a previous post I examined the way religious freedom empowers women, helping them become peacebuilders in the home, community, and nation. On the other side of the coin is the double persecution of women for their sex and their faith. Because religion is a platform for women’s empowerment and leadership in society perpetrators, including governments and terrorists, target women of faith.

·       In 2023 Iran’s government used gender based violence to punish religious freedom protesters, which the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) identified as both religious persecution and violence against women.

·       The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) persecutes women Uyghurs for their Muslim religion and their place as culture-bearers. The CCP zeroes in on Uyghur women religious leaders  to carry out its genocide of Muslims in Xinjiang. The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) details the way that the CCP humiliates women, especially elderly women religious leaders, to undermine both their religious standing and their dignity as women. The UHRP debunked the mainstream perception is that only men are targeted for long prison sentences. This blind spot is one result of the analytical bifurcation between women’s rights and religious liberty addressed in a previous post. This in turn can cause data on women to go missing from the analysis and thus from policy and advocacy.

Terrorists use double persecution for military ends such as crushing political-military opposition.

·      In the early morning hours of October 7, 2023 the terrorist organization Hamas launched an attack on Israel, murdered and raped Israeli women and took hundreds of hostages.  

·      In 2014, ISIS abducted and enslaved Assyrian Christian and Ezidi girls and women from Sinjar.

·      In Nigeria —a decade after the famous case of the Christian Chibok girls were abducted by Boko Haram—Christian women continue to be targeted by the terrorists and, according to religious freedom organizations, by the government too, because it turns a blind eye for political reasons.

Cases like Israel, Sinjar, and Chibok urge us to understand more about how to predict, prevent, and punish this type of religious persecution. Sexual violence has generational effects on society for reasons Janie Leatherman articulated in Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict.  The invisible wounds of sexual violence persist even when the body heal. Societies, like the body, bear wounds of sexual violence for decades after the crimes.[SY1]  Reasons include a lack of special services to deal with that violence, women’s self-blame, fear, shame, or stigma, all of which leave societies with psychosocial wounds unhealed.

Societies are plagued by follow on crises as victims and survivors are vulnerable to human trafficking, prostitution, and other crimes that destabilize society and perpetuate violence, even using American military bases overseas. Status as a religious minority increases vulnerability and can hamper access to services. Hence, there is an urgency for US agencies to protect faith-based organizations that are on the front lines of prevention and response to these vulnerable populations. My next post will examine how to better integrate knew knowledge into achieving foreign policy goals by aligning women’s rights and religious persecution policy mandates.