British IS schoolgirl 'wants to return home'

[weepiper]

Honestly. It's just a variant on the 'should have kept her legs shut' stuff that all teenage mums get if they dare to mention that their life has turned out to be a bit more challenging than they expected. People love to tell young mothers how much it's all their own fault, and they hate to see them getting any compassionate treatment, and most of all they get outraged if they have the temerity to ask for help.

 

[kebabking]

Honestly. It's just a variant on the 'should have kept her legs shut' stuff that all teenage mums get if they dare to mention that their life has turned out to be a bit more challenging than they expected. People love to tell young mothers how much it's all their own fault, and they hate to see them getting any compassionate treatment, and most of all they get outraged if they have the temerity to ask for help.

If she was a 19 yo man, would your views be different?

 

[eoin_k]

The British state showing compassion would be fairly low down my list of priorities, or expectations, in the case. She might have been a minor when she went out there, and the school messed up in the cases of some of her cohort. (A few of the girls left after the school gave them letters addressed to their parents, informing them that their daughters were at risk, which might not have been the most effective way of raising such a serious concern with hindsight.) But, she's an adult now with a commitment to a fascist ideology.

Any argument for not just shrugging our shoulders at this point needs to be framed in more general terms. Does the anti-terror legislation she would be prosecuted under criminalise activity that would not previously have been illegal? What wider implications does this have for political dissent? When a minister on the news said that she could come back, but that the Foreign Office wasn't perpared to send staff to a war zone to provide consular support to get her out, I struggled to see what was so wrong with this position. Plenty of people get themselves into a sticky station abroad without consular support. As for any child(ren) involved the one expectation that seems reasonable would be consistency with how a similar case would be handled in a similar case involving a far-right group. I imagine that the situation might look very different if an English Patty Hearst joined some dodgy US far-right group just before they commited an attrocity. While far-right groups might share an equally hateful ideology, its hard to think of hypothetical comparison to Isis in terms of the sheer scale of their effectiveness.

They're men.

Apart from the ones that weren't. Irish Republican prisoners, women and feminists among them, engaged in a political process that led to their release. No doubt loyalist women ended up in prison too, although I can't think of any off the top of my head. That's the substantive difference between these cases.

 

[Pickman's model]

They're men.

what, all of them?

 

[Teaboy]

Honestly. It's just a variant on the 'should have kept her legs shut' stuff that all teenage mums get if they dare to mention that their life has turned out to be a bit more challenging than they expected. People love to tell young mothers how much it's all their own fault, and they hate to see them getting any compassionate treatment, and most of all they get outraged if they have the temerity to ask for help.

Sorry, I don't think its that. At least that's not the main driver. I think you're drawing parallels with other situations which don't exist.

Its the IS thing. She enabled IS as much as any UK male who joined to fight.

 

[likesfish]

From her interview, she seems to regret not being there at the last stand.
That's not exactly screaming IS was wrong, murdering people who aren't the correct flavor of Islam is wrong and I shouldn't do it. Republicans mostly signed a peace treaty and stuck to it Daesh hasn't.

 

[eoin_k]

Honestly. It's just a variant on the 'should have kept her legs shut' stuff that all teenage mums get if they dare to mention that their life has turned out to be a bit more challenging than they expected. People love to tell young mothers how much it's all their own fault, and they hate to see them getting any compassionate treatment, and most of all they get outraged if they have the temerity to ask for help.

Surely if teenage girls are old enough to exercise some autonomy over their sexuality they are old enough to take some responsibility for their own actions when they decide to join a gang that kidnaps, rapes and murders other women?

 

[SpookyFrank]

It's the one most people take - they choose not to travel thousands of miles to become fangirls of a genocidal, slaving state. Once she chose to be different the good options started falling away.

Cool so your solution is 'don't do the thing you've already done'.

 

[skyscraper101]

Notwithstanding that she should be allowed back on compassionate grounds having been a groomed UK child, now brainwashed adult, she'd be a way better intelligence asset here than left stateless out there.

 

[likesfish]

Cool so your solution is 'don't do the thing you've already done'.

british state is murderous but not genocidial and doesnt take slaves

 

[Teaboy]

From her interview, she seems to regret not being there at the last stand.
That's not exactly screaming IS was wrong, murdering people who aren't the correct flavor of Islam is wrong and I shouldn't do it.

Its not going to happen though is it? There is nothing to suggest the true believers have changed their mind in any respect. The entire IS schtick was basically a death cult, you're not going to get out of that mind set just because things have started to unravel for you. None of them will think they've done anything wrong and in fairness to her's she's not pretending otherwise.

 

[weepiper]

Surely if teenage girls are old enough to exercise some autonomy over their sexuality they are old enough to take some responsibility for their own actions when they decide to join a gang that kidnaps, rapes and murders other women?

She decided to join the gang when she was still under the age of consent.

 

[SpookyFrank]

and what are uk values then?

Don't join ISIS. Don't give support or allegiance to murderous regimes unless they are among the numerous murderous regimes we as a nation officially support. Don't mention our pals in China who have built an infrastructure of repression and torment ISIS could only dream of. Don't mention our pals in Saudi Arabia. Don't mention the Turkish state we are still doing business with despite their support of ISIS and their own crimes against humanity.

And say thanks to the driver when you get off the bus. I think that's it.

 

[Manter]

There are at least 7 British women and 15 or so children in that camp, according to the journo on the radio yesterday. I don't see how making them stateless helps anything or anyone, which implies they should get consular assistance to return here, once they've served any jail terms elsewhere. When they're here there are plenty of laws that can be used to lock them up or restrict their movements, and to take their children into care.

Completely agree- but if you read the FCO guidance on Syria says that they can offer no consular support there. She needs to get to, say, Lebanon. Then, as she has a British passport, she can come home.

 

[SpookyFrank]

british state is murderous but not genocidial and doesnt take slaves any more

FFY

Also worth noting that the British state does have in common with ISIS the use of child soldiers.

 

[weepiper]

If she was a 19 yo man, would your views be different?

Yes, because if she was a man, she wouldn't have been impregnated three times already and lost two of the babies. I can't believe I actually have to spell this out.

 

[Pickman's model]

FFY

you could have taken the extraneous i out of genocidial

 

[tim]

i must have imagined internment, the h-blocks, the campaigns against strip-searching, the blanketmen and hungerstrikes then.

perhaps you should read this

and this

I cant forget that but I can't forget this either

Neither of them seemed too troubled by the compromises they'd made.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

She decided to join the gang when she was still under the age of consent.

There's an age of consent for joining ISIS?

 

[weepiper]

There's an age of consent for joining ISIS?

Haha. Ha.
We have an age of consent because it's generally agreed that until around 16 children don't have the capacity to make informed decisions about consequences to life choices.

 

[Manter]

She is still with IS isn't she? So she is hardly going to start criticising IS...while still in their presence.....this may be her only way out of the mess she is in.
Once back in the UK she and her baby will be relatively safe.

She’s in al-Hawl. SDF are largest military presence near there, it’s outside d’aesh territory.

 

[Pickman's model]

I cant forget that but I can't forget this either

Neither of them seemed too troubled by the compromises they'd made.

the road leading to that meeting was paved in part by the imprisonment of thousands of irish republicans

 

[chilango]

and what are uk values then?

There's posters of them in every school these days.

Children have to learn them.

 

[tim]

the road leading to that meeting was paved in part by the imprisonment of thousands of irish republicans

And a fair few loyalists but very few in the official British forces.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

Haha. Ha.
We have an age of consent because it's generally agreed that until around 16 children don't have the capacity to make informed decisions about consequences to life choices.

That's to do with sex, not joining Islamic terror states. One presumes she didn't have sex until she married her Dutch beau, that was once she was in the caliphate, an area which seems to have had a somewhat more lax attitude to sex, especially with regards to raping Yazidi women and girls who were kept as slaves by people such Shamima Begum.

 

[eoin_k]

She decided to join the gang when she was still under the age of consent.

She she went out there when she was under 16, but she was above the age of criminal responsibility and of an age where the decision to enforce charges of statutory rape take in to consideration the question of consent, both parties ages and parental attitudes. She wasn't an adult in law, but nor was she a child.

More young men than young women are criminalised for how their lives play out over the course of this transition.

 

[A380]

I’m concerned about some people trying to devalue her ability to make choices as her own actor.

Just because what she chose to do was abhorrent- supporting a slave owning theocracy - doesn’t mean mean she wasn’t competent. It showed ( misplaced in my opinion) courage and skills and probably a fair degree of intelligence of both kinds to get from London to the IS. I am concerned about people who try to infantilise women and BME people as not being as responsible for their actions as white men of any age.

Anyway, I both hate and fear her and her fellow IS comrades. That’s my starting point.

I’m not sure there is a good solution. The best is to see if she makes it back to the UK and then try her as a criminal and deal with her punishment and rehabilitation like that. The American Gitmo approach both didn’t work and was wrong and the Russian shooting people in the head approach is also wrong and makes us into something we don’t want to be.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

Haha. Ha.
We have an age of consent because it's generally agreed that until around 16 children don't have the capacity to make informed decisions about consequences to life choices.

btw, the age of criminal responsibility in the UK is 10.


eta: as mentioned by eoin_k above.

 

[tim]

There's posters of them in every school these days.

Children have to learn them.

So uniquely British too! Or so we're meant to believe

 

[Pickman's model]

Haha. Ha.
We have an age of consent because it's generally agreed that until around 16 children don't have the capacity to make informed decisions about consequences to life choices.

unless you're in france where they deem such decisions can be made at 15 or in austria, germany or estonia where the aoc is 14, whereas in cyprus they feel consent can only be given at 17 and the turks locate the age at 18. it's by no means "generally agreed" there's something special around 16.