A Convenient Noun

The phrase “ISIS brides” has returned to Australian front pages alongside the women themselves, and is currently doing almost as much work as the agencies assigned to monitor them.

Two words. One noun that collapses a terrorist movement, a territorial caliphate, and a decade of international catastrophe into a convenient acronym. And one that reaches back several centuries for a legal and romantic status that most of the women in question may have held for only a portion of their time in Syria, if it applied straightforwardly at all. Together they constitute a category, efficient, memorable, and useful enough that almost everyone who uses it feels no particular pressure to examine it further.

They are not, of course. Neither are the alternatives. 'Returnees' sounds like a package holiday gone wrong. 'Detainees' is technically accurate for the camp years but does the security services' framing for them. 'Jihadist women' carries its own assumptions about agency. 'Victims of grooming and radicalisation' carries the opposite ones. The phrase 'ISIS brides' won the competition not because it is precise but because it is vivid, and because vividness in a media cycle tends to travel further, and faster, than precision ever does.

Language in these cases does actual jurisdictional work. Whether a woman is processed primarily as a criminal suspect, a national security risk, a victim of trafficking, or a returning citizen depends substantially on which framing reaches the minister's desk first and stays there. The AFP and ASIO have their preferred vocabulary. Human rights organisations have theirs. Journalists, who must file before the afternoon deadline, tend to reach for the phrase already in circulation. That phrase, once established, shapes what questions are asked and which ones aren't.

Consider what "bride" specifically implies: domesticity, arrival, a life organised around someone else's purpose. Some of these women did follow husbands or fathers into IS-controlled territory. Others made independent decisions of varying levels of coercion and conviction. A small number reportedly held administrative or facilitative roles within IS structures. These are not equivalent situations and do not warrant equivalent treatment, legally or otherwise. Yet the singular noun covers all of them, and the debate that follows treats the category as though it were internally uniform when it plainly isn't.

The phrase was coined, more or less, by the same media environment now treating it as self-evident fact. It is perhaps fifteen years old. It was not the term used by the women, by IS, or by Kurdish camp authorities. It emerged from coverage, stuck because it generated engagement and travelled well, and has since become the shorthand through which an entire security and legal debate is conducted and, 'Enemy combatant' once seemed like a precise legal category until the courts examined it.

The security question is real, and it is not resolved by pointing out that the vocabulary is messy. What is not resolved by ignoring the vocabulary, however, is the rather important matter of who, exactly, these women are, and whether the term we have been using for a decade is helping anyone answer that question, or merely making it feel as though we already have.

The phrase "ISIS brides" will continue to be used. It is, at this point, unavoidable. But the next time it appears in a headline, it may be worth pausing for a moment to notice how much of the argument has already been decided before the first sentence begins.

If you know someone who’d appreciate this, they probably will. Please share. Sharing's nice.
...
If you enjoyed this article and would like to see more, 'Buy the Goose a Coffee →'.
...
The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.