The lived experience of surviving from the Islamic State attack and capture in Iraq and Syria: An arts-based qualitative study with Yazidi young women

Background: In August 2014, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) attacked the Sinjar district and destroyed several villages and towns and killed several individuals. Aim: In this study, the Yazidi young women who survived the ISIS attack were encouraged to express their lived experiences through paintings following participation in a 6-month art-based intervention program. Methods: A total of 13 Yazidi Kurdish females aged 18 to 25 years (Mean: 21.7 years) were invited to participate in an art-based (drawing and painting) course for 6 months in 2018. They were invited to draw or paint images that portrayed their lived experiences of attack and capture by the ISIS. Qualitative research situated within feminist methodology was used with the young women in this study. The interviews were analyzed using the descriptive content analysis method. Results: The paintings and narratives of the participants were constructed into three main themes: fear and traumatic experiences; feeling of hopelessness; and freedom and hope. During the attack and capture, due to the escape, rape, and horrific treatments by the ISIS fighters, the young women were traumatized severely. They were sold as a sex slave by the ISIS fighters. The participants still had severe anxiety and psychological challenges after being free from the capture. However, despite their traumatic experiences and feeling of hopelessness, most of them were hoping for freedom and a better future. Conclusions: This study showed that the Yazidi young females still experienced psychological challenges burdens even 3 years after the traumatic day. However, the participants showed their resilience through feeling hopeful for freedom and a better future.

Ambiguous agency in the vulnerable trafficked body: reading Sanusi’s Eyo and Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street

The narrativization of the trafficked body in the novels of Abidemi Sanusi and Chika Unigwe allows for a contemplation of Europe in African migrant imaginaries as both promise and failure. Sanusi’s Eyo is a narrative of a ten-year-old girl who is trafficked to the United Kingdom as a human sex slave. The novel draws attention to the tensions that define her being/unbeing in Europe and beyond, even after a brave escape from her traffickers. This precarious existence is enhanced in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, whose main characters exist in Europe selling their bodies while existing in states of continuous vulnerability. In reading these two novels side by side, this article explores the discursive meanings of trafficked bodies and how traumatic existence allows for an engagement with Europe as illusory in the imaginaries of African women who cross borders into Europe. The article argues that while the female characters are vulnerable, they retain an ambiguous agency contained within their ability to survive and remain resilient in the face of atrocities for borders crossers. The narrative form of the novel allows for an exploration of what this agency looks like in the face of extreme vulnerability.

Purity or danger? The establishment of sex trafficking as a social problem in Sweden

Sex trafficking has become established as one of the most significant (crime) problems in the Western world. This article provides a greater understanding of how the work of certain actors, that is claims-makers, established sex trafficking as a prominent problem on the political and media agendas in Sweden during the 2000s. It can help us understand how certain crimes can achieve the position of social problems. The study analyses political texts and debates, newspaper articles and reports published by the Swedish police. The sex-trafficking discourses that were particularly dominant in the material were: ‘The ideal sex slave Lilya’ (referring to the film Lilya 4-ever), ‘The foreign threat from the East’ and ‘Hidden but well-established organized crime’. By defining sex trafficking as an important problem, with the aid of these three discourses, a large number of claims-makers were given the opportunity to emphasize threatening and racialized discourses about ‘sex slaves’, immigration and organized crime. These discourses on sex trafficking create moral borders between innocence and guilt, between belonging and unbelonging, and between purity and danger.

Cultural Competence of Western Psychotherapists in Helping Sex Trade Survivors: An Initial Exploration

Sex-trafficking survivors that come from the Developing world and who become free in the west, can receive help from western psychotherapists. A therapist who is able to provide help to a former sex-slave of this origin is answering to a need for culturally competent mental health professionals. To serve this goal, the author analyses the example of Nigerian women who become free in the west and provides information about their background that could be useful in session. Parallel to this discussion, the question of whether cross-cultural differences can be overcome in therapy in an ethical way arises.

Ruined Abjection and Allegory in Deadgirl

Deadgirl (2008) is a horror film that gained notoriety on the film festival circuit for its disturbing premise: when a group of teenage social outcasts discover a naked female zombie strapped to a gurney in the basement of an abandoned asylum, they decide “to keep her” as a sex slave. Accordingly, two sites of monstrosity are staged—one with the monstrous-feminine and the other with monstrous masculinities. Insofar as the film explicitly exploits images of abjection to engender its perverse pleasures, it would seem to invite “abject criticism” in the tradition of Barbara Creed, Carol Clover, and colleagues. However, in light of recent critical appraisals about the limitations of “abjection criticism,” this article reads Deadgirl as a cultural artifact that demands we reassess how abjection is critically referenced, arguing that—instead of reading abjection in terms of tropes and themes—we should read it in diachronic, allegorical ways, which do not reify into cultural representation.

Rethinking sin and evil through the life of a child sex slave

This article rethinks (original) sin and evil through the life of a child called Engela who has been ‘sold’ into sex slavery. Focus is placed on the high value with which children should be regarded, especially children who have been sold as sex slaves. During this argument the emphasis is placed on ecclesiastical evolutionary perspectives on creation as well as relevantand contemporary understandings of sin and evil, and related to this, the devil and hell. Towards the end of the article theological consideration is given to fatherlessness, because Engela’s father was often absent in her life. According to literature, Jesus in all probability grew up without a father too. It seems as if Joseph played a minimal role in his life and education, whilst Jesus’ own experience of rejection laid the foundation for his compassion with the socially rejected, particularly children. Fatherlessness from a black African liberation perspective is also contextualised and applied.

Public treasury looting for global North banking, public welfare denial, migration and sex-slave trafficking of Nigerians after colonialism

Enslaving and victimising the poor by criminals within and outside governments of underdeveloped countries is gaining attention of academics in the social sciences. This article clarifies inter-relationships among modern slavery and trafficking in girls/women for sexual exploitation. It also shows how vulnerability of people victimised by the crime has been increased by policies deriving from neo-liberalism. To facilitate explication of the variables/issues, the study was based on the theoretical/doctrinal and political aspects of neo-liberalism, coinciding with scenarios of declining welfare, increasing susceptibility/vulnerability of Nigeria’s poor (non-elite) and massive unemployed youth to out-migration and traffickers in persons. The explicated issues include modern slavery (generally and trafficking in Nigerian girls/women for sexual exploitation abroad) as well as the relationships among treasury looting and stashing of the loot in the banks of the global North. It is explained how declining welfare (i.e. multiple-dimensional adversities e.g. unemployment) provokes desires in the unemployed to out-migrate and increases their susceptibility to trafficking in persons. Finally, the article is concluded.

Gendering Cultural Memory: Balzac’s Adieu

In this essay I examine the en-gendering of cultural memory in Honoré de Balzac´s story Adieu (1830), which proceeds from a repressed trauma originating in historical events. Balzac wrote the story in the spring of 1830, i. e. at a time when the French discontent with the Restoration regime was soon to explode in the July Revolution. The story is considered to claim that the Restoration regime’s repression of revolutionary history will recieve serious consequences in the present. But the question is how the now of the Restoration can best be linked to the then of the Revolution and the Empire? How can history be represented in a productive way, without silencing traumatic memories? My suggestion is that the abyss be-tween now and then has to be met with an ethically informed respect for difference. Stéphanie, the protagonist, dies when Philippe creates an exact replica of the traumatic situation in which they were separated many years ago. She then became a sex slave to the retiring French army, dehumanized during the hard Russian campaign, an experience that also dehumanized her. This Philippe refuses to acknowledge, since he wants to retrieve the woman he knew. That can of course never happen, but in insisting on it, I would claim that he actually renders Stéphanies life after the trauma impossible. Instead of emphasizing the distinction between past and present, Philippe overlooks it, with the severe consequence of Sté-phanie’s death. In my analysis I relate to pertinent discussions in the interdisciplinary field of cultural memory studies (an expanding field of research within the wider frame of cultural studies), but since it rarely discusses gender aspects I find it essential to relate also to feminist scholars who continually have scrutinized issues concerning memory and history writing.