“The Consequences of Your Actions”: The Punishment of Shamima Begum

By: Aishling Mc Morrow (she/her)

Mulberry Academy, London, which was formerly known as Bethnal Green Academy. This is the school that Shamima and her two friends attended before travelling to Syria to join ISIS. Photo credit: Jake Brockman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

Although just a schoolgirl when she travelled to Syria, the framing of Shamima Begum as a national security threat and the subsequent stripping of her citizenship tap into well-established logics that serve to punish all women.

Shamima Begum may be a household name in the United Kingdom, perhaps even further afield, but her crimes, still to this day, remain unnamed. Shamima, along with two of her schoolfriends, travelled to Syria to join ISIS in 2015. Although a media storm immediately erupted around the girls, they seemed to vanish into thin air.

When Shamima Begum re-emerged in 2019, her two friends were dead, her two children were dead, and she was on the brink of giving birth for the third time. She was just 19.

Days later, with her newborn baby in her arms, Shamima was told in a live television interview that she had been stripped of her citizenship and would not be allowed to return to the UK. The Home Secretary at the time, Sajid Javid, had labelled her as “one of the most dangerous people in the world,” declaring that no one would let her return if they knew as much as he did.

In my article, I argue that in the absence of any clearly defined crime, Begum’s punishment has been legitimated through a trial by media. As she battled to reinstate her citizenship, my analysis shows that across numerous interviews, television appearances, and podcast episodes, two dominant discourses emerged through which her fate was understood and justified.

“You did go and join ISIS, you were a member of that group. That group was committing genocide... You are a part of a group doing those things and… you share some responsibility for that group’s actions” (Baker 2023)

Apology

My initial curiosity around the framing of Shamima stemmed from classroom conversations with students. Voices in those rooms were often suspicious, if not disbelieving, of Begum’s stated remorse.

This reaction also mapped onto the media analysis, in which commentators were fixated on the need for Shamima to apologize. Repeatedly, she was asked to apologize for the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, the ISIS genocide against the Yazidi people, beheading videos, and many other crimes.

Utilizing the work of Alice MacLachlan, I underscore how Begum has suffered from the paradox of apology. The contradiction at play here is that the more an apology has been demanded from Begum, the more likely these apologies are to be condemned. Across all interviews, Shamima was asked to apologise, to express remorse and repentance, and even to ask forgiveness from the “British people” as a whole. Yet, consistently, her apologies are rebuked and framed as insincere, strategic, and even sociopathic.

Thus, the repeated calls for Begum to apologize have locked her into a deficit model whereby she has not only been positioned as guilty of the manifold crimes of ISIS, but she has also been always-already guilty of failing to apologize. While Begum’s apologies may have been demanded from the start, as I highlight in the article, they have equally been doomed from the start.

A bad mother

The second discourse, perhaps unsurprisingly, focused on her status as a mother. Black feminist scholars, such as Ange-Marie Hancock, have extensively detailed how stereotypes that are written onto African-American women are underpinned by the archetype of a bad mother.

Patricia Hill Collins (2000) traces how these negative frames have been fundamental to the oppression of all Black women. The hugely detrimental impacts of the automatic coding of black women as bad mothers can be traced across maternal mortality rates (Amankwaa et al 2018), welfare policies, and even everyday interactions (Rosenthal & Lobel 2016). Thus, for women of color in particular, motherhood has always been the grounds on which punishment has been legitimated.

However, the weaponization of her status as a mother was indeed surprising to me. Not only was Shamima framed as a bad mother, as her children were deemed to have died due to her actions, but she was also to blame retroactively. Her decision to travel to Syria when she was a child, and before she was even a mother, also made her a bad mother. Her guilt transcends temporality. The fact that Shamima was a child when she travelled to Syria has never been enough to mitigate any of her perceived guilt. Yet, her status as a mother has been sufficient to condemn her.

As I show in the article, Shamima has been deemed to fail within these discourses; she has been unremorseful, and she has been a bad mother. Thus, it is this guilt that has established Shamima as deserving of punishment, rather than any guilt associated with named terrorist offences. I argue that she has been punished for her inability or unwillingness to offer a political apology “correctly” and for being perceived as a bad mother.

While the article traces the case of Shamima Begum, the overall point is that both of these discourses are powerful mechanisms that serve to punish all women. These discourses tap into already established logics about apology and motherhood that have long histories of serving to oppress women. In this sense, the way in which Begum’s punishment has occurred in this specific and gendered manner that has normalized and legitimized her framing as a national security threat is nothing new. Yet it has set a dangerous precedent.

Whether she is genuinely remorseful or not, whether she is a bad mother or not, we should watch the way in which Begum’s punishment has been legitimated with great concern.

Read the full article here: “The consequences of your actions”: political apology and the “mommy myth” as discursive punishment in the Shamima Begum case

Each blog post gives the views of the individual author(s) based on their published IFJP article. All posts published on ifjpglobal.org remain the intellectual property and copyright of the author or authors.

Blog

By: Aishling Mc Morrow (she/her)