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Women’s Involvement in Terrorism

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Abstract

Women have had a long history of participating in terrorist activity. This history extends from the earliest modern terrorist group, from the nineteenth century Russian People’s Will to the current wave of suicide bombings carried out by the Chechen Black Widows and the Tamil Tiger’s Birds of Paradise. This article traces the history of female involvement in modern terrorism and then goes on to make a number of generalizations about this experience. Among other things, the writers point out that women have played strong leadership roles in left-wing, revolutionary bands, while these roles have been far fewer with right-wing and racist aggregations. Women have tended to be late-comers to contemporary, religiously-inspired terrorism: Muslim religious authorities first had to endorse their participation.

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Notes

  1. There are several datasets. ITERATE has been maintained since 1968, current. Another dataset, formerly at RAND was migrated to the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, and later to the University of Maryland. This data set is no longer available. The Global Terrorism Dataset, originally constructed by the Pinkerton Agency is also now at Maryland. Among these data sets, only ITERATE directly includes participation of women. The other datasets are incident by incident descriptions, each of which must be read and coded for women’s inclusion.

  2. This illustrates the difficulty data compilers confront: lack of valid or accurate information surrounding most terrorist events.

  3. These categories are “compressed” into these ranges, given the very small number, typically zero, of counts across the range of the frequencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

    Leonard Weinberg & William Eubank

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  1. Leonard Weinberg
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  2. William Eubank
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Correspondence to Leonard Weinberg.

Appendix: Terrorist Gender

Appendix: Terrorist Gender

See Tables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.

Table 7 Foreign wounded per incident
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Table 8 Foreign killed per incident
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Table 9 USA victims per incident
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Table 10 US victim type per incident
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Table 11 USA wounded per incident
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Table 12 USA killed per incident
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Table 13 Terrorists wounded per incident
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Table 14 Terrorist killed per incident
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Weinberg, L., Eubank, W. Women’s Involvement in Terrorism. Gend. Issues 28, 22–49 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-011-9101-8

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