Mothers are revered in Southeast Asia. But, when it comes to extremism, might they also be part of the problem? Olivia Harris/Reuters

Terrorism research is now seeing a notable shift, with analysis examining the role women play as possible instigators of violence: mothers and mother-figures who are raising the next generation of soldiers.
 

Women as radicalisers

In Southeast Asia, for example, over the past year, there has been a rise in the number of stories of women involved in planning acts of terror and declaring support for extreme religious beliefs.

And ISIS is known to actively indoctrinate women in order to nurture young holy warriors.

Networks of women who pledge allegiance to the cause – whether ISIS’ or other extremist ideology – can exchange radical ideas among themselves and inculcate their children through a sustained domestic radicalisation strategy.

This suggests that terrorism prevention efforts should target not just extremist elements themselves, but also women, as possible vectors of radicalisation.

In Southeast Asia, home to 25% of the world’s Muslims, however, this proposition may sound particularly offensive. Here, women are often portrayed as symbols of virtue, selflessness and purity; entire sermons and treatises are dedicated to reverence for mothers.

A selection of hadiths, or Islamic teachings, about revering mothers are often cited as the reason for this inculcated respect, but even before the advent of Islam, Southeast Asian cultures treated mothers with great reverence.

Asian myths of various origins often feature a mother goddess who is deemed the personification of motherhood, fertility and creation.

Malay communities, for example, espouse a mother’s cherished status, and it is commonly believed that the pathway to heaven is in the footsteps of the mother.

The notion that it might lead instead to extremist thought and violent action is a dramatic departure from traditional thinking.

Nonetheless, across Muslim Southeast Asia, there are clear indications of increasing religiosity, from the controversial election, in April, of a conservative Muslim as Jakarta’s governor to purported support and empathy for ISIS in Malaysia.

Could mothers, those glorified beings, be part of the problem? Given dramatic economic and cultural changes underway in the region, the notion is not unfounded.
 

From distress to reprieve

As many parts of rural and coastal Southeast Asia undergo rapid development and urbanisation, many communities are quickly losing the natural habitats upon which their traditional livelihoods, like fishing and farming, depended.

Some families have been forced to migrate or commute to urban areas to seek employment in manufacturing, but volatile economic conditions and increasing automation have cast doubt on the longevity of even these jobs.

As a result, societies in which men have typically been the main breadwinner are now leaning on women to put food on the table.

To do so, mothers often rely on informal women’s networks . These provide information on bargain shopping or bartering for food. They might also resort to income-generating activities that men disdain as too difficult (such as the sale of homemade products) or too demeaning (such as collecting snails and greens in the forests).
 

Even as women in Southeast Asia increasingly serve as the family backbone, they receive little recognition or support for this role. Mental health services and financial assistance for women under pressure, such as those provided in some rural parts of India, are rarely, if ever, available here.

On the contrary, research has shown that that when men perceive that their public standing has been diminished by the inability to provide for the family, they may seek to exert more control in the personal sphere, translating into even more prohibitions on their wives and children.

Such economic and psychological burdens may leave poor, isolated women with religion as virtually their only reprieve.
 

Women as the family’s beacon of religion

A 2009 study of upper middle-class urban Malaysian women by Sylvia Frisk found that in spite of societal patriarchy, mothers and mother-figures are primarily responsible for disseminating and enforcing religious knowledge and rituals within their families.

And, in a decade of fieldwork in Malaysian coastal areas, we have seen that women who are most constrained by their husbands or families also most proactively take command of religious enforcement in their homes.

In other words, women who are under the most mental, physical or emotional pressures seem to find a sense of power that they are unable to exercise in other parts of their lives by compelling religious compliance in those closest to them.

Dictating religious practice becomes a way to exercise some form of control. The promise of a happier afterlife may also provide some sustenance.

The danger is that, unlike the upper middle-class women in Frisk’s study, poorer women have limited access to religious information. Their social circles are smaller, their movements more limited and they are less likely to read widely and critically question what they are taught.

If such women rely on a single source of Islamic learning, and that source is a radical one, they can be convincingly poisoned by extreme teachings. From here, it is not difficult to envision children being imbued with radical thought as well.
 

Empower the mothers

Women enforcing religious thought is innocuous on its own. But it becomes a concern when considered alongside the rise in female engagement with Islamic extremism.

In the Middle East, the existence of radical Muslim women’s networks has been documented. In several high-profile cases, mothers have encouraged their sons to fight the “holy war”.

At times, mothers appear to have even celebrated their children’s deaths as martyrs.

This is now happening in Southeast Asia too. As the recent case of Malaysian women selling their property to be with their ISIS lovers shows, radicalisation among women is on the rise.
 

We also found that it is increasingly socially unacceptable to speak out against or disagree with a religious entity – a religious school or a faith leader, for example – in Malaysian society today, which allows venues for extremist education to flourish unchecked.
Among Malay Muslim, the fear that not abiding by anything taught by a religious teacher can lead to a loss of pahala, the reward of heaven, encourages compliance with religious instruction – no matter its source or content.

All of these factors combined create the perfect setting for women to disseminate radical Islamic beliefs, both intentionally and unintentionally. Their offspring may then fulfil their filial duty to obey.

To reduce the likelihood that radical thought will be spread in Southeast Asia, empower the mothers. Providing socioeconomic support where it is most needed – among women – is the best insurance against future terrorism, ensuring that mothers and families remain vectors for positive action and tolerant beliefs, not hotbeds of distress and discontent.
 

Serina Abdul Rahman, Visiting Fellow (Malaysia Programme/ Regional Economic Studies), National University of Singapore and Christopher H Lim, Senior Fellow in Science, Technology & Economics at RSIS, Nanyang Technological University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post To Fight Radicalism, Empower Women: South East Asia appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In workplaces today, we can see how capitalists in collusion with the State to extract as much surplus value as possible from the labourer – not only by pushing wages down but by pushing productivity up. The latter is done, in part, by denying workers the time to sit for a few minutes, to use the toilet, have a cup of tea or a meal, exchange a friendly word with a colleague, change a sanitary pad, breastfeed a baby or attend to a child. At the same time, the State’s own ‘welfare’ provisions (which should be called ‘social wages’ rather than ‘welfare’, since they enable social reproduction) are drastically being shrunk and slashed.         
 
Maternity Entitlements and Childcare Provisions in India
 A recent Convention in Delhi, organised by the Right to Food Campaign in conjunction with many women’s groups, unions and organisations, highlighted the demand for universal maternity entitlements and childcare provisions.
 
In India, 90% of women are engaged in informal or the unorganised sector. They do not get maternity leave, nor wage compensation during pregnancy and after childbirth; instead they can be thrown out of work for getting pregnant. The principal employers and contractors all shrug off any responsibility for maternity and childcare provisions. Even in the organised sector, the Maternity Benefits Act, like labour laws in general, is rampantly violated.
 
The fact that workers, especially in the unorganised sector and especially women, are not allowed to avail their right to organise and form Unions, also contributes to a situation where labour laws and maternity entitlements laws are violated.
 
The National Food Security Act 2013 was a significant breakthrough, since it entitled all pregnant and lactating women to a maternity entitlement of at least Rs 6000 per child birth. This amount is far from enough, and does not take wages, minimum wages or inflation rates into consideration, but it is nevertheless an achievement. But how far has this entitlement been implemented in the past two and a half years?
 
The NFSA maternity entitlement is provided through the Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana (IGMSY). But the latter has undermined the universal nature of the entitlement. It is provided in just 53 districts, only to mothers above the age of 19 and for two live births – and also expects women to fulfil a range of conditionalities such as health check-ups, immunisation etc on their own responsibility in order to avail of the entitlement. This means that the State sits in judgement on women; and restricts the entitlement to ‘deserving’ mothers, blaming mothers for teenage marriages and pregnancies and for violating the neo-Malthusian ‘two-child’ norm. Perhaps most perverse is the manner in which mothers are blamed for not getting health check-ups and immunisation done or for failing to breastfeed babies – callously refusing to recognise the lack of basic healthcare provisions in vast tracts of India, and work conditions and chronic malnutrition that make breastfeeding difficult.         
 
Nine labour laws including the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act mandate crèches at the workplace – but like other labour laws, these are routinely violated. 
 
Voices of Mothers and Fathers
At a Jan Sunvai (Public Hearing) session at the Convention, we heard more than 25 women and some men from all over India speak of their lives as mothers and fathers. The picture that emerged was alarming.   
 
Sunita Bharti, a garment worker in Delhi and a migrant from Bihar, spoke of how she lost her job during pregnancy because the resulting anaemia and weakness made it difficult for her to walk for half an hour to work from home. She is a contract worker, and the contractor provided no maternity leave or entitlements. When her son was a year and a half, Sunita resumed work, but had to leave her baby at home to be cared for by her 12-year-old daughter who, as a result, quit school. At work, a room is designated as a ‘creche’ as required by labour laws, but is usually kept locked – and is opened only when buyers visit the premises.    
 
Activists from Jharkhand presented case studies of women from Jharkhand, many of whom had been denied maternity entitlements because they had delivered at home; difficult forest terrain had prevented them from being able to reach a hospital for the delivery. One Adivasi woman, Monica Dung Dung, risked her own life and her baby’s, travelling to a hospital without cutting the umbilical cord, hoping that this would persuade them to register it as an institutional delivery. But they refused – and as a result she could not avail of the entitlement.  
 
Babita, a sanitation supervisor in JNU, spoke of how she was kicked out of her job by the contractor when she returned after her delivery, and remained out of work for some 8 months till JNU students and the AICCTU affiliated General Kamgar Union held a Ghera Dalo Dera Dalo protest, occupying the ad block night and day for weeks to force JNU to reinstate her in the same position. They tried to demote her but could not, under pressure from the agitation. Sonia, another worker at JNU, said she took leave to deliver her baby girl, and wasn't kicked out, but wasn't given wage compensation or ESI benefits either.
 
Babita asked, 'Don't the poor have a right to deliver babies? Why won’t JNU compensate me for the eight months I was forced to take a break in service after having a baby? There are 300 contract workers in JNU, yet no creche facilities for them, nor nursing breaks. I think every woman is a worker and should get maternity entitlements and every parent should get child care and creche facilities at the workplace.' (An aside – JNU is the University that the Hindutva right wing has branded as a ‘den of sex racket and sedition’. Babita and Sonia clearly saw the JNU students in a very different light – as allies in the struggle for dignity as workers and as women.)   

It was painful to hear Himesh Bhai Vankar, a worker from Gujarat, speak of his wife’s death after childbirth and his struggles to bring up his daughter Shreya alone. HimeshBhai and his late wife Gangaben both suffered disabilities thanks to kyphoscoliosis. During her pregnancy, Gangaben was never warned of the dangers of this condition. After delivering a baby and being discharged from hospital, Gangaben fell grievously ill. When she returned to the hospital, a cotton pad that had been left in the uterine lining was removed – but she died of the resulting infection. Subsequently, the Government and the various health agencies did not want to admit to medical negligence, and instead blamed her death on the kyphoscoliosis, alleging falsely that she had gone ahead with the pregnancy against medical advice.
 
The baby Shreya is malnourished and the natural weaning process is yet to happen even though she is two years old. One member of the Jan Sunvai panel asked HimeshBhai if he could possibly find enough time to personally feed the baby and try to wean her. His answer reflected such helplessness and anguish that it was painful to witness. He travelled a couple of hours each day to his workplace where he is a tailor; his mother, brother and brother’s wife all have to go to work as well. “If I don’t get any help from the Government, how will Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (the Modi Government’s call to save and educate daughters) become a reality,” he asked with tears in his eyes.           
 
Paternalism and Public Shaming of Women
At the Convention, the paternalism of the state and statutory institutions stuck out like a sore thumb. The current Chairperson of the NCPCR (National Commission for Protection of Child Rights), instead of speaking of what her institution plans to do to enforce maternity and childcare provisions, delivered a lecture on how women must help themselves and not expect the Government to solve their problems. From the floor, however, her speech was met with vigorous slogans by participants, saying ‘We women are struggling for our rights, NCPCR we expect support from you!’
 
When Neelam, a woman worker, came to give her testimony about being denied maternity entitlements in her first two pregnancies, the representative of the National Commission For Women (NCW) interrupted to ask her if she was now pregnant with a third child. When Neelam said yes, the NCW representative (to the visible discomfort of other members of the Jan Sunvai panel) began to administer a prolonged public shaming and admonishment: “You belong to a women’s organisation, don’t you know better than to keep having babies, don’t you know there should be a gap of at least three years between babies?” The lively participants challenged this attitude from the floor though, with activists urging her to remember that she was there to give a hearing to the women and tell them what the NCW planned to do, not give the women a scolding.  
 
These episodes actually gave us a glimpse of the sheer humiliation and denial of basic human dignity to which women are subjected daily – not only at home and at work, but at the hands of hospitals, doctors, and a range of State institutions. Women are humiliated and shamed in patriarchal society for being barren or choosing not to bear children and for bearing girl children. And State institutions that supposedly work for women’s welfare also humiliate women in their turn; routinely deeming them ‘ineligible’ and ‘unfit’ for the entitlements they demand.       
  
The Central Government, the ruling party and its camp followers use the slogan of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ (victory to Mother India) to intimidate Indian citizens into ‘proving’ patriotism by performing ‘worship’ for the ‘Nation’ imagined as a Hindu goddess. But the Government and the ruling party is least bothered about rights of ‘Bharat ki Matayen’ (mothers of India), ‘Bharat ki mahilayen’ (women of India)  to life, to dignity, to control over their reproduction and their bodies, to food, maternity entitlements and childcare.       
 
(The author is Secretary, All India Progressive Women’s Association) 
 

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