Women, Justice, and Gender Prejudice: From Nazi Crimes to ISIS Affiliations

There is a historical, legal, and political thread connecting the trials for Nazi crimes to the current European debates on the responsibility of women involved in extremist groups like ISIS. It is an uncomfortable thread, because it forces us to question a deeply rooted belief in Western societies: the idea that women are, quasi by definition, marginal, passive figures, swept along by events rather than protagonists.

Yet, the history of the twentieth century and contemporary crises reveal a more complex reality. Women have not only been victims of totalitarian systems, wars, and violent ideologies; in some cases, they have also been participants, collaborators, beneficiaries, or perpetrators. The problem is that this evidence, when it reaches the judicial space and public debate, is often distorted by persistent gender bias. This raises a crucial question: when a woman participates in a criminal system or an extremist organization, is she judged for what she has done or for what is culturally expected of a woman?

For decades, the dominant narrative depicted female participation in mass crimes as exceptional, secondary, or at least subordinate to male authority. This approach produced two opposite but equally problematic consequences. On the one hand, many women were almost automatically considered less culpable than men. On the other hand, when their involvement became evident, public outrage took particular violent forms, precisely because the guilty woman was seen as a double transgression: against the law and against the social image of femininity.

This double standard emerged forcefully in the immediate postwar period. Alongside military and civilian courts, practices of informal punishment, whether communal or openly extrajudicial, developed in various European contexts. Women accused of collaboration were publicly humiliated, exposed to mockery, and banned from the community. The demand for justice was intertwined with the need for a symbolic reaffirmation of the violated order. But precisely here, emerges a delicate point: public justice and collective vengeance often tended to target women as visible bodies, transforming punishment into spectacle and guilt into stigma.

The relationship between legal responsibility and social responsibility, which emerged forcefully in those contexts, is not just a thing of the past. After every collective trauma, societies feel the need to redefine the boundaries of their belonging: who has betrayed, who can be reintegrated, who must be excluded. Even today, in European discussions on the return of individuals affiliated with jihadist groups, the issue concerns not only the penal code, but also social memory, the recognition of victims, and the possibility of reintegration.

When women are held accountable for their actions in contexts of organized violence, certain lines of defence frequently recur; coercion, ignorance, and the marginalization of their role. These are arguments that cannot be dismissed in a simplistic way. In totalitarian or terrorist contexts, coercion is often real, and the line between survival, adaptation, and complicity can be extremely ambiguous. However, the problem arises when these arguments are accepted quasi automatically in the case of women, as if femininity itself constituted a presumption of passivity.

This is where gender bias is most profound: not so much in consistently denying guilt, but in reducing women to much less active and therefore less accountable subjects. This distortion clearly resurfaces in the way Europe today addresses the issue of women linked to ISIS. Public debate oscillates between two simplifying representations: the manipulated victim or the exceptional monster. In both cases, what is missing is an adequate understanding of agency.

Some women have indeed been coerced, trafficked, or abused. Others have actively supported the project of the so-called caliphate," contributing to propaganda, social control, recruitment, and ideological reproduction. Reducing everyone to the category of victim obscures real responsibility; treating them all as combatants is equivalent to ignoring substantial differences in role and context. The task of the law should be precisely to distinguish, grade, and ascertain. In order to do that, it requires a culture capable of observing, not projecting stereotypes.

The contemporary risk is that of a new form of selective impunity. If political violence continues to be interpreted through implicitly masculine categories, many female behaviours will remain underestimated or invisible. And so, the historical lessons of the postwar period risk not being mastered.

For Europe, this is a question of legal culture and democratic credibility. But for European Islam, it is something more: it is a test of political maturity. Islam rooted in the European space cannot simply react to external narratives, nor take refuge in an identity defence that tends to erase internal ambiguities. It must, Instead, develop its own analytical capacity, capable of recognizing both conditions of vulnerability and forms of responsibility.

A mature reflection should instead eschew both shortcuts. It should question the mechanisms through which gender shapes the perception of guilt, but also the way in which European Muslim communities elaborate—or avoid—the issue of individual responsibility. In this regard, the issue is not only about law, but about the construction of public ethics.

Comparing the post-World War II trials with the challenges posed today by jihadism reveals an uncomfortable truth: gender continues to profoundly influence the way societies define guilt, complicity, and punishment. However, simply acknowledging this distortion is not enough. We must question who produces these interpretative categories and what space exists today for their reprocessing.

If Europe does not overcome its prejudices, it will continue to oscillate between paternalistic absolution and symbolic demonization. If European Islam does not develop its own analytical tools, it will continue to be defined from the outside. In both cases, the result will not be more equitable justice, but weaker understanding.

Thus, without understanding, there is neither justice nor integration

EuroIslam
Weekly Editorial no. 4