UK Newspapers’ Portrayal of Yazidi Women’s Experiences of Violence under ISIS

Although as of early 2019 ISIS has lost all of the territories it occupied, scholarly and media attention has continued to focus on its barbarity and brutal treatment of the women living in its former territories. The extremist group has committed a long list of severe human rights violations since it seized territories in Iraq and Syria. In this article, I aim to illustrate the reporting of this violence against the Yazidi women from 2014 to 2019 by the UK’s national newspapers because the media’s portrayal of these women shapes public opinion and policy towards this group in relation to the violence they have endured. The results indicate that while UK national newspapers give preferential treatment in their coverage of Yazidi women’s experiences of violence, abuse, and torture, they often ignore these women’s agency and activism in terms of the extent to which these women resisted and coped with the atrocities they endured