Two words: Case closed

The gap between the words “ISIS brides” and the reality of a child trying to get home from behind fences in Syria with a broad Australian accent is a gap that language is designed to prevent you from seeing, writes Wayne Hawkins.

LANGUAGE is never neutral. Every choice of words carries with it a verdict, and in the court of public opinion the decision is often made before anyone has examined the evidence. Nowhere is this more visible or more important than the two words that end an argument before it even begins.

“ISIS brides”

Read this again slowly. “ISIS”. The reader’s mind immediately goes to black flags, beheadings, mass executions, the most visceral events. terrorism of a generation. One word. Conviction complete.

Then “brides”. Soft, romantic, almost fairytale-like. A woman who chooses. A woman who willingly goes to the altar of all this. The story is told in two words and nothing else is needed. Why would a decent person want the return of a terrorist bride?

That’s the point. The language is designed to do exactly this.

The framework did not appear by chance. Because it was useful, it was equally adopted in magazines and newspapers, in Left and Right media outlets, in government press releases and in parliamentary debates.

It has allowed Western governments, faced with truly complex legal, moral and humanitarian obligations, to circumvent each of them. You can’t have a serious conversation about civil rights, due process, international law, or the legal status of children in a Syrian detention camp if the headline has already told the audience who these people are.

Two words. Case closed. Next story.

What the language hides is where it is disturbed.

Many of the women identified as “ISIS brides” recruited as minors. Shamima Begum, the case that clarified the debate in the UK, left the UK at 3.15pm.

He was groomed online, as teenagers are groomed, and went to a war zone. While Parliament was discussing the revocation of his citizenship, he lost three children and was stateless in a camp in northern Syria.

The “bride” framing enabled this entire public debate to take place without seriously acknowledging that a child was radicalized, trafficked into a conflict zone, and held legally responsible as a fully informed adult for decisions made at an age when he could no longer legally purchase beer.

Cases in Australia follow similar patterns. Women who broke up when they were young. Women who follow their husbands. Women themselves born in ISIS-controlled areas with no meaningful options. The “ISIS bride” label collapses each of these conditions into a single category that is politically convenient and legally dishonest.

Then there are the children

This is where language performs its most damaging task, because children are not brides. They are not ISIS. They had no ideology, no agency, no choice about where they were born or who their parents were. Many hold Australian citizenship.

Many were born to Australian citizens; international law It gives them rights that do not depend on their mother’s choices, their father’s crimes, or the political difficulties they create for a government that would prefer their existence to remain someone else’s problem.

When you listen to these kids talk, the whole frame suddenly collapses. They are not talking about the caliphate or ideology. They talk about wanting to go home. They want to see their grandparents. I want to go back to school. In the language of perfectly ordinary Australian children, asking for something as ordinary as a meat pie.

This is what the child of the “terrorist bride” sounds like. Like other Australian kids. Because they are like that.

The gap between those two words – “ISIS brides” – and the reality of a child in Syria asking to go home from behind a wire fence with a broad Australian accent is not a gap that language is designed to bridge. It is a gap designed by the language to prevent you from seeing.

The stripping of citizenship without charge, without trial, without due process is something Australia would unhesitatingly condemn if another government did so. Leaving children stateless in detention camps because their mother’s political toxicity makes repatriation onerous, a violation of international obligations that Australia has signed up to and largely ignored.

These are not radical positions. These are basic requirements of a legal system that applies equally, no matter how effective the pre-loaded public opprobrium of tabloid framing.

Language doesn’t just describe a situation. It determines which questions will be asked and which will never surface.

“ISIS Brides” asked a question: Why would we want them back? It made all other questions invisible. Citizenship of children. Age of radicalization. No hearing. Existence of international law.

Two words. An entire moral and legal framework was buried.

This is not reporting. This is a ruling.

And in a country that still claims to believe in the presumption of innocence, we should be disturbed that we have accepted it so completely and so quietly.