ISIS desensitized child fighters to killing through modeling and graded practice
Evidence
To model gruesome killings and desensitize revulsion to them, children were shown videos and witnessed beheadings and stonings. For one training session, after viewing beheading videos, the youth practiced beheadings on three captured Syrian soldiers. As described by a child attendee who defected, “[a]fterward, the teachers ordered the students to pass around the severed heads” (Belz, 2015). Gruesome behavior was likened to an ordinary culinary practice: “It was like learning to chop an onion. You grab him by the forehead and then slowly slice across the neck” (Belz, 2015). Another execution video showed a child shooting two suspected spies in the back of the head, spraying their writhing bodies with bullets and smiling proudly while applauded as a “lion cub.” In a video of thorough dehumanization, children were shown playing with severed heads and poking fun at the decapitated bodies. There was no limit to the atrocities for which morality was suspended. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2453
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- STORYSTEM: The detail of child soldiers learning to behead by likening it to chopping an onion is a chilling, vivid narrative device — usable as a depiction of brutalization in fiction, showing how normalizing metaphors make atrocity possible.