Boxing Sisters
Yazidi women are boxing their way back to health.
Local radio producer Jodie Taylor has produced a documentary that has just come out on BBC World Service. Jodie is a Hastings local (born and bred!), and the organiser of the boxing programme also lives in Hastings. Taban Shoresh is a Kurdish Iraqi genocide survivor who now runs a charity called The Lotus Flower for displaced women and girls, for which her shop in hastings helps to raise money.
The Boxing Sisters at a Training Session
The documentary is about a group of Yazidi women and girls in northern Iraq coping with the memory of the atrocities they have suffered at the hands of ISIS. It focuses on personal testimonies from the women about their experiences, and also on the reactions of their very conservative community.
Jodie sums up the content of the documentary briefly as follows:
In northern Iraq, Yazidi women and girls who have been the victims of brutal sexual enslavement and have lost swathes of their family and community to genocide at the hands of ISIS are finding an unusual way to heal: boxing.
Since 2014, when ISIS began targeting Yazidis because of their religious identity, those who survived the genocide have been confined to ‘internally displaced’ persons camps in the Kurdish region of Iraq. Here conditions are difficult and the women and girls still struggle to process all that has happened to them. So, in 2018, in the face of limited mental health support, Taban Shoresh and her team took a radical approach by offering boxing training to help the women and girls channel their emotions and anger.
The documentary asks this question: for women who have lived through unspeakable trauma and loss, can the sport of boxing offer physical and mental restoration? And in a deeply traditional and conservative community, how are they navigating the stigma attached to the idea of women boxing?
Narrated by Taban, and told through the personal stories of some of its participants, this documentary takes us inside the world of the Boxing Sisters.
Radio documentary: bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct7mvz
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