For the last year, headline news reports covering young women engaging in jihad, have been prominent in France and in the UK. The coverage of young women is more present in the news that the coverage of men engaging in jihad with the young women frequently portrayed as “lost” either because of sometimes mentally unstable or in conflict with their family. This paper examines two aspects of this coverage that are in conflict: the narrative of women “going to war” and the narrative of women engaging in “jihad”. The first narrative of women doing war relates to women breaking away from traditional gender roles and engaging in war. The second narrative highlights the struggle that the mainstream media has in regards to women joining the fight in a “holy” war, when that war is portrayed in the same media as both evil and cruel. The paper will use a word-counting analysis of mainstream British and French newspapers, divided between broadsheet and tabloid. The paper will show that in spite of the news coverage which is reporting women breaking gender-roles, the traditional roles are actually more prominent and that the western media show more a narrative for a war against extremist Islam in which women are caught in between.
