Boxing Sisters: Yazidi women boxing back to health
Can boxing help traumatised Yazidi women and girls heal from all they have been through?
The Documentary Podcast · BBC World Service
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Show Notes
In Northern Iraq, Yazidi women and girls who have been the victims of brutal sexual enslavement and lost swathes of their family and community to genocide at the hands of IS, 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.