It’s a fairly normal week in the Sisyphean struggle to keep women’s rights intact in 2024. A few days before I speak to activist Taban Shoresh, news breaks that Gambia has overturned its 2015 ban on female genital cutting. Meanwhile, Afghanistan is marking its third consecutive year with more than one million girls barred from secondary education, and the US Supreme Court is revving up to hear arguments on limiting access to the abortion pill mifepristone.
“In the most democratic country in the world, women don’t have rights over their bodies. Of course that is going to have a backlash in other parts of the world,” says Shoresh, drawing a comparison to central Iraq, where use of the word “gender” has been banned. “They do look at other parts of the world and say, ‘Well, they don’t have rights over their bodies. So who are you to tell me to do anything?’”
Shoresh is working on the frontline in the global tug-of-war over women’s bodily autonomy. Her charity, The Lotus Flower, supports some of the most vulnerable women and girls in the world. It focuses on northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, where millions live in camps made up of both internally displaced Iraqis and refugees from surrounding countries. The communities there have escaped everything from ISIS attacks to civil war.
“I know it’s no longer in the news, but Iraq is actually such a strategic location,” she says. “If it’s not stable, it can be quite dangerous because it spills over to everywhere else. So it plays a very critical role. It is somewhere where there’s a massive need.”
At four years old, Shoresh herself was put in jail during Saddam Hussein’s brutal military campaign against the Kurdish people in Iraq. Now 41, she’s cruelly familiar with the type of senseless violence that unites oppressive regimes around the world. She remembers when she and her family were put into trucks and realised, in a harrowing moment, they were en route to be buried alive in mass graves. Incredibly, they managed to escape when two Kurdish men intercepted their vehicle. The family fled Iraq for Iran, eventually settling in the UK when Shoresh was six.
It’s a poignant time to be a formerly displaced person in Britain, where the anti-refugee rhetoric has grown more acute (and absurd) under the Conservative government. “I’m in a unique position where I can compare it to when I came to the UK. The narrative was completely different,” says Shoresh. “Do they expect people to just disappear and vanish? These are people’s lives.”
The British Kurdish activist considers herself living proof of the positive impact refugees can make once they’ve been given the proper support to start a life in a new country. “That’s a big reason why I do share my story, to try and help that narrative and humanise it,” she says. “Don’t label us as just takers.” Her charity has managed to help more than 60,000 women and girls, and employs 200 people in Kurdistan, in addition to staff in the UK.
When Shoresh and her colleagues asked women and girls in one refugee camp what would be most helpful to reduce gender-based violence in their community, they said quite clearly that The Lotus Flower needed to involve men.
“It turned out a lot of it was mental health needs. So we started providing mental health services for men and boys, and that did actually reduce the gender-based violence with the group we were working with,” says Shoresh. “Imagine if you’ve gone through so much trauma, and you’re expected to kind of be the breadwinner of this household, but you’ve lost everything and you can’t do anything. You’ve got all these pressures on you, and you’re taking it out on others around you.”
Working with the young victims of traumatic events takes an inevitable mental toll, which Shoresh contends with daily. One girl was rescued from ISIS aged of 12, after being enslaved and raped for three years by six men. Finally back home, she felt traumatised and embarrassed, and was unwilling to leave the house. Shoresh managed to convince her to try The Lotus Flower’s girls’ boxing class. “She came to the session and realised that everyone was engrossed in the boxing. Nobody cared about each other.” The girl came back again and again, and after a few months, the girl’s mother sent Shoresh a photo of her back at school. “What keeps me going is that I get to see first-hand so many success stories,” says Shoresh. “I know it’s possible for someone to have their life turned around if they’re given the right opportunities.”
See Taban Shoresh at GQ Heroes in Oxfordshire, from 3-5 July, in association with BMW UK. For more information and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com.
Photograph by Jemima Ingamells
