The tabloid Daily Mail constructed a similar story. In one report, it claimed that the girls had been “ruthlessly groomed online” and were “brainwashed in their bedrooms.” It noted that both Begum and Sultana were prolific Twitter users, and that Begum had followed scores of pro-ISIS accounts, giving her “access to a torrent of appalling images and footage.” It quoted Begum’s sister as saying, “We love her, she’s our baby. She’s a sensible girl. ... [ISIS is] preying on young innocent girls and it’s not right.”

This infantilizing narrative is the same one that the parents of Aqsa Mahmood—the 20-year-old ISIS propagandist from Scotland investigated for potential connections with the three schoolgirls—offered to explain their own daughter’s radicalization: “She may believe that the jihadists of ISIS are her new family but they are not and are simply using her. … Our daughter is brainwashed and deluded.” Writing in The Guardian, Humaira Patel—herself a female Muslim student from East London—similarly reflected on how the three schoolgirls had been “led astray by people with no morals” and had fallen “prey to a form of virus spreading through the Internet, brainwashing young women and men in the name of religion.”

The idea that jihadists are brainwashed or somehow manipulated isn’t just a media trope. It also appears to be a foundational tenet of one of the most lauded counterterrorism initiatives in the world today—the Mohammad bin Naif Counseling and Care Center in Saudi Arabia—even though the center’s official materials make no reference to the term “brainwashing.”

The center, established in 2004, purports to “de-radicalize” jihadists—or, as the center prefers to call its detainees, “beneficiaries”—through an extensive program of religious re-education. It also provides psychological counseling, convenes classes in creative writing and artwork, and helps with post-treatment resettlement. These activities reflect the worldview that jihadists are misguided about the authentic nature of Islam and their religious obligations, and that these lost souls must be returned to the correct path. All this comes out clearly in the research of my doctoral student Mohammad Almaawi, who has undertaken an empirical analysis of the center’s practices and philosophies. One staff member told Almaawi that the majority of detainees were, in his view, “simpletons” whose youth—most are in their early 20s—and “lack of knowledge [made] it easy for extremists to target them and influence their way of thinking.” The solution to extremism, this staff member said, lay in the propagation of “true” Islam, by which he apparently meant the apolitical and conservative version defined by the center and the Saudi state.

Harvard terrorism scholar Jessica Stern recorded similar views among staff members in 2010, following her own visit to the center. “A Saudi official,” she wrote, “told the group of us who visited ... that the main reason for terrorism was ignorance about the true nature of Islam.” She observed that “the guiding philosophy” behind the center’s efforts “is that jihadists are victims, not villains, and they need tailored assistance—a view probably unacceptable in many countries.”