Whose Life Is It?
Go, Sunny.
…annoying cultural traditions have a distinct knack of clinging on through generations. It would be no exaggeration to say that thousands of young British Asian women are forced into marriage every year…I have seen well educated and well adjusted friends slowly become nervous wrecks as their parents pile on the pressure…last week the Home Office decided a specific law to ban forced marriages was not needed. To put it mildly, the decision was not only a travesty but an unbelievably stupid fudge…Yet once again Labour has fallen victim to an army of Asian apologetics who prefer this muddle and like to pretend that the practice is very rare. Complete rubbish.
Go on.
For example, Pragna Patel from the Southall Black Sisters, is quoted as saying on Radio 4: “We don’t see the need for criminalisation of forced marriage, which is yet another way of stereotyping and criminalising entire communities at a time when there is heightened racism in this country.” When a women’s rights group is more worried about stereotyping than the well-being of thousands of women, alarm bells should be ringing within their offices.
Yeah. It’s also quite an odd idea that forced marriage should not be criminalized. It’s not as if it’s a trivial thing. It’s not like forcing a woman to sit next to someone she doesn’t like at dinner, or like forcing her to stay home for an evening when the relatives are coming over. It’s deciding the entire shape of her life; it’s handing her over to someone who will have authority over her (clearly people who think forced marriage is appropriate for girls are not going to think an egalitarian marriage is a swell idea) for the rest of her life (or his) without allowing her the right of refusal. What if she has other plans? What if she wants to go to graduate school and become a physicist or an historian? What if she wants to become a journalist and work on the foreign desk, spending a few years in Africa maybe, then a few years in Latin America or Asia? What if she wants to become a musician, or a surgeon, or a computer scientist? What if she simply wants to shape her own life rather than having her parents shape her life? Well, she doesn’t get to. So, what is that? It’s slavery, or else imprisonment. Slavery and unlawful imprisonment are both crimes, so why should forced marriage not be a crime? Because it’s okay if it’s your parents who do it to you? I don’t think so.
Many of the respondents felt naming and shaming of coercive parents would lead to communities being “unfairly labelled” and creating a negative stereotype. Such daft responses are not surprising once you consider that most of those opposed were middle-aged men considered to be our “community representatives”…It is racism of the worse kind – a tacit acceptance that vigorously affording them the same protection as other women is not necessary because of their colour or culture.
Yup. See (as I have said several times in the past) Susan Moller Okin’s Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?. Clearly, yes, it is.
If you think it’s not, check out the comment (at 10:26 p.m.) of FaisalB – would that be Faisal Bodi?
Another article betraying your thirst to gain secular liberal acceptance. Where’s imprisoning parents going to get anyone? The whole idea behind the government’s culturally and religiously sensitive approach to the subject is to try and keep families intact during times of severe stress. Only in the most extreme cases should external assistance be offered. Even then it should be applied in such a way as to try and maintain the integrity of the family.
Secular liberal bad, culturally and religiously sensitve good, keeping families intact (at the expense of the coerced girl or woman) good, integrity of the family (but not the girl or woman) good. Yes, multiculturalism sucks for women. Next question?
And, yes, of course it’s Faisal Bodi – he links to an article signed with his full name.
A few more people would also get the point if (never mind that this is impossible) someone tried instituting forced marriage in combination with permanent subordination for men. Some of the comments on Sunny’s piece, even though sympathetic, gave me the impression that some think the problem is just an unchosen spouse, but it’s an unchosen spouse who is also a resident, lifelong boss. It’s not just some less than ideal guy, it’s your whole life, it’s how you’ll spend all your time from here on out, it’s what your job will be, it’s how much freedom you’ll have – which is zero. In short, it’s slavery, and sexual/reproductive slavery at that.
Oh yeah, so he does. How dense of me.
What disgusting crap that article is.
“Take women’s refuges. Not without cause do we view them with suspicion and mistrust. Refuges tear apart our families. Once a girl has walked in through their door, they do their best to stop her ever returning home.”
Who’s we, bub? What do you mean “our” families? Well, it’s obvious enough what you mean, but it’s pretty sickening.
Agree completely, OB. I didn’t mean to ignore the fact that it’s women, not men, who have this done to them, but was concentrating on how women who aren’t subjected to it can too easily view it as a problem that doesn’t affect them. I can well imagine that not all the husbands want the wives they are assigned either, except there they’re being forced into a relationship in which they are the bosses, instead of the reverse.
If things were more clear-cut it might be easier. Forced marriage is tantamount to a form of rape, because in the end a woman is pretty much forced to have sex with a man she didn’t choose and may consider utterly repulsive. But it isn’t as simple as the family telling her “marry this man or else.” This may be resorted to, but the part of the problem that seems impossible to police is the pressure that isn’t a direct order or a threat.
“educated and well adjusted friends slowly become nervous wrecks as their parents pile on the pressure”
Fine, go to the cops if your family tells you straight out they’ll kill you if you don’t marry the man they’ve chosen for you. Who do you go to if one family member is hounding you to death in a more subtle way, by telling you you’ll be breaking another family member’s heart if you don’t go along with tradition? It may have a lot in common with rape, but it can be much harder to define in a criminal sense. What about parents who submit their kids to enormous pressure to choose a certain career? Surely, in many cases the tactics used must be identical to those used in forcing marriáges on them? Can one legislate that parents internalise that their children are individuals, not just communal or family appendages?
Some of this may be complex, but Bodi’s attack on refuges isn’t. He’s saying that one can’t give women choice, because when one does, some of them actually – gulp – take it.
Failure to get a specific law on forced marriage onto the statute books is a shameful failure of nerve, but at least the Forced Marriage Unit
(http://www.fco.gov.uk/servlet/Front?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/ShowPage&c=Page&cid=1094234857863)
is active and dedicated.
However, with a problem as complex and often near-invisible to outsiders as this, grass-roots intervention is surely the most effective approach. Trained and sensitive counsellors in schools, better funding and recognition of women’s organisations at the local level, a help-line, a clear way for schools and social srvices to flag concerns, as they would for any other form of child abuse.
And what is there to say about Faisal Bodi? The man’s a bloody disgrace.
Grass-roots, yes, but perhaps the most important aspect of it has to be letting potential victims of this know that they have a choice at all. There will surely always be plenty aware of the options who are too frightened to make a move in their direction, but information must especially be directed at those who cannot see anything but the path enforced by their parents. That is possibly the most significant battle of all, for it is knowledge of options that those doing the forcing most want kept at bay.
If forced marriage is not illegal, what argument can be offered against it? By anyone, but especially by reluctant brides.
Bodi’s comments illustrate the principle behind all this (a principle even simpler than “let’s keep women under control”): groups are to be respected more than any individuals in them. He doesn’t outright say individuals aren’t important, he merely makes clear that the good of a group of more than one always outweighs the good of any one. Not only is it of negligible importance whether that individual wants to be part of the group, it seems to him axiomatic that no individual should prefer an existence outside its group.
[Maybe a few more people would get the point if they tried instituting forced marriage for non-Asian British women.]
In the sense intended by the Forced Marriage Act, they do, and on men too. The FMA wanted to create a brand new speech crime of putting social pressure on women to get married.
I’ve had Jewish mates who were driven to quite some degree of distraction by their families because they were considering “marrying out”, and seen two or three relationships break up as a result of it. But I strongly suspect that the government wasn’t actually thinking of putting lovely old Beattie in jail for asking David when he’s going to find a nice Jewish girl and settle down.
The genuinely criminal forced marriage practices are criminal under the ordinary law of the land and are enforced quite well by the police. Creating a special new speech crime, which you only really intend to enforce on one or two racial (not even religious) groups is a very bad law and it’s a good thing it got shot down.
At the end of the day, some situations demand moral courage from people. If your family are saying that they’ll disown you if you don’t marry Sanjeev, then you either marry Sanjeev or get used to life without a family. It’s a horrible situation, but unless your family break the law on assault, kidnapping or imprisonment then the government ought not to be involved.
Btw, you aren’t necessarily right on the facts of forced marriages. They go on at all levels of society, and in the middle classes they’re not at all incompatible with the woman carrying on with her career; I used to have a dentist who had probably been coerced into her marriage under the meaning of the draft bill, although not illegally under current law I hasten to add.
There are even plenty of forced marriages where the wife is very much the dominant partner, most usually because the husband doesn’t speak English and is not at all well adapted to life outside a village. I read about a couple of cases of husbands in these marriages actually ending up in battered men’s refuges. There are plenty of marriages where they do indeed attempt to recreate the conditions of village life in Birmingham or somewhere, but *these are illegal too*, just as it is illegal for white women’s partners to treat them in that way.
‘I’ve had Jewish mates who were driven to quite some degree of distraction by their families because they were considering “marrying out”,’
Yeah, I had similar thoughts. I’ve had Jewish friends and for that matter relatives (by marriage) who have had worse than distraction from their families.
But – I’m not sure that’s an argument for just shrugging and thinking it’s no biggy. That stuff can ruin people’s lives. Granted (we’ve had this discussion before, at some point), it’s very very hard to know how (if) to get the law involved; but I maintain it’s not good enough just to say ‘that’s family life, that’s private, the law can’t intervene’ and let it go at that.
I think saying it demands moral courage isn’t good enough. If groups of people are being systematically subordinated and coerced and pushed around, it’s not good enough to tell them to pull their socks up and fight back. Just for one thing, what if they’ve had all the moral courage thoroughly ground out of them by their subordinators? It’s not as if that never happens!
Moral courage is a fine thing, to be sure, but it doesn’t develop all by itself.
And if I tell you about a close friend who is persona non grata to most of his family for precisely that kind of reason, will you believe it isn’t me (with the added note of hypocrisy that the generation that started the boycotting was the one that started with the “marrying out” in the first place)?
Sure I’ll believe you. Because it’s not exactly a rare experience, is it!
In the one I’m chiefly thinking of…after forty years of marriage, the widower and his mother-in-law have become close, despite his Gentility (so to speak).
I’ll forgive your gullibility and thanks for the hope.
[I think saying it demands moral courage isn’t good enough. If groups of people are being systematically subordinated and coerced and pushed around, it’s not good enough to tell them to pull their socks up and fight back. Just for one thing, what if they’ve had all the moral courage thoroughly ground out of them by their subordinators? It’s not as if that never happens!]
The problem with that argument is that everyone can help themselves to it; there is no objective criterion to distinguish between different kinds of people who think that other people need to be “forced to be free”. Isiaiah Berlin explained in detail where this kind of Rousseauean thinking that privileges the choices that people would make if they were truly free over the choice they actually do make leads – begins with “g”, rhymes with “gulag”, gets the Euston Manifesto crowd’s underwear in a twist.
At some point, the law has to say “tough luck”, unless it is to gain access to every corner of our lives. If you are prepared to legally intervene in a conversation between a mother and daughter about getting married, then it is going to be very hard to explain to other people why they have to put up with racist cartoons.
Lots of obfuscation there. The issue isn’t forcing people to be free, it’s preventing some people from allowing other people to be free. Different thing. If you want to make a case, make the real case, not a different one.
And yes, at some point the law has to say ‘tough luck,’ but I’m claiming that forced marriage isn’t that point. And I’m not talking about mere conversations. If you want to make a case, make the real case.