Reflection by Sajitha R. Shankhar, Charcoal 1994

 

Reflection by Sajitha R. Shankhar, Charcoal 1994

 Sajitha Shankhar is a widely acclaimed feminist artist based in Chennai, India who has been associated with Asian Women Unite from its inception. She hopes to set up an independent centre for Indian women in the performing and creative arts. She can be contacted through South Asia Solidarity Group

 

---

The forced marriage debate and the British state

AMRIT WILSON

Abstract: In recent years, the British government has increasingly sought to intervene to prevent forced marriages and ‘honour killings’. But its new-found concern for the plight of South Asian women belies a deeper structure of racism, particularly against Muslims, and collusion with South Asian patriarchy. It is argued that initiatives such as the recent proposal for legislation on forced marriages are not empowering to women but are driven by the state’s need to police South Asian communities, an approach that has colonial roots. The lack of support given to grassroots South Asian women’s organisations and the continuing deportation of women at risk of violence reveal the partial nature of the state’s commitment to supporting victims of domestic violence and other forms of oppression.

Keywords: anti-Muslim racism, domestic violence, ‘honour killings’, immigration controls, South Asian women, women’s refuges

Hotspots of radicalism and hotspots of honour-based violence – the Forced Marriage Unit have a lovely map on their wall and it basically identifies where most of their referrals are from and, if you went in the Special Branch of the Terrorist Unit and looked at their map, you would see significant links, significant correlation. So, maybe there is something about … extremism, the way people think around those issues, that links in with what happens with women in their families too. There was one case where I could actually evidence it, so how many others are there … I have been talking to ministers for the last few months. I mentioned radicalism hotspots and the map of honour-based violence hotspots – then they really listened!
Nazir Afzal, a director of the Crown Prosecution Service, 22 November 2006[1]

This extract from a speech – linking forced marriage, ‘honour killings’[2] and terrorism – reflects many of the current concerns of the British state: the pervasive preoccupation with terrorism; the use of women’s oppression to legitimise immigration control, policing and surveillance, as demanded by ‘national security’; and the politics of fear with its ‘hotspots’ of ‘extremism’. In this speech, moreover, these aspects are highlighted by the middle-class and Muslim identity of the speaker himself; the subtext is that here is an enlightened ‘expert’ on all those ‘uncivilised others’ in the communities. In what follows, I will use the experiences of South Asian women to explore the debates which surround these areas, looking briefly at the nature of the state’s ‘concern’ for the plight of South Asian women and the racism which is inextricably linked with it.

South Asian women’s struggles against domestic violence

In Britain, the South Asian women’s movement has created a unique network of refuges that perform the crucial task of providing support and safety to women facing violence, often the most acute and life-threatening violence. These refuges have been built up by grassroots feminists with enormous effort over the last thirty years. However, over the last four years, these organisations have faced a particularly difficult phase. Often operating on a shoestring, they have had their funds slashed and a number have been ‘decommissioned’. New Labour’s neoliberal welfare agenda, bolstered by the monocultural policies of ‘community cohesion’, has meant that the needs of South Asian and other minority communities have been defined away.

Another woman described her experiences of sharing kitchen facilities:

Everyone cooked in the same kitchen. There was no possibility of keeping halal things separate. The English women made it worse if I complained. They would use lard even more and spread it around. Those women were racist inside; outside they were nice.

In the Northamptonshire study, we found deep-seated racism in service provision on a remarkable scale. An Asian woman worker had told us:

Racism exists in one form or another in all services … this can take the form of lack of cultural awareness and understanding, racial stereotyping, as well as direct racist and discriminatory practices.

Much has been written about how black women’s voices have had an impact upon the discourses of feminism but these experiences suggest that, on a day-to-day level, they have had very little influence on the practices of many white-dominated women’s organisations.

South Asian patriarchy and British immigration controls

The white knight of the British state

The immigration rule that imposed a one-year probationary period on those who came to the UK as spouses existed right through the era of state ‘ethnicist’ policies, which were, as A. Sivanandan has argued, the official response to the racism that led to the Brixton riots of 1981. These policies, taking their cue from Lord Scarman’s report, aimed at ‘pouring money into ethnic projects and strengthening ethnic cultures’[9] and the interventions in culture and family brought about by the one-year-rule were, in many ways, typical of this phase. Ethnicism, while claiming to recognise ‘ethnic’ cultures, had denied internal differentiations of gender, class and caste. Oppressive gender relations were, therefore, implicitly accepted. This was why women’s struggles could be defined as not ‘part of’ South Asian culture, while ethnicism had originated and consolidated the notion that all struggles within the family were a result of ‘western influence’ or because Asian girls wanted to be ‘like English girls’. In this way, existing power relationships were reinforced while, at the same time, women could be portrayed as victims without agency who needed to be ‘saved’. And since ethnicist notions had also largely defined away racism and the power relationships which perpetuated it, gender and race could be portrayed by the state and state agencies as entirely separate elements of analysis and experience.

During the last phase of the ethnicist era in the 1990s, the demonisation of Islam in America’s global strategy began to feed into the British media, and into the ways in which ethnic minority communities were constructed, generating a specifically anti-Muslim racism. The construction of the ‘Muslim’ man (and also, more recently, woman) as fanatical, fundamentalist, violent and owing allegiance to forces external – and hostile – to Europe came to the foreground in racist imagery.[10] In this phase, too, culture and religion came to be conflated and populations which had earlier been categorised according to language or region of origin were categorised by their religion above all else. ‘Muslim’ became the new ‘ethnicity’. As Claire Alexander noted in 1998, in Britain the term ‘Muslim culture’ increasingly started appearing in welfare state documents and in academia, despite the diversity of groups adhering to variants of the Muslim faith – which made the concept meaningless in practical terms as well as flawed on a theoretical level.[11] Also in this period, the state began to give encouragement to organisations in the South Asian community that belonged to the religious Right; whether Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, they were all bolstered with local government funding.

It was against this background that the state began to propose policies that appeared to confront ‘Muslim’ patriarchy. Ethnicism had allowed the state to consolidate and strengthen both South Asian patriarchy and the construction of South Asian women as victims; at the same time, the state was under pressure from South Asian women’s groups to respond to the sometimes extreme violence they faced. The state, having till then colluded with South Asian patriarchy, began to posture as confronting it, reacting with shock and horror as though patriarchy was a monster unknown to it, which had suddenly appeared from an ‘alien’ and ‘backward’ land.

While the effects of the one-year rule on South Asian women were left hidden in the shadows, a forced marriage initiative was launched by a debate in the House of Commons in 1999, led by Ann Cryer, the MP for Keighley. In a speech laden with colonial overtones, she appealed to ‘the leaders of the Asian Muslim community’ to: ‘encourage their people to put their daughters’ happiness, welfare and human rights first. If they do, their community will progress and prosper, in line with the Sikh and Hindu communities.’[12] This suggested, therefore, that not only were ‘forced marriages’ the preserve of Muslims but also that Muslims were poor and working-class as a result. In reality, of course, coercion of one sort or another can be a feature of family-arranged marriages across religious and class divisions.

Soon after this debate, the Home Office appointed a working group which, with the exception of representatives of two Asian women’s groups, consisted of influential ‘community leaders’. Within a few months, one of the Asian women’s groups, Southall Black Sisters, left the working group over disagreements about mediation, calling for the state to ‘mainstream the issue of forced marriage by incorporating it in its national strategy on violence against women and children’.[13] In June 2000, the report of the working group, entitled A Choice by Right, was launched by the Home Office with great fanfare.[14] The state’s approach to the handpicked members of the working group can be gauged by the patronising comments of the Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office in a joint action plan in August 2000, in which they were congratulated on ‘a difficult job well done. They have bravely broken the taboo on discussing this difficult subject openly and objectively.’[15] In fact, coercion in the context of marriage is, and always has been, widely discussed in the South Asian community, particularly among women.

A Choice by Right led to a deluge of racist articles in the British press about brutal South Asian parents of girls who were far less mature than their white counterparts, and about horrendous experiences from which they must be rescued. Frequently, these articles were specifically anti-Muslim and the notion of women’s agency was completely missing in these accounts. The report called for a debate around the issue and the debate was conducted by the media. Every tabloid now had the power to choose key spokespersons and bring selected victims as evidence into the public gaze, whetting the appetite of their readers with more and more salacious accounts of young women’s suffering and brutal South Asian parents destroying their lives.

This way of using a ‘debate’ to initiate an intervention around gender and culture is, however, not entirely new to the British state. It was done once before, in the colonial era, with the British state’s interventions in practices of widow immolation or sati, although, on that occasion, the debate was initiated by the colonial officers and the indigenous elite. Just as women’s agency never explicitly arises today, nor did it in the nineteenth century. Then, as now, women were mainly seen as helpless victims to be rescued by the state.[16]

Forced marriages were defined by the forced marriage initiative as marriages ‘without the valid consent of both parties, where duress is a factor’.[17] This was, and still remains, problematic since, in this context, duress is a nebulous concept – family-arranged marriage is often an arena of struggle, which may be psychological, emotional or physical, and is affected by a complex set of interacting issues – from emotional blackmail and low self-esteem to isolation and exclusion as a result of racism. However, it soon became clear that the Home Office (and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which was also involved) was mainly concerned with the marriages of British South Asian women with men from South Asia who, by virtue of the marriage, then entered the UK. In their own words, they were tackling ‘the overseas dimension of forced marriage’.

While under the one-year rule, the state showed a total lack of concern for women from South Asia who faced violence from their British South Asian husbands, in the forced marriage initiative, its mirror image, it acted to protect ‘civilised’ British South Asian women from violence and prevent their exploitation by men from South Asia. This latter group of women ‘belonged’ to Britain – they were seen by the state in this context as ‘our women’ as opposed to the former group who were those ‘others’ from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

But if citizenship conferred this ‘belonging’, it was increasingly a citizenship that was moulded to fit a racist conceptualisation of nation and culture, in which David Blunkett, home secretary from 2001 to 2004, could exhort Asian parents not to speak anything other than English to their children, in which he proclaimed the wrongness of marrying ‘foreigners’ and in which he could say of people who were born and brought up in the UK that ‘those who come into our home – for that is what it is – should accept those norms just as we would have to do if we went elsewhere’.[18] With David Blunkett heading the Home Office, racism reached new peaks, or perhaps revisited old peaks from the 1970s when Asian people were seen as problems. Under the two home secretaries who have followed Blunkett, nothing has changed, perhaps because, in his outspoken way, he was merely expressing New Labour’s views on race. Since then, the Home Office’s pathologisation of the South Asian family and South Asian marriage has continued apace. While the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act imposed a duty on marriage registrars in the UK to report ‘suspicious marriages’ of foreign nationals to the Home Office, under the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004, which came into force in February 2005, all those subject to immigration control have first to apply to the home secretary for ‘permission’ to marry. The marriage itself can only be carried out in designated registry offices. Significantly, those who want to get married in an Anglican church are not required to seek Home Office ‘permission’; in 2006, this ‘permission to marry’ requirement was found by the High Court to be discriminatory.[19] More recently, a further restriction has been imposed on spouses wishing to gain permanent settlement rights in the UK at the end of their two-year probationary period; from April 2007, they will have to pass English language and ‘knowledge of life in the UK’ tests.

Of eight young married women in Luton who discussed forced marriages with me, two said that they would like to inform the Home Office about being forced but would not be willing to say anything publicly; two others said that this would be the best course of action if they had to go through with marriages that their families wished to impose upon them.[20] Their comments revealed a widespread belief that anyone could be ‘shopped’ under the immigration laws and would then simply be removed regardless of the circumstances – and attitude no doubt based on their experiences of state racism in general. More than anything, their approach to their marriages revealed the strong and complex relationships which bound these young women to their families. These relationships, and the fear of separation and rupture from the parental family, can prevent women from acting until they are desperate. They may know, in addition, that these fears are fully justified because there are examples in the community or family in which women have been cut off in this way.

‘Forced marriage’ and criminalisation

The government backed down and abandoned the proposals but the racist discourse of Muslim women’s oppression began to reverberate around the media with forced marriage being increasingly conflated with ‘honour killings’, which, in turn, were linked with terrorism and ‘lack of integration’. At the same time, the media and certain elements within the police and other agencies began to identify specific South Asian women as spokespersons on the horrors of ‘backward, traditional practices’ in South Asian communities; among them was Jasvinder Sanghera.

They recommended that forced marriages be dealt with as an amendment to the Family Law Act.

The law was also opposed by the Equal Opportunities Commission, which wrote to Lord Lester pointing out that, while supporting the principle of his proposals, they felt it would be more effective for statutory provisions on forced marriage to be a part of the wider legislation on domestic violence.

This would reduce the risk of the issue being used by those with other agendas to stigmatise particular ethnic minority communities … [and] could trigger a more effective response from statutory agencies who, whatever the limitations of their work on domestic violence, are more likely to work on domestic violence than on forced marriage.[27]

While the need for integration was frequently invoked during the debates on the Bill at the House of Lords, the Bill itself represents the opposite; it is, as Labour MP and solicitor Sadiq Khan says, ‘ghetto’ legislation, targeted at specific communities.[28]

However, Lord Lester presented the Bill unchanged at its second reading at the House of Lords on 26 January 2007. As he told the press: ‘When I saw last summer that the government had rejected making forced marriage a crime, I wondered what we could do about it.’[29] The civil Bill was the answer, although as feminist barrister Birinder Kang points out, this civil Bill is actually proposing quasi-criminal legislation with powers of arrest. Interestingly, the publication of a book by Jasvinder Sanghera coincided with the second reading of Lord Lester’s Bill.[30] Herself a survivor of forced marriage, Sanghera has provided a harrowing description of her experiences. Her book has been reproduced widely in the press and is now being quoted every time the Bill is discussed. ‘As we didn’t get the criminal offence, I am fully in support of this civil protection bill’, she explains. But she adds: ‘I will continue to support criminalisation.’[31]

A number of national organisations, such as the civil liberties campaign Liberty and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, support the Bill. And the South Asian women’s group Southall Black Sisters has not only supported the Bill but been given a human rights award by Liberty for ‘drafting’ it. In response to his critics, Lord Lester has indicated that the proposed ‘stand-alone’ law may be abandoned and the provisions of the Bill incorporated, in their entirety, as amendments to the Family Law Act. But whether this will happen or not remains to be seen. What is clear, at the time of writing, is that the Bill’s provisions are almost certain to become law, following Tony Blair’s personal endorsement of forced marriage legislation in March 2007.[32]

If forced marriage gets its own law, can a law on ‘honour killings’ be far behind? Increasingly, the two are mentioned in the same breath, often interchangeably. At the House of Lords meeting on 15 January 2007, Lady Butler-Sloss, herself a High Court judge, seemed to see no difference between the two[33] and, according to feminist barrister Birinder Kang, such confusion is not uncommon amongst the general public and even lawyers. As for a law on ‘honour killings’, she explains that:

People accused may well be able to use stereotypes in their favour – stereotypes, for example, of how it may be legitimate to be horrified about what your son or daughter is doing, thereby using this to invoke the defence of provocation or use as part of their mitigation against sentence – so, in the end, the law will not be effective and, in relying on stereotypes, it will serve only to demonise whole communities further.[34]

 This article first appeared in the journal Race and Class, July 2007

References