‘Shot Pakistani girl’: The limitations of girls education discourses in UK newspaper coverage of Malala Yousafzai
| Author | Rosie Walters |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148116631274 |
| Published date | 01 August 2016 |
| Date | 01 August 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2016, Vol. 18(3) 650 –670
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148116631274
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‘Shot Pakistani girl’: The
limitations of girls education
discourses in UK newspaper
coverage of Malala Yousafzai
Rosie Walters
Abstract
This article analyses the extensive coverage in UK newspapers of the shooting, recovery and
activism of Malala Yousafzai, the prominent campaigner for girls’ rights from the Swat Valley
in Pakistan. The study uses discourse analysis and a poststructuralist, feminist and postcolonial
approach to analyse 223 newspaper articles, identifying the dominant discourses about Yousfzai in
the context of the United Kingdom’s colonial history and perceptions of its current role in global
politics. The article demonstrates that the UK media’s representation of Yousafzai’s story embraces
and reproduces seemingly emancipatory discourses around girls’ education, yet is ultimately
limited by enduring gendered and orientalist discourses that underlie these new initiatives, which
are simultaneously produced by, and productive of, unequal power relations. Despite Yousafzai’s
courageous campaigning, these discourses still make it easier for UK journalists to label her the
‘shot Pakistani girl’ than to call her powerful, a survivor or indeed a feminist.
Keywords
education, girls, Malala, media, UK
Introduction
I am focusing on women’s rights and education because they are suffering the most. There was
a time when women asked men to stand up for their rights, but this time we will do it for
ourselves. (Malala Yousafzai’s speech to the United Nations, cited in Holpuch, 2013)
Malala Yousafzai, the well-known campaigner for girls’ education from the Swat Valley
in Pakistan, has blogged, given speeches and lobbied politicians since the age of 11 in
response to the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and their acts of
violence and intimidation against girls and their teachers in the region. Although Malala
Yousafzai had been blogging for some time for the British Broadcasting Corporation
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Corresponding author:
Rosie Walters, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, 11 Priory Road,
Bristol, BS8 1TU, UK.
Email: rosie.walters@bristol.ac.uk
631274BPI0010.1177/1369148116631274The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsWalters
research-article2016
Article
Walters 651
(BBC) Urdu Service, she was relatively unknown in the United Kingdom until the con-
siderable media interest after 9 October 2012, when two gunmen claiming to represent
the TTP shot her in the head at point-blank range while she was sitting on a bus waiting
to return home from school. This article analyses the way in which the shooting of
Yousafzai, her medical treatment in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, her return to
school and her continued activism have been treated by UK newspapers. While many of
the findings echo the wealth of literature on historically gendered and orientalist dis-
courses of the ‘East’, which see Muslim countries as ‘carried over from the times of the
Prophet Mohammed’ (Mohanty, 1991b: 61–62), and in need of ‘corrective study by the
West’ (Said, 2003: 40–41), they also reveal the adoption of new and emerging discourses.
These discourses have emerged in the context of what Mohanty (2006: 9) sees as ‘infor-
mal and not violently visible empire building’, which relies upon ‘hypernationalism,
hypermasculinity and neo-liberal discourses of “capitalist democracy” bringing freedom
to oppressed third world peoples—especially to third world women’.
Spivak (2004: 525) has argued that since decolonisation, new discourses serve to justify
the continuing undoing of, and intervention in, former colonies: ‘the human rights aspect
of postcoloniality has turned out to be the breaking of the new nations, in the name of their
breaking-in into the international community of nations’. In recent years, one particular
focus of the international human rights apparatus has been that of girls’ education. There
has been an unprecedented level of concern for the cause of girls’ education at the highest
levels of international politics, with particular attention to the concept of the ‘girl effect’—
also the name of a campaign by the Nike Foundation and United Nations (UN) Foundation
which champions investing in girls in developing countries—which posits girls as the
untapped resource of the developing world, who, with the right investment, will ultimately
lift their communities out of poverty (see, e.g. Bent, 2013; Girl Effect, n.d.-a; PLAN
International, n.d.). Initiatives such as the Girl Effect and Chime for Change, an organisa-
tion cofounded by Gucci, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Salma Hayek-Pinault, combine
powerful multinational corporations with celebrity endorsement and seek both to change
the way that girls in developing countries are perceived and to alter the opportunities avail-
able to them through Western investment. These powerful discourses promote girls’ educa-
tion as a potential boost to the global economy, and girls have come to be seen as ‘“both
the dire problem and the fantastical possibility” of personal success in an unstable global
economy’ (Ringrose, cited in Bent, 2013).
In Pakistan, the right to education carries a long and complex history of Western inter-
vention, which still shapes the opportunities available to all children today. Pakistan’s
madrasa system, in particular, has been the subject of much Western preoccupation.
Heavily undermined by the policies of the East India Company and by British modernisa-
tion drives, madrasas were no longer, under colonial rule, a useful route into employment
(Bano, 2007: 48). As a result, they began to focus increasingly on the spiritual education
of their students alone. It is claimed that it was within some of the more extreme Deobandi
madrasas in Pakistan that key members of the Taliban were educated, and they have as a
result become a target of recent US reform packages (Bano, 2007: 43–44; Kronstadt,
2004: 1–4). In a report for the US Congress in 2004, Kronstadt writes, ‘In the longer-term
interest of promoting moderation and democratic values in Pakistan, and in improving the
socioeconomic status of its people, sector-wide reform of the education sector seems
vital’ (5). More recently, this Western concern about the nature of education offered in
Pakistan’s system has combined with discourses emerging from a context in which
‘Muslim girls in developing nations are constructed predominantly as the objects of
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