Towards a Transformative Paradigm in the UK Response to Forced Marriage
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663912453848 |
| Author | Fauzia Shariff |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
21(4) 549–565
Towards a
ª The Author(s) 2012
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Transformative
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663912453848
Paradigm in the UK
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Response to Forced
Marriage: Excavating
Community
Engagement and
Subjectivising Agency
Fauzia Shariff
London School of Economics, UK
Abstract
Government plans to criminalise forced marriage have intensified debate over how to
address the practice without alienating communities. Feminist and Critical Race litera-
ture on forced marriage castigates the government for treating forced marriage as a
cultural event fostered by a deviant and alien ‘other’ and for seeking to ‘liberate’ women
from their culture, but itself views community with suspicion and denies subject agency.
Re-examining policy developments through personal experience – setting up the Forced
Marriage Unit – I excavate the now forgotten imperative of community engagement and
how government became invested in its exclusion. Given the porosity of the forced–
arranged marriage distinction I then examine why engaging community is important.
Young British Asians’ experience of the marriage process puts high value on family and
community involvement. This power-laden paradigm, where consensus is valued over
the Western liberal concept of ‘free consent’, is the context into which government
policy must fit.
Corresponding author:
Fauzia Shariff, Department of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street,
London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: F.Shariff@lse.ac.uk
550
Social & Legal Studies 21(4)
Keywords
Forced marriage, consent, consensus, agency, arranged marriage, community engage-
ment, culture, South Asian diaspora
Introduction
On 8 June 2012 the government announced plans to criminalise forced marriage despite
nationwide concerns that the move will stigmatise minority communities, reduce report-
ing and push the practice underground. The move, which has received criticism from
British South Asians,1 is the culmination of over a decade of debate in which government
policy has moved increasingly away from community engagement on the issue.
Forced marriage hit the UK headlines in 1998 with the high profile murder of Ruk-
shana Naz. The case had the makings of modern blockbuster: a young woman, forced
to marry a man considerably older than her, had reconnected with her childhood sweet-
heart and sought a divorce. Seven months pregnant with her lover’s child, she was killed
by her own mother and brother. The imag(in)ary this evoked of a strange and violent cul-
tural community living within Britain was mirrored in similar cases elsewhere in Europe
(Dauvergne and Millbank 2010: p. 61). Internationally and domestically there was
momentum to address this supposed ‘cancer of multiculturalism’. This was framed
within a human rights and women’s rights paradigm, and founded principally on the fun-
damental right to free and full consent in marriage.
Feminist and critical race theorists have dominated the literature on forced marriage.
State responses to forced marriage have been situated within three possible approaches –
regulation, exit and community engagement – with most states favouring the first and
second of these (Phillips and Dustin 2004: p. 533). Regulation, often framed as protect-
ing vulnerable individuals, sets cultural minority practices against ‘universal principles’
of human rights. Legal sanctions are used to prevent or punish deviant behaviour seen to
fall short of these ‘universal’ values. However, this approach has been found to harbour a
racist and exclusionary narrative, one that demonises cultural minorities and essentia-
lises culture as ‘backward’ or oppressive (Wilson, 2007; Razack, 2004; Enright,
2009). The second approach, exit, seeks to enable individuals, as free agents, who are
unable to realise their own preferences within a cultural minority, to leave that group.
The right to agency through exit has, however, been found to be meaningless for women
of culture, as it forces women to choose between their culture and their freedom, and fails
to understand the connection between culture and identity (Okin, 1998; Phillips and Dus-
tin, 2004; Enright 2009). The third approach, community engagement, and its theoretical
companion inter-cultural dialogue (Parekh 2000), is largely dismissed by states and in
the literature as risky – potentially endorsing cultural hegemonic power hierarchies
through the privileging of self-designated spokespersons – and buying into a false rep-
resentation of cultural groups as homogenous (Phillips and Dustin 2004).
However, little attempt is made to investigate beyond this or explore how engaging
with community perspectives, may reveal latent possibilities for transformation. For
example qualitative data on forced marriage hints at complex ways in which power rela-
tions are already being resisted and challenged internally, and literature on
Shariff
551
multiculturalism recognises that engagement with communities can challenge and trans-
form hegemonic power structures (Schachar, 2001). Engagement here goes beyond stag-
gered unilateral exchange associated with ‘consultation with community’. It demands
genuine dialogue in search of compatibility (An-Na’Im, 2010), which engages at an inti-
mate level with motivations and expectations of both the ‘self’ (state) and the ‘other’
(communities). Self-reflection in this process facilitates the discovery of shared values,
and helps eliminate more extreme views maintained through power hierarchies, in a way
that regulation and exit do not. It also allows more opportunities for agency, engaging the
subject more centrally in the solution.
The possibility of facilitating agency through community engagement is rarely con-
sidered in the literature. Yet it has the potential not only to offer new solutions but also to
transform the very way forced marriage is defined. There is a presumption in the liter-
ature on agency, reflected in the forced marriage debate, that women of culture cannot
be agents. This view, which judges these women by Western standards of individualism
(Mohanty, 1988), mirrors a tendency, explored by Malik (2009: p. 2613), to represent
cultural difference as a clash of values: ‘our’ ‘progressive’ values, associated with free-
dom and choice, against ‘their’ ‘backward’ values associated with ‘tradition’. Crucially
this tendency manifests itself within the forced marriage debate through a defining lib-
eral individualist concept of free and full ‘consent’ in marriage, representing autonomy
and freedom of choice as the norm against which cultural practices are compared. A
rethinking of this through the cultural experiences of South Asian women and men sug-
gests a more nuanced boundary between forced and arranged marriages and reveals a
more processual characteristic to motivations and decision-making in the context of
marriage.
It is not the aim of this paper to investigate the semantics of consent and its applica-
tion to cultural minorities (this has been done elsewhere, see Anitha and Gill 2009a). The
aim of this paper is to examine why community engagement was rejected and to show
how a truly dialectic engagement with community perspectives opens a new, more
subject-oriented, paradigm through which to tackle forced marriage. I begin the paper
by examining the process through which community became the outsider, by retelling
the government’s story, drawing on my experiences in setting up the predecessor to the
Forced Marriage Unit and following policy developments culminating in the announce-
ment of the criminalisation of forced marriage. I show that, while government policy
began by recognising community exclusion as part of the problem, it has become
invested in that exclusion. The policy focus on exit, and now increasingly on regulation,
has its roots in the unit’s founding role: to extract British citizens from forced marriages
abroad. That this focus on removal continued to inform policy when the gaze turned
homeward to forced marriage on UK soil was partly due to a feminist and women’s
rights agenda that conflated force with culture and turned community into a pariah. The
rejection of community has been supplemented with a growing state paternalism in
which British ‘values’ have been pitted against Asian values.
In the second half of the paper I use community perspectives and subject agency to
reframe the debate. Drawing on material collected by sociologists and anthropologists
on South Asian women’s lived experiences of marriage I introduce what Malik (2009:
p. 2623) calls ‘inter-subjectivity’. I focus on the South Asian diaspora because these
552
Social & Legal Studies 21(4)
communities have accounted for the majority of requests for state assistance.2 These
lived experiences reveal that South Asian marriage processes prioritise consensus over
the Western liberal concept of ‘free consent’. The high value put on family and commu-
nity involvement provides a complex social, and power-laden, paradigm in which
negotiations are attempted. This re-framing of the debate allows us to re-direct analysis
away from questions of choice and consent and towards understandings of motivations,
micro-power and its navigation. It re-positions the challenges for state and community in
a deeper understanding of what Judith Butler has termed agency within social norms, and
re-positions agency and community engagement as central interlocutors.
The Forced Marriage Unit: A View from the Inside
The Forced Marriage Unit, which has...
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