Racialising domestic violence: Islamophobia and the Australian forced marriage debate

Introduction

It is clear that the issue of forced marriage in Australia is poorly understood and under-researched. ¹ When the Australian Federal Government announced a project to ban forced marriage in 2010, the only known forced marriages that had occurred in Australia consisted of three cases handled by the Australian Federal Police and two cases that appeared before the courts that year. ² Nevertheless, media coverage of the problem has tended to represent the known cases as ‘the tip of the iceberg’ of an ‘underground’ phenomenon carried out ‘behind the closed doors’ of Australia’s minority communities. ³ In a context in which so little empirical evidence of this form of violence against women exists, such representations acquire a heightened capacity to shape understandings and influence public policy.

Media discourse on violence against women is a highly revealing site of deep-seated prejudices, which allow the public to distance itself from the issue, and ultimately shape the services and avenues of redress available to victims. ⁴ News coverage of domestic violence perpetrated by black men, for instance, pathologises the black male body as excessively violent. ⁵ Feminist scholars argue that public discourse on forced marriage in Europe similarly naturalises racial tropes of the irrationally violent minority ethnic man and the oppressed minority ethnic female victim. ⁶ Policy debates and news reporting on forced marriage in the UK reinforce culturally essentialist responses that are not only ineffective, but also normalise racist responses to such violence, according to academic researchers Anitha and Gill. ⁷ Their analysis of British newspaper coverage of forced marriage found that the racialised problematisation of forced marriage ‘harnesses the protective role of the British state as a reformed patriarchy seeking to rescue minority women from their oppressive cultures’ and hampers attempts to both respond to forced marriage within a broader framework of violence against women and develop targeted service provision and preventative measures. ⁸ Joumanah El Matrah, spokesperson for the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights, has similarly criticised the representation of forced marriage in the Australian media as being ‘characterised by gross generalisations and omission of important information’ and ‘often blatantly racist’, making it ‘far more difficult to engage communities meaningfully on any difficult or controversial practice’. ⁹

Despite these claims, and the centrality of media reports in policy-makers’ public statements on forced marriage in Australia, ¹⁰ there has been no research carried out to date on Australian media coverage of forced marriage. This article addresses this absence by examining print media coverage of forced marriage across five daily Australian newspapers between 2000 and the introduction of the 2013 criminal legislation. By exploring the ideological frames and narrative devices on the issue, it seeks to understand the processes of meaning-making in which forced marriage is implicated and their consequences for Australian minority ethnic women who experience domestic violence.

Forced marriage – a marriage against the will and consent of one of the parties carried out under some form of duress – is conceived of here as a form of domestic violence which, while shaped by culture, is not reducible to it. Forced marriage is not a ‘cultural practice’ in the sense that marriage customs in countries of origin vary considerably and are influenced by class, caste, religion and economic changes. ¹¹ Likewise, within minority ethnic communities in the West, factors such as poverty, sexuality and immigration policies figure prominently in shaping coercive pressures to marry. ¹² Forced marriage is also not necessarily a transnational phenomenon, even though public policy overwhelmingly frames it as such. Conceiving of forced marriage primarily as a form of human trafficking, for instance, diverts attention from ‘the more routinised and hidden forms of parental control that do not involve the dramas of imprisonment or abduction’. ¹³ Tackling the problem therefore requires a sensitivity to both the cultural specificity and the universality of this form of gender violence; that is, community-centred programmes and interventions tailored to the specific needs of minority ethnic women are needed alongside the recognition that ‘all women located within a matrix of structural inequalities can face social expectations, pressure and constraint in matters of marriage’. ¹⁴

Background: forced marriage and Australian public policy

In 2010, the Federal Government released a forced marriage discussion paper for public comment outlining options for legal/policy reform. These consisted of new legislation (both criminal and civil), and non-legislative measures including: education for potential victims about their rights; education for health and welfare service providers; government and community stakeholder engagement; mediation outside the courts; increased material support such as housing and employment assistance; and a dedicated Forced Marriage Unit, similar to that which operates in the UK. After receiving public submissions in early 2011, the government approach narrowed to focus almost exclusively on criminal legislative reform, with a Crimes Act amendment proposed later that year. Further public consultation followed, alongside a Senate inquiry on whether marriage visas were facilitating forced marriages. The resulting Crimes Legislation Amendment (Slavery, Slavery-like Practices and People-Trafficking) Bill, with its specific forced and servile marriage provisions, was passed by the House of Representatives in 2012, and legislated by the Senate in early 2013.

This singular pursuit of criminal legislative measures and narrow conceptualisation of forced marriage as a form of slavery and/or people-trafficking worried experts on forced marriage in Britain, where similar legislation was proposed and abandoned in the mid-2000s, before being adopted in 2013. Professor Aisha Gill labelled the Australian legislative project a ‘quick fix’ rather than an effective solution to a complex problem, and said that ‘as criminalisation would increase the number of victims displaced not just from their family but their community it is significant that there is no reference in current proposals to how and where displaced victims would be accommodated’. ¹⁵ The Senate Committee charged with the marriage visa inquiry also expressed concern that the British experience was being overlooked in the rush to legislate. It cited a submission from the only refuge network for victims of forced marriage in Britain when the debate was being discussed there:

19 of the 20 [refuge residents] said that if forced marriage were to be a criminal offence they would not report it. They cited feelings of guilt, not wanting to see parents going through the courts or imprisoned, being ostracised from the family/community, being disowned from the family, fear of reprisals, that they still loved their parents and would not be able to deal with the emotional heartache. [original emphasis] ¹⁶

This is consistent with British research that has found that victims are generally resistant towards bringing criminal charges against their relatives, and instead tend to pursue only the protective orders granted by civil courts. ¹⁷ British women’s organisations have used further arguments against criminal legislation, including: that there are ample existing criminal legislative provisions (e.g. against kidnapping, rape, assault and human trafficking) to deal with forced marriage; that it would heighten racism by suggesting it is a cultural norm in certain communities; that forced marriage is domestic violence and should be addressed within a domestic violence framework; and that providing safety from violence requires a focus on the provision of more – not less – material support services. ¹⁸ This last point has proven especially salient. For, as the UK has seen an increase in political and financial support for criminalisation of forced marriage, there has been a correlating decrease in funding for specialist welfare services available to victims. ¹⁹ As a result, while not necessarily opposing criminal legislation, the position of British minority ethnic activists and gender violence experts tends to privilege women’s safety over the pursuit of criminal prosecution. ²⁰

Australian community organisations raise similar concerns. However, as this article will demonstrate, their views are almost entirely absent from the mainstream media and public policy debate. In a rare exception, legal scholar and then President of the United Muslim Women’s Association in New South Wales, Dr Ghena Krayem, was quoted alluding to these concerns when she likened the legislative project to using a ‘sledgehammer to crack the nut’ (Australian Magazine, 11 February 2012). Although few minority ethnic welfare services commented on the government’s forced marriage discussion paper, at least one group shared Krayem’s reservations about the utility of criminal legislation, saying that it favoured civil measures to encourage victims to seek protection due to victims’ reluctance to report family members to police. ²¹ The Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights (AMWCHR), an organisation which handles around ten forced marriage referrals from smaller organisations nationally each year, argued that any forced marriage legislation should be located within the Family Violence Bill that was being debated at the Federal level at that time. AMWCHR stressed, however, that any new legislation must be enacted in combination with preventative policies and programmes. As a standalone measure it could make the problem worse by driving it further underground. AMWCHR recommended that community-based welfare and education programmes receive adequate funding, as this had already proved successful among certain communities in South East Melbourne:

In this instance the rates of early, albeit consensual marriages have been thwarted. Counsellors have witnessed a decisive increase in the number of young girls who complete school, attend university and after graduating, then consider marriage, instead of marrying immediately after Year 12. Government funding to support proactive efforts is crucial in circumventing the need for remedial support services later on. ²²

To be clear, the purpose of this article is not to contest the criminalisation of forced marriage in Australia. Nor is it to imply that forced marriage can or should be addressed by simply recodifying the issue at the level of media representation. Rather, the underlying intention here is to understand how the experiences of women and service providers affected by forced marriage were marginalised within a particularly Islamophobic public debate, and how a punitive measure came to overshadow all other ways of addressing the problem.

Method

Data consisted of articles published in five Australian daily newspapers over the thirteen years leading up to the criminalisation of forced marriage. The newspapers were selected to provide a mix of political outlooks and national and state-based coverage. Australia’s only national newspaper, The Australian, is a News Corp-owned broadsheet commonly perceived to be politically conservative. Four state-based publications were also selected: in NSW, the Sydney Morning Herald (Fairfax Media) and the Daily Telegraph (News Corp); and in Victoria The Age (Fairfax Media) and the Herald Sun (News Corp). Both of the state-based News Corp newspapers are tabloids with a perceived conservative bias, while the Fairfax broadsheets are generally understood to be politically left-leaning. Fairfax and News Corp operate newspapers in other states and while these were originally included in the sample, the significant amount of content shared between each publisher’s state-based newspapers informed a decision to restrict data collection to each publishers’ two highest circulation publications.

The time-period was selected on the basis that 2000 was the first year all five newspapers were available through NewsBank, the digital database used for data collection, and forced marriage legislation was introduced at the end of 2012, becoming effective in early 2013. A search on the terms ‘forced marriage(s)’ and ‘forced to marry’ yielded 305 articles. Irrelevant items (e.g. stories about sporting club mergers), duplicate content and articles that had been edited only slightly differently for different publications were then removed, leaving 156 items. Articles were initially catalogued by year and content type (news/feature, opinion, letter to the editor, review) and were read to develop a coding schedule based on recurrent discursive contexts in which forced marriage was understood. This schedule was refined as articles were coded on a second reading and finalised on the completion of a third reading.

The articles were analysed using a combination of thematic and structural analytic approaches, which examined the content of the text and the rhetorical devices the author employed respectively. ²³ While forced marriage was mentioned in all 156 articles, it was the central focus in forty-three. Of these forty-three articles, only four looked at forced marriage in considerable depth (>600 words): three were about forced marriages occurring in overseas contexts, while just one looked at forced marriage in Australia. The next section presents an overview of the most common framing techniques used across all 156 articles. The subsequent section then concentrates on the forty-three articles in which forced marriage was the central focus, singling out the longer feature articles for closer analysis.

Print media coverage was chosen as a source of data in order to obtain a complete dataset that was large enough to facilitate an analysis of broad themes, and small enough to allow for the selection of a manageable number of texts for close reading. While these objectives were achieved, it should be noted that a limitation of this method is that it necessarily overlooks television and digital media coverage; further research is required to understand the visual dimensions of Australian media representations of forced marriage.

Culture, multiculturalism and the demise of the West

In all but one of the 156 articles, forced marriage was understood in culturalist terms, being either explicitly labelled a ‘cultural practice’, or repeatedly associated with specific cultures. With the exception of a small handful of articles about Mormons in Utah, Romanian ‘gypsies’ and Indigenous Australians, forced marriage was almost exclusively represented as a Middle Eastern, South Asian (with regards to the UK) or – most often – an ‘Islamic’ cultural practice. As Dustin and Phillips argue, ²⁴ representing forced marriage as if it is a normal and widely endorsed behaviour in minority ethnic communities reinforces the stereotype of these communities as uniquely oppressive to women, requiring assimilation to supposedly more civilised western norms. It thus situates the issue firmly within the domain of national political ideology, as opposed to family violence. In a significant proportion of the articles (one in five, n = 34), forced marriage was explicitly understood as a problem of multiculturalism. Routinely cited as empirical proof that multiculturalism has failed and/or is a dangerous ideology that must be abandoned, the semantic bond between forced marriage and multiculturalism was forged not through arguments about the act of forcing women to marry, but by simply naming forced marriage as an Islamic cultural practice. This naming took a rhetorically consistent form; more than one-third of the articles (n = 56) referred to forced marriage as one of a varying collection of abhorrent ‘Islamic’ practices that multiculturalism supposedly condones:

Honour killings, genital mutilation, the ridiculous burka, forced marriages, beatings and domestic slavery are the real points of contention. Of course some Australian men treat their wives badly, but that is the exception. Conversely, for our Muslim migrants that treatment is the rule. (Daily Telegraph, 7 September 2006)

In the absence of contextual detail about forced marriages, criminal sanctions become the obvious means of redress: errant communities are seen to require ‘the force of the law to bring them into modernity’. ²⁵ Legislation was presented as the thin line of defence against the ruinous forces of these cultural practices:

Multiculturalism can easily generate into moral relativism. Our laws are based on values, and the state has the right to intervene to protect them. Individuals cannot be left alone in their chosen communities, if that involves forced marriages, polygamy, burning books, supporting fatwas or even fighting against our armed forces. (The Australian, 9 May 2002)

Such statements were not confined to the pages of conservative newspapers. For example, in an editorial on the topic of Muslims and multiculturalism titled ‘The limits of tolerance’, The Age (23 September 2000) opined that ‘Australian laws, reflecting our values, do not allow such customs as forced marriage, female circumcision, polygamy, or the cruel and extreme punishment of children’.

This conflation of forced marriage with national political ideology reflects the broad political shift away from multiculturalism in the West ²⁶ towards assimilationist policies in which culture replaces ‘race’ as the key organisational concept. ²⁷ In Australia, as elsewhere, this takes the form of discriminatory discourses and corresponding political practices which overwhelmingly target Muslims. ²⁸ Forced marriage was implicated in the most extreme forms of this anti-Islam, anti-multiculturalism discourse: conservative commentators wrote about forced marriage only as empirical evidence of an impending civilisational collapse precipitated by Muslim migration to the West. They positioned themselves as uniquely possessed of historical insight, sharing with their readers a glimpse of a dystopian not-so-distant future in which Islamists seize control of a West fatally weakened by multiculturalism and a compliant Left:

Faced with the rising tide of bomb attacks, plots, threats, demands and belligerent victimology from a violent, ignorant and sexually repressive subculture, the centre of European civilization appears to be doing exactly what it did the last time blackshirts were on the march in Europe – appeasing, denying and capitulating. (The Australian, 5 February 2007)

The forced marriage media coverage illustrates how deeply the idea of the Islamicisation of Europe – the ‘Eurabia’ thesis, coined by Bat Ye’or for her book of the same title ²⁹ – has penetrated the mainstream media in Australia. While some Eurabia narratives dwell on an international conspiracy, ³⁰ those conveyed through the Australian press focus on the supposed demographic threat posed by Muslims. Daniel Pipes’ ‘Europe or Eurabia?’, ³¹ for instance, uses the differences in fertility rates between Muslims and non-Muslims to argue that Europe will either become ‘Islamised’ or descend into civil war. In all accounts of Eurabia, feminists, academics, journalists and the political Left are believed to collectively ‘serve as the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahideen’. ³² Apart from their flawed demographic evidentiary basis, ³³ such arguments rely on a racialised understanding of Muslims as an ahistorical Zombie-like bloc of uniform political interest. ³⁴ Nevertheless, in the print media coverage examined here, forced marriage was consistently evoked as evidence of feminist complicity with Islamicisation. Feminists, for instance, were routinely accused of concealing the violence of Muslim men:

But in the months after the attacks on New York and Washington, as Westerners gradually woke up to the strange vocabulary that went with jihadism – burkas, veils, honour killings, stonings, forced marriages – feminists went uncharacteristically mum. (The Australian, 8 March 2005)

Again, this rhetoric bled across Left and Right public idioms: in five of The Age columnist Pamela Bone’s articles published between 2003 and 2007, for example, forced marriage appears in lists of uniquely ‘Islamic’ forms of gender violence, providing empirical support for her claims that feminists are ‘mute on Islamic sex apartheid’ and that Islam must be reformed.

And many conservative writers used a ‘hero’ figure ³⁵ with extraordinary first-hand experience of forced marriage to present their irrefutable evidence of the dangers of multiculturalism. Twenty of the media items analysed either referred to or were entirely about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and what was presented as her daring battle against Islamists and leftwing elites. Nine of these items were published in 2007, the year Ali first visited Australia to promote Infidel, an autobiography in which she sought to present Islam as fundamentally detrimental to women and compel its western audiences to defend Enlightenment principles. All spoke of Ali in approving tones. Albrechtsen (The Australian, 6 January 2007), for instance, named her ‘the voice of reason and confrontation’, while for Szego (The Age, 9 June 2007) ‘she is our conscience calling’. In each of these items, Ali’s views on Islam are believed to be under attack because western feminists and the broader Left ‘embrace cultural rights as a higher paragon than, say, women’s rights’.

The articles about Hirsi Ali provide a further indication of the extent to which journalists not only accepted the validity of the Eurabia thesis, but also failed to present key information and alternative points of view. Not one of these items mentioned that Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands after she was forced to resign from the Dutch parliament and faced being stripped of her citizenship over alleged discrepancies in her asylum application; ³⁶ her flight from Europe was uniformly presented as a brave escape from Islamists. This was a particularly striking omission given that some of these journalists – particularly Janet Albrechtsen and Paul Sheehan – have actively contributed to local moral panic over the integrity of refugees’ asylum claims (see The Australian, 31 May 2017, and Sydney Morning Herald, 23 June 2011). Likewise, claims that Hirsi Ali’s anti-Islam rhetoric is racist – because she consistently conflates her own experience of forced marriage with Islam in general – were either not considered or were presented as further evidence of Muslim deviance from western cultural norms. For example, Szego (The Age, 9 June 2007) admits that Ali ‘runs the serious risk of her views being exploited by bigots’, yet dismisses any possibility that those views could be racist: ‘to see criticism of Islam, however crude or unbalanced (which is how many other Muslims describe her interpretations of theology) as the vilification of Muslims is, well, incompatible with Western democracy’.

Despite what the proponents of Eurabia claimed, there was no evidence provided of feminist approval of forced marriage – tacit or otherwise – in any of the coverage. The only item that did seriously consider forced marriage in the context of cultural rights was not couched in feminist terms. In 2010, Chief Justice of NSW James Spigelman delivered a speech on law and multiculturalism to a university forum, an excerpt of which was published on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald (16 April 2010). Reflecting on the implications that respect for cultural diversity could have on judicial reasoning in cases of violence against minority women, Spigelman referred to a modern-day case of bride theft, in which a young Sicilian-Australian woman was abducted and kept by force in Italy: ‘The dishonour to her family was such that custom would have obliged her father to kill her if she did not marry her kidnapper’, he claimed. Spigelman argued that such ‘conflict of values’ creates unavoidable legal dilemmas in a multicultural society:

Clearly, on the criminalization of physical violence the majority culture is not able to compromise. However, questions arise about enforcement and sentencing. It is difficult to know where to draw the line in cases where policies underlying these laws conflict with other policies recognizing the respect that should be given to minority cultures … [T]here is tension between gender bias considerations and cultural respect considerations in determining what the overriding value of equality before the law requires in a particular case. It is a very real challenge to balance the objective of cultural equality and diversity against the protection of women from gender-based violence. (Sydney Morning Herald, 16 April 2010)

This implication of forced marriage presenting a binary opposition between cultural recognition on the one hand, and women’s rights on the other, is not new. Spigelman’s problematisation of forced marriage resembles the thesis put forward in the US by Susan Moller Okin in her essay Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? ³⁷ Okin’s argument that multiculturalism can lead to the acceptance of harmful minority cultural practices in the name of cultural tolerance became the focal point for criticisms of mainstream feminism for what many saw as its ontologically flawed conception of culture. ³⁸ Critics argued that Okin had reified culture into discrete social entities abstracted from historical and political context, ³⁹ thus obscuring such things as local forms of resistance to patriarchal practices and the extent to which ‘cultural practices’ are shaped by the diasporic experience, as opposed to tradition.

In marked contrast to Okin, Spigelman argued that culture should be taken into consideration when assessing male provocation when prosecuting domestic violence cases. While Okin and Spigelman may therefore exemplify very different – in fact oppositional – liberal conceptions of cultural recognition, they nevertheless share the same culturally deterministic view of the violent male subject. From their perspective, when minority men commit acts of violence against women, their behaviour is understood to be an expression of their non-western culture; yet when men deemed to be western commit such crimes, they are understood to be violating the norms of their culture. This asymmetrical understanding of male violence was so normalised in the media coverage of forced marriage that it was not only consistently implied through the representation of minority men’s crimes as uniquely horrific, it was also explicitly stated, including by Spigelman:

Sexism in the European cultural tradition has been attacked on a broad front, including violence against women. However, there are important racial, ethnic and religious minorities in Australia who come from nations with sexist traditions which, in some respects, are even more pervasive than those of the West. (Sydney Morning Herald, 16 April 2010)

Feminist scholars have highlighted the racialised double standard at play here. Razack argues that it ‘not only obscures the cultural and community approval so many crimes of violence have in majority culture,’ but also ‘reifies that “they” are stuck in pre-modernity while we have progressed as fully rational subjects with the capacity to choose moral actions, even if the choice is a bad one’. ⁴⁰ As Volpp reminds us, individual agency and the ability to make rational choices are intrinsic to the definition of humanity in the West, thus to represent people’s actions as being determined only by culture is ‘deeply dehumanizing’. ⁴¹ Liberal perspectives on forced marriage may not espouse Eurabia’s crude rhetoric of Muslims harbouring secret plans to take over the West, but they are still premised on a similar racialised understanding of subjecthood.

Horror, rescue fantasies and women’s agency

Information about forced marriage was uniformly sparse in almost all the articles analysed, including those that were specifically on the subject. While some included summaries of court rulings in local and international cases, most articles consisted of little more than graphic descriptions of violence enacted against forced brides. Two items about the marriage of a 12-year-old Romanian ‘gypsy princess’, for instance, described how the ‘groom’s family proudly showed the guests a bloody sheet to prove the marriage had been consumated’ (Herald Sun, 2 October 2003) and how ‘hundreds of guests and a throng of reporters had seen the gypsy princess try but fail to escape her lavish wedding’ (Daily Telegraph, 3 October 2003). A 2007 Daily Telegraph (13 October) article about an Afghani case begins: ‘When asked about her engagement party, little Sunam glanced blankly at her family, then fiddled with her gold-sequined engagement outfit, a speechless response not of shyness but because she does not yet talk much. Sunam is 3.’ A 2012 (2 January) item in the same paper begins in a similarly shocking manner: ‘An Afghan child bride has told how she was tortured by her mother-in-law who locked her in a toilet for six months, beat her, pulled out her fingernails and burned her with cigarettes.’ This ‘pornography of pain’ resembles that of the ‘pulp non-fiction’ genre of memoirs of Muslim women and girls escaping gender violence attributed to Islam analysed by Lila Abu-Lughod. ⁴² Abstracted from all social context, such vignettes give no indication of their exceptional nature in the societies or minority communities in which they occur: ‘without the contextual information we draw on to judge similar stories of abuse and violence in North America or Europe, we are led to attribute these abuses to the culture at large’. ⁴³

Two of the three feature articles about forced marriages occurring outside Australia begin with similarly horrific victim narratives. An article about Jasvinder Sanghera (Australian Magazine, 2 February 2002), an advocate for British South Asian forced brides, begins by describing the dying moments of Sanghera’s older sister, who ended her life by self-immolation after suffering years of domestic violence. Similarly, an article about the trafficking of Chinese women across provinces for marriage begins with one kidnapped bride’s explicit account of being beaten unconscious and raped by the man who bought her (Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November 2007). Neither article, however, focuses on the women who experience the violence of forced marriage. Rather, the explicitly violent opening vignettes operate as a scene-setting device, helping to underline the bravery of a central protagonist who is fighting to defend victims of forced marriage. In the British example, it is the sister of the victim campaigning to prevent other forced marriages, while the item about China focuses on a private investigator who has dedicated his life to rescuing stolen brides. The third and longest feature article about overseas forced marriages is similarly constructed around a central ‘hero’ figure, using an account of a daring mission to rescue a forced British-Pakistani bride from the family members holding her captive in Pakistan in place of a victim narrative as its opening sequence (Australian Magazine, 4 September 2010). The hero rescuer is, in this case, a British-Pakistani consular official working for the Home Office’s Forced Marriage Unit in Pakistan.

It is not surprising that journalists relied so heavily on such simplistic character-driven forms of narration to make sense of forced marriage. The presentation of complex social issues through clearly defined characters is an integral part of the newsmaking process, and is a key means by which some social actors are ‘purified’ while others are ‘polluted’ within public discourse. ⁴⁴ Crime reporting generates particularly sharply delineated, one-dimensional characters because media representations of crime serve to reaffirm a society’s moral consensus; they are a form of modern morality play in which ‘the “devil” is both symbolically and physically cast out from society by its guardians – the police and judiciary’. ⁴⁵ Where the crime of forced marriage is concerned, this morality play is staged at the civilisational level. The hero/villain dynamic reinforces the Orientalist worldview that an irreconcilable schism exists between East and West. ⁴⁶

Within Orientalist discourse, the binaries of modern/traditional, civilised/barbaric, liberal/despotic serve as rhetorical means of normalising western hegemony. ⁴⁷ Such dichotomies were particularly apparent in Lucy Bannerman’s (Australian Magazine, 4 September 2010) article on the Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) in Pakistan. Literal references to dirt, pollution, commotion and darkness in descriptions of Pakistan and its people on the one hand, and quiet, order, calm and cleanliness in descriptions of western actors on the other hand, serve to pollute and purify them respectively. Here, for instance, Bannerman emphasises the British identity of a rescued bride not only by recounting her hankering for chips and gravy, but also by contrasting the clean and modern technology of the West with the literal dirtiness and backwardness of the East:

[Tania exhibits] playful teenage pride in the superior Bluetooth technology of her own mobile phone … And yet, as a newlywed, she’d had to learn to use a type of traditional stove abandoned by many Pakistani women a generation ago. ‘I had to blow through a funnel, which made my face all black. It was horrible.’

The FMU’s work thus becomes not simply a means of addressing serious cases of domestic violence, but a struggle to save western women from the horrors of the East, depicted as literally another world:

More than once, their cars have scooped up girls who have fled through back-windows. They have clasped a woman’s hand as she was dragged by the hair over the family threshold and back into a world of obligation, where an individual’s happiness always comes second to customs, culture and that other word – honour – and where, in so many cases, the happiness of a woman is barely considered.

Only those actors located on the western side of this divide are depicted as having agency: the actions of the men and women deemed to be of the East are presented as simply the outcome of timeless local customs. The Pakistani families depicted in Bannerman’s piece are never seen or – despite the numerous lines of dialogue in the piece – heard. The only Pakistani characters that feature in the story are David and ‘his two devoted consular officers’ who play a fleeting role as the hero’s sidekicks. Pakistanis are otherwise represented only as elements of the landscape: silent kohl-eyed women staring from behind veils and men whom Bannerman describes as having ‘faces like fists’, closed off and unknowable. Any information that would complicate these stereotypes is left out, including the fact that in Mirpur, where most forced marriages occur, the political situation is often too unstable for the FMU to operate. Here, courts have a record of success in ending forced marriages through state-initiated court orders requiring that the suspected bride/groom attend court so that it can be determined whether he or she is being held against his/her will. ⁴⁸

The denial of women’s agency here is especially problematic. The forced marriage rescue saga is a variant of the long-running Orientalist narrative of ‘saving brown women from brown men’. ⁴⁹ Originating in nineteenth-century colonial discourse, this narrative co-opts feminist ideals to justify interventions into colonised and minority ethnic communities, ⁵⁰ including recent arguments in favour of bombing Afghanistan to ‘free’ women from their veils. ⁵¹ By focusing on rescue and limiting the discussion of women’s experiences of forced marriage to graphic details of violence inflicted upon them, the media coverage of forced marriage reduces victims to objects of paternalistic worry, as opposed to subjects of a multi-faceted problem who are capable of authoring their own solutions, either individually or collectively. Where they are represented as having agency, it is only because their individual victim narratives easily conform to the Orientalist view that culture is the root cause of forced marriage, and they can be understood to be actively distancing themselves from their culture.

As illustrated in the previous section, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the subject of the most widely disseminated victim narrative, fits this framing because she is herself an active proponent of the Eurabia thesis. In the article profiling Jasvinder Sanghera, women who have successfully escaped or avoided forced marriages are said to be able to do so because ‘their culture is diluted’, and Sanghera is described as part of a growing ‘movement’ of such women. As Anitha and Gill argue in relation to the representation of forced marriage in the British media, while the courage of Sanghera and other survivors should certainly be recognised, it is also important to question the politics surrounding which narratives are accorded legitimacy in the mainstream media, and which are overlooked. ⁵² As they point out, in a rare instance in which a British victim’s refusal to condemn her parents was conveyed in the media, it was done so not as means of illustrating the often complex dynamics at play in this form of domestic violence, but rather to criticise the victim.

The only feature article that explored forced marriage in Australia in any depth was also a rescue narrative with a hero protagonist who is rhetorically distanced from her culture. Caroline Overington’s ‘The wedding vow’ (Australian Magazine, 11 February 2012) profiles Eman Sharobeem, a Sydney community worker described as ‘a true warrior for girls’ trapped in ‘small communities around the country’ where ‘parents are plotting to force their daughters into marriage’. Sharobeem’s appearance (‘She is wearing a figure-hugging animal-print dress. Her fingernails are beautifully manicured and polished, and her heels are high with peep-toes’) is highlighted in order to represent her as modern and western, in contrast to the communities she deals with. Yet despite this distancing, she is still accorded an insider status as a source of hidden truth regarding minority ethnic men:

[Sharobeem] notes that some men who arrive in this country are ‘immediately told by others in the community that Australia is a country where women are powerful. Women run the government, and you are going to be led by women, and you will lose your balls, basically, and forced marriage is one way for these men to show that, no, I still have control over my wife, and my daughter.’

This insider status was used to dismiss minority ethnic women’s groups’ criticisms of the legislative project as simply ‘migrant’ groups’ resistance to ‘government attempts to interfere in what some may see as a cultural problem’:‘Sharobeem waves that argument away. “This is a growing problem in Australia, and it should be a crime”, she says. “And that is from somebody who knows, because of course I have been through it myself.”’ The evidentiary weight accorded to one victim narrative thus invalidated the views of grassroots organisations that provide frontline support services to women, and most certainly do not regard forced marriage as a cultural problem.

The centring of Sharobeem in this way can also be read in the context of a broader western media preoccupation with charismatic Muslim or ex-Muslim figures whose support for assimilationist agendas affords them celebrity status, while the voices of other Muslims are silenced or ridiculed. ⁵³ These international stars find particularly receptive audiences in Australia, where critical public engagement with their views is rare. For instance, Norma Bagain Toliopoulos, who wrote an entirely fictitious memoir about an honour killing in Jordan under the pen-name Norma Khouri, was granted asylum in Australia and became a fixture on the national literary festival circuit despite the many obvious discrepancies in her story. ⁵⁴ In the rare instances where Muslim women’s criticisms of these figures are conveyed in the mainstream media, the framing is often intensely hostile. In 2017, more than sixty prominent Australian Muslim women, including representatives of frontline minority women’s domestic violence services, signed a petition asserting that Ayaan Hirsi Ali did not speak for them, after Hirsi Ali made comments inferring that forced marriage is an Islamic practice. ⁵⁵ When Hirsi Ali subsequently announced that she was cancelling a planned Australian speaking tour, the media coverage that followed focused almost exclusively on her claim that the women who signed the petition were Islamists ‘carrying water’ for Islamic State and Boko Haram (The Australian, 5 April 2017), with little or no examination of the reasoning behind the petition. Conservative commentator Andrew Bolt labelled the petition an ‘act of totalitarianism’ in an online blog for the Herald Sun, ⁵⁶ while the Daily Telegraph carried op-eds describing Hirsi Ali as the ‘victim’ of ‘Islamic intolerance’ (5 April 2017) and the petitioners ‘compliant, man-obeying Muslim women’ (25 March 2017). Even the left-leaning Sydney Morning Herald (5 April 2017) published Hirsi Ali’s charge that Australia needed programmes to assimilate Muslim migrants.

Like the Norma Khouri memoir, much of Eman Sharobeem’s story has since been revealed to be fictitious. In 2017, a NSW corruption commission inquiry heard that she had falsified client numbers and defrauded over $600,000 from the women’s health service at which she worked, and was neither a psychologist nor recipient of two PhDs and a Master’s degree as she claimed. She also was not a child bride: she told the inquiry that she married her first cousin in Egypt at 21 before migrating to Australia with him, not the age of 14 or 15 she told the media. The inquiry did, however, hear that she was subject to domestic violence in that marriage. Her experiences were thus not unlike those of many other Australian women, albeit further complicated by her status as a recent migrant and sole income earner of the family, which she said left her socially isolated and powerless to leave the marriage. If that version of her story is to be believed, it suggests above all a need for accessible, targeted welfare services for minority ethnic women facing similar difficulties. Likewise, Hirsi Ali’s story does not easily lend itself to support for criminal legislation as the primary means of addressing the problem of forced marriage. As Hussein points out, despite her claim that her parents forced her to marry, Hirsi Ali continued to financially support her family and visit them in Kenya long after she settled in Europe. ⁵⁷ ‘It seems vanishingly unlikely that she would have given evidence in court that would have sent her father to prison, despite having so publicly denounced both him and his religious beliefs’, Hussein writes. The point here is not to deny that some women may wish to prosecute their parents, but rather that women’s experiences are often more complicated than the media coverage suggests, and their needs are therefore unlikely to be met by criminal legislation alone.

Conclusion

Mainstream Australian newspapers overwhelmingly represented forced marriage as a cultural practice most often associated with Islam during the thirteen years leading up to the criminalisation of forced marriage in Australia. Forced marriage acquired meaning in the context of an Orientalist civilisational frame in which it was consistently understood to be a problem of multiculturalism. Conservatives writing in both politically left- and right-leaning publications represented forced marriage as evidence of the Eurabia thesis, in which policies of multiculturalism – supported by feminists and the broader Left – have left the West vulnerable to Islamic conquest. While liberals did not necessarily subscribe to this conspiracy theory, they did share its culturally essentialist view of the minority ethnic subject, expressed through the tropes of the excessively violent minority ethnic male and his victimised female counterpart. For liberals, multiculturalism may not spell the end of western civilisation, but it nevertheless requires the reassertion of western values through criminal legislation to temper minority ethnic men’s violence.

This civilisational framing naturalises criminal legislation as the most appropriate means of addressing forced marriage in several interrelated ways. By representing forced marriage as a crime against western cultural values, criminalisation becomes a logical and necessary means of addressing violence enacted not simply against women, but against the western nation state. The state takes on the role of the white knight in a historically familiar patriarchal rescue fantasy which aims to liberate a perpetually oppressed brown female victim from the civilisational threat of the excessively violent brown man. This informs a fetishisation of the point of rescue in accounts of the lived experience of forced marriage, obscuring other important aspects of women’s experiences of domestic violence, particularly recovery. The consequences for service provision are significant: a fixation on rescue forecloses consideration of the measures that can prevent forced marriages from happening in the first place, such as community-based relationship education, and of the material needs of women who experience forced marriage. Understanding forced marriage in civilisational terms makes it impossible to understand that for a woman experiencing this form of domestic violence, prosecuting her family members may figure less prominently in her conception of her own needs than finding immediate safety from violence through civil legislation in combination with crisis accommodation, and in the longer term accessing targeted services to rebuild her life. ⁵⁸ In legitimising only those victim narratives in which liberation lies in distancing oneself from one’s culture, the civilisational framing marginalises more complicated experiences that cannot be understood within its simplistic culturalist terms.

These findings support minority women’s groups’ claims that media coverage of forced marriage in Australia is racist. Importantly, the racism here extends beyond the overt cultural chauvinism of conservatives’ paranoid delusions of Muslim takeover. Laying bare the assumptions about subjects and violence (either as perpetrators or victims of violent acts) that are present even in the liberal discourse on forced marriage has revealed an underlying logic of western cultural superiority. In the current political context it is more important than ever to explicitly name this as racism. For many people, this so-called ‘new racism’ ⁵⁹ – which is premised on flawed conceptions of culture rather than phenotype – is not racism at all, hence the common assertion that Islamophobia is not racism because Islam is not a race. However, as critical race theorists point out, the dominant means by which racialising power structures are reproduced today across multiple domains of social life is precisely through the disavowal of race as their organising principle. ⁶⁰ As this article has shown, racism in Australia manifests itself not only as the street assaults, repugnant speech acts and similar forms of public behaviour usually associated with the term in the popular imagination. ⁶¹ It also operates in subtle yet equally insidious ways to discursively shape perceptions about minority ethnic populations. These perceptions ultimately materially affect the lives of racialised people, in this case by restrictively shaping the services available to minority women seeking safety from violence. The consequences for women are therefore cause for alarm, and underline the urgent need for a serious public discussion on anti-Muslim racism in Australia.