Towards a Transformative Paradigm in the UK Response to Forced Marriage

Introduction

On 8 June 2012 the government announced plans to criminalise forced marriage despite nationwide concerns that the move will stigmatise minority communities, reduce reporting 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 Rukshana 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 sweetheart 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 cultural 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 fundamental 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 protecting 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 essentialises 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 Dustin, 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 representation 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 relations are already being resisted and challenged internally, and literature on multiculturalism recognises that engagement with communities can challenge and transform hegemonic power structures (Schachar, 2001). Engagement here goes beyond staggered unilateral exchange associated with ‘consultation with community’. It demands genuine dialogue in search of compatibility (An-Na’Im, 2010), which engages at an intimate 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 considered 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 literature 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 freedom and choice, against ‘their’ ‘backward’ values associated with ‘tradition’. Crucially this tendency manifests itself within the forced marriage debate through a defining liberal 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 suggests 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 application 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 announcement 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 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 community 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 shaped the government’s strategy on forced marriages, was launched in 2000 amidst strong commitment to endorsement from the South Asian community. While it took its current title in 2005, it was initially established under the title Community Liaison Unit – a hint towards the government’s intention to situate its forced marriage work in a wider community engagement strategy. In the early years, the unit had three permanent staff, including two secondees with expertise in human rights and ‘the South Asian community’. I was one of these secondees – a British Bangladeshi experienced in international human rights and immigration law research. Myself and my fellow secondee – an Asian family counsellor of Pakistani descent – were tasked with relieving the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s regional consular desks of the day-to-day handling of requests for assistance from women (and some men) ³ facing an imminent forced marriage abroad and improving partnership working between government departments and between domestic and overseas police forces and civil society.

Also working for the unit during the early years was a South Asian research fellow, seconded from the influential Blairite thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research, and a South Asian woman who had escaped a forced marriage in Pakistan with the unit’s help. This strong South Asian, and third sector, presence in the unit demonstrated the government’s commitment in these early years to a culturally informed approach that would both tailor the government’s service to users’ needs and enrich internal cognisance of South Asian culture. We commissioned Samad and Eade’s much cited ‘Community Perceptions on Forced Marriage’ research to provide a community-based understanding of forced marriage to public agents involved in these cases.

Our principal task was to improve consular assistance. By the end of the first year, if someone approached ⁴ the Unit to say that they were in a rural village facing a forced marriage somewhere in Pakistan, India or Bangladesh, there was a good chance we could locate them and have a member of consular staff, often accompanied by police, visit them. If they wanted to leave, we could take them to a safe house in the city and arrange their repatriation to the UK. Where minors were involved, social services were also contacted and in most cases were already aware of the family.

These ‘rescue’ cases were only a portion of the cases we handled. About a third of the women and men who contacted us were ‘reluctant sponsors’ who had been forced into a marriage abroad, and were being made to sign sponsorship forms for their new spouse’s visa. They asked for the visa to be denied without explicit reference to the forced marriage, and without disclosing that they had been in touch. Given that this was only three years after the government had abolished the unpopular primary purpose rule, and that there was suspicion within South Asian circles that the forced marriage work was a ploy to bring the rule back in by the back door, refusing the visa in this way was not an option ⁵ – although government thinking on the immigration aspects of forced marriage changed after 2005. We could only help if other grounds for refusal were available. If we succeeded then the women effectively avoided the reality of marriage without risking exit from the family. While exit characterised the international work, it was not the primary aim for this domestic work.

Our priority in the international work was to take British citizens who requested consular support out of danger, in a context of real threat not only of an unwanted marriage, but in some cases also of rape, domestic violence and even murder. The deep felt need for the state to react decisively and effectively, while being informed by a community perspective, was, however, matched by an unsettling realisation that what we were offering was only one part of the solution. Once back in the UK many of those the unit helped were reluctant to cut off ties with their families and communities, faced with a total absence of any alternative support network. There was a greater task ahead for the state to engage with debate within the South Asian community itself to improve women’s options domestically. However, in 2005, when the unit changed its name and the focus turned to the domestic dimension of forced marriages, the theme of exit, which was imperative to the international work, continued to underlie its domestic approach. The remaining South Asian secondees were replaced with an expert on domestic violence (Forced Marriage Unit, 2008) and regulation was adopted as the chosen method for behavioural change. The factors leading to this approach are complex and I will attempt to unpick these below.

The State’s Agenda Revisited: Women’s Rights and the Exclusion of Community

As suggested above, at its incarnation, current government policy on forced marriage was founded on a principle that forced marriage could only be tackled with the communities’ involvement. The government’s initial Working Group on Forced Marriage, ⁶ was led by Baroness Uddin, Lord Ahmed and five other members, including representatives of women’s groups and consultants with race relations expertise, all of Asian descent. The forward to their report A Choice by Right is written as a direct and personal address to first-generation British Asians: ‘many of us have migrated to Britain’ with an ‘innate sense of obligation to maintain our cultures, languages and traditions’ (emphasis added). There are indications also that this was intended to be the beginning of work for British South Asians themselves to tackle forced marriage – the forward ends: ‘[f]or it is the communities, and above all the parents, who now need to take the leading role in eradicating forced marriage and giving all of our children peace of mind’.

Despite this clear intention that the solution would lie ultimately within the communities themselves, government policy turned increasingly against community (Wilson, 2007; Enright, 2009). The reasons for this are complex. To begin with the challenge for the government in tackling forced marriage in the UK was partly a tendency by government agencies and frontline staff to view forced marriage cases as a cultural form of domestic violence, and ‘off limits’. To overcome this the government sought to engage with critical voices from within the South Asian community, especially women’s support agencies, thus shielding itself from accusations of racism while defending its intervention through a human rights narrative. The Home Office lead on forced marriage came primarily from those working on domestic violence, reinforcing a women’s rights perspective on the domestic work.

The government found cautious allies in vocal Asian women’s rights campaigners. Inclusion of women’s support groups in early discussion, notably Southhall Black Sisters, confronted the government with a particular strand of feminist discourse that warned against involving community or families in a compromise solution to forced marriage that would leave vulnerable women unprotected. Any deference in the government’s policy to community leaders or respect for cultural practices was treated as misguided and irresponsible multiculturalism (Razack, 2004). The government’s consideration of involving families through mediation prompted the resignation of Southhall Black Sisters’s representative to the Working Group, Hannana Siddiqui. While the principal reasoning for the stance of the Southhall Black Sisters, to safeguard vulnerable women and children from misguided attempts at reconciliation with violent family members, was important, this type of intervention lent itself to creeping claims of cultural deficiency within the government literature, re-positioning the South Asian minority as a violent and backward ‘other’ (Dauvergne and Millbank, 2010; Enright, 2009).

The most recent policy paper, The Right to Choose (HM Government, 2008: p. 9), references culture-specific motives for forced marriage: protecting family honour, protecting perceived cultural and religious ideals, preventing unsuitable relationships and attempting to strengthen family links. These are framed not only as characteristic of a particular cultural community but also as out-dated and misconceived: parents upholding cultural traditions from their home country ‘when in fact practices and values there may have changed’, and protecting ‘perceived religious ideals which are misguided’. Speech marks are used to denote an alien conception of reality endemic in these motives: ‘preventing “unsuitable” relationships’; ‘controlling unwanted behaviour, for example … behaving in a “westernised manner”’; ‘protecting “family honour”’. Some motives listed speak directly to fears over abuses of immigration rules, or anti-libertarian practices that associate marriage with consolidating familial property and wealth. Forced marriage, then, becomes an endemic cultural practice motivated by misguided, out-dated and paternalistic values at odds with British values and against its interests.

Perhaps predictably, the response to this has been to substitute a state paternalism aimed at protecting South Asian women from their communities. While legislation on forced marriage was considered unthinkable in 2000 – stigmatising a specific cultural community would run contrary to the ethos of equality and non-discrimination ⁷ – the government has introduced civil and now plans to introduce criminal sanctions for forced marriage. In 2007 the government made a firm statement of their intention to regulate forced marriage as a cultural practice: the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act. ⁸ A central provision of the Act, the Forced Marriage Protection Order, modelled on those used in domestic violence cases, allows the court to issue civil prohibitions, restrictions and requirements against those suspected of attempting to force someone to marry. In fact, a review of the Protection Orders in May 2011 concluded that they have not been closely monitored and their use, usually ex parte by public bodies with varying degrees of understanding of the cultural complexity of the cases, has raised concerns. ⁹ In the few cases where breaches were reported, no prosecution was made owing either to lack of evidence or to the unwillingness of the victim to cooperate with what would be a criminal prosecution (contempt of court).

Unperturbed by concerns over the effectiveness of this legislation, on 8 June 2012 the government announced the controversial introduction of a criminal offence of forcing someone to marry. ¹⁰ In its press release the government stated that it wanted to send a clear and strong message to communities that forced marriage would not be tolerated. ¹¹ At the time of writing no details have been released about how the new crime will be framed. Three separate consultations on criminalising forced marriages in 2005, 2011 and 2012 resulted in warnings from agencies, professionals and individuals working with people facing forced marriage, that creating a specific criminal offence would discourage reporting and alienate communities. Responses from within the South Asian community have highlighted the dangers of framing policy as a clash of values and have called for dialogue to identify shared values as a more appropriate way forward. ¹²

Alongside criminal and civil sanctions are the bold steps that have been taken in the area of immigration law. In November 2008, despite warnings that the move would violate human rights, be perceived as discriminatory, penalise genuine marriages and not prevent forced marriages in general (Home Office, 2008: p. 12; Hester et al., 2008), the government amended the Immigration Rules (para. 277) to raise the age at which a person lawfully present or settled in the UK could sponsor a spousal visa (or be sponsored) from 18 to 21. This was said to reflect the fact that cases peaked at ages 18 ‘and above’ – in fact they peak at 19. ¹³ This rather blunt tool effectively created a presumption of force for any British citizen or resident wishing to marry a non-British citizen where either party was under 21. The Supreme Court in Quila v. SSHD [2010] EWCA Civ 1482, describing the new rule as a ‘sledge-hammer’, held that it disproportionately inhibited the right to family life and could not be justified. Feminists writing on forced marriage, who struggle with the usurpation of gender equality arguments by anti-immigration lobbyists, identify an increasingly racialised quality to the government’s immigration policies on spousal visas (Razack, 2004: p. 134).

Race relations theorists, situating government responses to forced marriage in a neo-colonial and post 9/11 context, have highlighted multiple layers of xenophobia in the government’s response (Wilson, 2007; Razack, 2004; Phillips and Dustin, 2004). Wilson (2007: p. 35) notes that Lord Lester, ¹⁴ who proposed the Forced Marriage Act in the form of a private member’s bill, alluded, in his presentation of the Bill in the House of Lords, to colonial efforts by British administrators to abolish Sati and child marriages during British Indian rule. He also referred to those who supported his Bill as ‘enlightened British Asians’ (Anitha and Gill, 2009b: p. 261 emphasis added). In a recent speech on radicalisation and terrorism, David Cameron, citing forced marriage as a case in point, stated that, when ‘unacceptable views or practices have come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious … to stand up to them’. ‘Muscular liberalism’ is advocated as an antidote to the ‘passive tolerance’, which he says has allowed segregated communities to ‘[behave] in ways that run counter to our values’. ¹⁵

This neo-colonial paternalism has not only alienated community generally, but has also reduced engagement with young South Asians as agents of change. Samad and Eade (2001) noted, over a decade ago, concerns raised by young people in their focus groups that the government’s interest in forced marriage was a symptom of Islamophobia. However, these legitimate concerns were never addressed. Instead the government increasingly positioned forced marriage policies within the framework of violence against women and children – re-inventing those involved as ‘abused children’ and ‘vulnerable adults’ (HM Government, 2008: p. 7, para. 16). While these culture-neutral descriptors could have been useful in uncoupling the most serious cases from cultural practices, and identifying specific categories of person at risk, they have instead been used to infantilise South Asian women in general, stripping them of their agency and legitimating state protectionist policies in ways reminiscent of the colonial mission (see Nandy, 1983).

Marriage as Process: A South Asian Perspective

It is not only that the paternalistic turn in forced marriage policy has alienated community and disengaged agency that is problematic, but the fact that it is founded on a culturally Western framing of marriage as an event. Forced marriage is distinguished from arranged marriage and defined in the government’s position paper A Choice by Right (HM Government, 2000: pp. 6–7) as: ‘A marriage conducted without the valid consent of both parties, where duress is a factor’. Consent, often appearing with the prefix ‘free and full’, is understood in the negative, as the absence of coercion or duress in marriage choice. Duress is defined in the Forced Marriage Act as ‘to coerce by threats or other psychological means’, S.63A(6), and includes physical, psychological, financial, sexual and emotional pressure.

The problem associated with using objectified (legal) criteria of ‘consent’ and ‘duress’ in the context of South Asian marriage processes has been discussed elsewhere. Anitha and Gill’s (2009a) thought-provoking article articulates the problems of situating forced marriage within a liberal individualist binary of consent and coercion. They discuss the problematic emphasis in case law of the English courts (nullity cases) on the ‘myth of free choice’. These cases demonstrate how the legal process extracts realities of pressure into logical legal equations whereby some women can be understood to have made a choice – because there was a ‘reasonable alternative’ to accepting the marriage – and others, owing to threat of violence for example, have not. This ‘race-less façade of the legal language’, as they put it, reduces all those seeking legal intervention to a detached persona, without community or culture (Anitha and Gill, 2009a: p. 175). We are beginning to see glimpses of a more nuanced understanding of culture in judicial opinion writing as a complex setting for young women’s choices. In her separate opinion in R (on the application of Begum v. Denbigh High School) [2006] UKHL 15, Baroness Hale summarises with remarkable insight the complex pressures to ‘veil’ on young Muslim women, capturing the negotiated sense of self, and the politics of self that she embodies. However, she is criticised for taking a ‘paternalistic stance on choice’ (Vakulenko, 2007: p. 728) and courts have generally struggled with cultural practices that appear to clash with British values (Cumper and Lewis, 2011).

Arguably, though, it is not that South Asian women are treated in the legal space as culture-free that is problematic – some members of minority communities take recourse to the British courts in family matters for exactly that reason (Menski, 2002; Holden, 2011) – but that this culturally determined (liberal individualist) approach to conceptualising marriage is used as the basis for defining absence of consent generally, which generates unsatisfactory conclusions. Ballard (2006) points to the difficulty of transposing the heavily individualist model of consent inherent in the debate in the West onto the reality of familial responsibility and engagement in the marriage process within South Asian communities. The arranged marriage process, heavily reliant on parental and sometimes extended family input, fails to measure up to the requirements of free and full consent. The government’s position, that there is a clear distinction between arranged marriages and forced marriages, because consent is freely given in the former but not in the latter, simply fails to engage with this problematic.

Some researchers (Gangoli et al., 2006; Enright, 2009) refer to this as a ‘slippage’ between arranged marriage and forced marriage, identifying a difficulty in drawing an empirically observable line, where pressure is identifiably absent in the context of arranged marriage processes. The broadening of the definition of duress beyond threat of physical violence to include emotional pressure in policy and case law has led to a ‘grey area’ (Anitha and Gill, 2009a: p. 171) between forced marriage and arranged marriage, and findings of force more readily in the context of the latter. While agents of the state who use this term still insist that arranged marriages are capable of supporting free consent (see Justice Singer in Re SK), as Mondal (2008: p. 161) puts it, the spectre of the forced marriage ‘haunts the scene whenever arranged marriages are discussed in Britain’. This slippage feeds into anti-immigration rhetoric, evident in papers such as Brandon and Hafez’s (2008) report for the right wing think tank CIVITAS, and Storhaugh’s ‘Human Visas’ discussed by Razack (2004).

While many cases of forced marriage have more to do with familial breakdown and domestic violence than culture, a better understanding of arranged marriages and how to conceptualise force in the context of these marriages is important. Social anthropologists studying the British South Asian communities have discussed and documented cultural codes designed to maintain hierarchies of power, pool resources and direct wealth and control in the UK and back to those in the subcontinent (Ballard, 1994; Shaw, 1988, 2000; Gardner and Shukur, 1994; Modood et al., 1997). Ballard’s much referenced Desh Pardesh illustrates that maintaining values of personal and family honour, ‘izzat’, was important as ‘a matter of relative standing’ for first-generation Pakistani migrants and created a competitive environment in which each kinship group attempted to compete against their neighbour in community ratings. Marriages and other life cycle events were important signifiers in this process, acting as arenas of social interaction and a means of advancing family status. Endogamy, marriage for example within one’s own caste or kinship group, has been characteristic of marriages in some South Asian communities (Samad and Eade, 2000), although support for endogamy is said to be in decline (Anwar, 1998).

Connected with this was the particular role given to women in upholding family honour. Alison Shaw in her study of the Pakistani community in Oxford explains that, as the bearers of sons who would inherit the family property, keeping women sharif (respectable) ensured that property was properly channelled through marriage. The high premium placed on female chastity was enforced at a community level through the complementary concepts of purdah (modesty or veiling) and izzat. These are seen not only as affecting a woman’s worth but also as limiting their agency: for older-generation women, agency consists of protecting family honour, even over their personal safety (Enright, 2009: p. 342, citing Gill). However, Ahmad (2006) notes that the reproduction of izzat and purdah across the migrant community has not endured consistently. As families relinquished the ‘myth of return’ to the subcontinent and adapted to life in Britain, many women began to contribute to household economies and political dialogues. She questions the stereotype of the ‘over-bearing’ and ‘izzat-obsessed’ family and ‘Asian women as passive victims of a homogenised South Asian culture that is inevitably oppressive towards them’. Veiling in particular has become a highly complex political (Ahmed, 2011; Motha, 2007) and often autonomous act, part of what Parekh (1997) calls the ‘subtle dialect of cultural negotiation’.

The historic, global and political complexity of these issues is beyond the remit of this paper. What I wish to suggest here is that, while cultural codes provide a context in which decisions are made, they should not be taken as homogenously determinative. In fact, a number of authors suggest that the custom of arranged marriage is becoming more flexible both in Britain and in the countries of origin (Anwar, 1998; Samad and Eade, 2001; Phillips and Dustin, 2004; Mondal, 2008). The involvement of young people is changing, with prospective spouses able to meet and spend time together, albeit with a chaperone, and Anwar (1998) and Ahmad (2006) both note the increasing use of Asian marriage agencies to facilitate meetings. Furthermore within one family parental involvement may change over time. Shaw found in her study of Pakistanis in Oxford that parents were becoming less involved with younger siblings. Autobiographical accounts of forced marriage such as Jasvinder Sanghera’s Shame (2007) suggest that strict parental control may become relaxed over time between siblings.

Parental Involvement in Arranged Marriages

One thing that tends to be consistent, however, is the (often primary) importance given to parental involvement in the process, not only in literature analysing cultural norms but also in the testimonies of young British South Asians. How that parental involvement is manifested and experienced, and the way the younger person is able to engage with the process are critical factors. Stopes-Roe and Cochrane’s (1990) convenient, if simplified, types of arranged marriage, distinguished on a sliding scale of control by family members, is often cited, and provides a starting point for understanding the variables that allow for flexibility. The ‘traditional arranged marriage’ involves parents and extended family members playing an active part in the selection of the future spouse with little or no involvement of the prospective bride/groom. In their ‘modified traditional marriage’ the family provide a limited choice of suitors, and the young person chooses between them. ‘Cooperative traditional’ describes a marriage process where the individual may be involved in selecting a number of candidates and the final decision is a joint one. The ‘independent arranged marriage’ involves Western style courtship before marriage with parents giving their approval before the marriage can take place.

Social researchers have found that communities who typically migrated to the UK from South Asia, such as Sylheti Bangladeshis and Mirpuri Pakistanis, originating from poor, rural backgrounds with low education, are more likely to arrange their marriages with high levels of parental involvement (Afshar, 1989; Modood et al., 1994; Hemel, 2011). Research carried out in 1994 by Modood et al. as part of the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities corroborates this: 57% of Pakistanis and 45% of Bangladeshis aged 16–34 allowed parents to chose their spouse without them having a say – the figures were higher for spouses over 35. However, as Modood et al. note, these statistics tell us little of the nuances of dialogue and unspoken readings of social binds that encompass the process leading up to the marriage. They also give no insight into motivations underlying levels of participation.

Qualitative research in this area has revealed a complex of emotions behind these statistics. Interviews carried out by Gangoli et al. (2006) illustrate a deep trust, pragmatic and emotional, in parental guidance in the marriage process:

Our mum and dad, they love us, they want the best for us …

If my mum said you can’t marry him then I wouldn’t. Cos if they are saying no, cos my family means everything to me and if they are saying no then that means he is not the right boy for me.

I went for the arranged marriage option. Because I just think in a way there are people there, your aunties, uncles, mum and dad, they are checking out the whole family for you. if you met a guy in the street you would just fall in love with and you wouldn’t think to check his financial situation or his background. You just go for his looks or whatever, his charm … so when you go through an arranged marriage you know you are very secure because it has all been checked out.

However, perceptions about who has ultimately made the decision may also be distorted. Some respondents, for example, over- or underemphasise their input compared with arrangements in other families (Modood et al., 1997). Sensitivity about admitting their inability to direct events may also distort retrospective accounts. It is common to see references to people claiming to have made the final decision themselves, while under considerable pressure (Gangoli et al., 2006):

I was given a choice [about my marriage], my father did sit down with me and discuss it but I could see the pressure that he was under and I agreed.

My mum just wanted somebody from inside the family that I guess she could get on well with … my father said ‘either you do it my way or I’m going to kick you out on the street’ … my mum crying all the time, so it was actually very very difficult. So you know I just … decided to bring it to an end so I said ‘yeah, I’ll do it’.

Consensus as a Framework for Future Analysis

I have said that conceptualising force in the context of South Asian marriages engenders an analysis of marriage as a process in which primary importance is given to cultural mores and parental and extended family involvement. The subjects of this process seek to engage in a meaningful way with this process, although their expectations of this, and consequently their perception of their own involvement, may vary enormously. While feminists warn that entrenched inequalities predetermine and limit the scope of their involvement, there is evidence of young people asserting their preferences. ¹⁶ Their deference to parental endorsements, at minimum, mean, however, that these negotiations tend to take place as part of an attempt at reaching a consensus, which maximises their own preferences while maintaining close family relations and securing cultural endorsements.

Empirical research gives many examples of young people’s agency within the arranged marriage process. Shaw (2000: p. 179) provides a common example of a woman, Nadia, who uses negotiations over her education and career prospects, both of which may have positive implications for marriage prospects, to delay marriage. Samad and Eade (2001: p. 88) explain how younger South Asians reason with their parents about the demerits of consanguineous marriage, citing the risk of unwanted disabilities in children born from those marriages. Bredal (cited in Razack, 2004: p. 163) found that young people circulated stories of divorce and desperate measures taken by those in unhappy marriages. In Mondal’s (2008) account, a young woman, Razia describes herself telling her parents that they need to treat their sons and daughters equally and citing the Qu’ran in support. The Qu’ran is also brought up by a young man, Riaz, recorded by Shaw (2000: pp. 190–191) as he defends a friend’s right to a love marriage.

While the success of these initiatives may vary, Samad and Eade (2001: p. 69) note that parents faced with the prospect of a child rebelling may accommodate them, not only as a strategy for sustaining relations with their children but also because this may in the long term be the surest way to ensure the maintenance of family respect and honour in the community. One older respondent comments:

In reality, parents over here are helpless. There is no way children can be forced in this country. Parents are well aware that times have changed and doing this kind of force, or talking about using this kind of force, will cost or bring bad name to them.

However, this consensus has to be understood culturally, not in the liberal sense in which parties maintain a right of veto, but as a longer process of negotiations in which input from a number of people within the family is offered, rebuked, given weight or not, depending on relative standing. Because of this some caveats exist. In reality decision-making in the family and extended family takes place in a context of competing claims to legitimacy, authority and power, and young people test out the limits of these claims within the family and social communities in a context of culturally endorsed power dynamics. Consensus, while offering a space for negotiation, is often a political tool to reinforce established authority in small social groups (Nader, 1990) and can be used as a mandatory condition of inclusion (Okin, 2002: p. 229) that protects the status quo. Also it is unlikely to facilitate agency for children and dependant adults. Consensus inevitably also involves compromise, and if the parents and young person’s core interests are fundamentally at odds, no consensus may be possible – parental disagreement with a lesbian, gay or bisexual son/daughter’s wish for a same-sex relationship for example.

My aim here is not to profile consensus as the solution but to demonstrate that it has to be engaged with because it is the process into which government interventions take their effect. The challenge that lies ahead is to situate the forced marriage debate in a closer analysis of these dynamics. More research is needed on the factors that affect negotiating powers. I have said nothing here about the role of third party intermediaries, such as Sharia Councils, religious and other elite who may also affect this dynamic and the wider literature problematising women’s position within these bodies (Schachar, 2008). I use these examples from qualitative literature to try to show that an inter-subjective approach demonstrates that, because these women negotiate in a context of pressures from their family and wider community, persuading their family, and possibly community, of their wishes may be a pre-requisite to realising them. Whereas the liberal individual may only need to realise her own will – consent – the woman in this context may desire familial or community endorsement – consensus – before she chooses to exercise it. Understanding this helps us to appreciate why the government’s focus on exit and regulation, which fails completely to engage with this dynamic, is so at odds with the needs of those it seeks to assist.

Conclusion

In this paper I have sought to show that government policy on forced marriage, which has moved increasingly away from community engagement, is not only failing to serve those it claims to assist but is missing an important opportunity to participate in transformative dialogue. Although forced marriages that take recourse to domestic violence, abductions and rape do call for rapid action from the state and its agents, this response is not a panacea, and a separate, although interrelated, question exists of the dynamics of pressure within arranged marriages. In fact the government, while failing to engage with this, has simultaneously conflated forced marriage with South Asian culture in a way that blurs the distinction, and responded to both with paternalistic, neo-colonialist policies.

In doing this it has failed to engage with latent possibilities for transformation and negotiations by young people within the communities. A new paradigm of policy would re-examine distribution of power and wider familial and community involvement in contemporary marriage decisions in South Asian communities, and how to facilitate negotiations that are attempted within these. It would re-situate ‘force’ in the consensus process that characterises South Asian marriages and engage in debate that facilitates self-reflection within these communities and families. However, this process cannot take place without serious self-reflection on the part of the government also and a repositioning of policy in a community informed paradigm. Regulatory and exit-oriented strategies that treat British South Asians as an unwelcome, unvalued ‘other’ to be punished for behaviour seen as repugnant will not only fail to encourage transformative reflection but also reinforce racial segregation and mutual distrust.