Fraught parenting: Immigrant parents’ chronic double-bind in Denmark

Introduction

“Someone will always think that I am a bad mom,” Dalia said as we were talking about her relationship with local authorities and institutional staff who worked with her children. Dalia and her husband Ahmed lived in the largest and one of the most notorious immigrant social housing estates in Denmark, Gellerupparken, at the time I met them in the late 2000s. They had fled the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s, and embarked on their family life when settling in Gellerupparken, where they had raised eight children, among them six sons who were enrolled in conflicts with the local authorities or served time in prison. Taking a point of departure in Dalia’s case, this article explores how she and Ahmed, and parents like them, had come to experience themselves in a chronic double-bind position, trying to reconcile multiple contradictory demands on their parenting practices. These parents were caught living with two sets of rationalities and social norms on parenthood—that of the Danish welfare state and that of the Palestinian diasporic community. Although we should not regard these rationalities and norms as fixed or closed, there existed a number of situations where they were in direct opposition to each other. These intersections had persisted throughout the parents’ life in Denmark, and seemed only to be thickening when the children were involved in crime or conflicts. In these situations, the parents were in a doubly marginal position, where the fulfillment of one demand on their parenting practices necessarily entailed the subversion of another. In this article, I argue that this double-bind position entangled with the parents’ experience of permanent crisis and had come to constitute the context of their everyday life, extending far beyond the constraints of a singular moment or situation. It had become an enduring process and a state of being, akin to what Martin Heidegger (1962) defined as being-in-the-world, determining their ways of seeing and being as parents, including how they related to people in their closest social and institutional surroundings. The notion of the chronic double-bind provides us with a heuristic for understanding the production and lived experience of marginality among some groups of immigrants in Denmark. To Dalia and Ahmed, the friction between conflicting norms and rationalities created a crisis in which they experienced their own being-in-the-world as riddled with inconsistency, ambiguity, and moral compromise. I understand this friction as constitutive of their sense of marginality, given that their success of becoming attuned to the social norms of one particular relationship (e.g. the state) inevitably led to their experience of radical othering and exclusion in another relationship (e.g. the immigrant community). It thus situated them in the margin no matter how hard they tried to stick to the demands they encountered in their lives. As I will show, this situation was not only constitutive of their sense of marginality. It could also have devastating costs, such as the experience of forced child removals, as well as ramifications of “social death” in the immigrant community.

This argument feeds into a larger theoretical discussion about the margin as produced by and productive of the state (Das and Poole, 2004). In scholarly accounts, marginalization is often portrayed as a product of the state and its modalities of power and politics of inequality, racialization or structural violence (Essed, 1991; Scott, 1998; Sharma and Gupta, 2006). Marginalization describes a process of radical othering, in which people’s “perspectives and practices are cast to the side or excluded” (Tsing, 1993: 5), and which people themselves actively engage in by negotiating, reinterpreting, protesting, and embellishing their exclusion (Tsing, 1993). However, as argued by Veena Das and Deborah Poole (2004), this mechanism does not mean that we should approach people in the margin as peripheral to the state. Rather, in the process of othering, the margin emerges as a central constitutive counterpart and necessary opposition against which the center, i.e. the state or society, defines itself. As such, the margin constitutes a crucial backdrop for policy development and for the production of moral and political discourses on proper state–citizen relations (Das and Poole, 2004: 8).

While this is also the situation in the Danish case, where places like Gellerupparken have become hotspots for national policy development and extra-juridical interventions (Johansen and Jensen, 2017; Stender, 2018), my analysis takes a different starting point, focusing on the ways in which the margin is enacted “on the ground,” i.e. between parents, relatives, neighbors, and state authorities. Based on this account, I stress the necessity of considering the plurality of social norms that guide these parents’ everyday practices. By invoking the role of the immigrant community, and by emphasizing the ambiguous zone of the double-bind which captures people between different centers of orientation, I suggest that marginalization is not only to be understood as produced by and productive of the state but by the interface between the state and other vitally important actors. The parents in my study are not simply situated at the boundaries of one “center” (i.e. the state) but at intersection between different kinds of “centers,” which are simultaneously interconnected in a state–margin relationship. It is exactly the impossible fusion of these mutually exclusive entities—the center and its margin—that makes both entities exist primarily in the interface between them. I structure my argument in three parts. After introducing methodology and ethics, I take up Gregory Bateson’s notion of the double-bind, refracting it through the anthropological literature on morality and chronic crisis in order to outline a conceptual approach to parenting as an inherently ambiguous endeavor. Secondly, I introduce the site and people of my research in Gellerupparken, focusing on how and with what effects parenting has become a key domain for the social engineering of the state. Thirdly, I analyze Dalia’s case by exploring one particular conflict of norms, examining how she experienced the double-bind in contradictory practices and clashing relationships. I conclude the article by revisiting the argument of how marginality is produced by and productive of the interface between conflicting social norms and rationalities, and what the social implications of this might be.

Methodology and ethics

In my analysis of the perspective of the parents I worked with in Gellerupparken, I draw on long-term ethnographic research on the relationship between immigrant families and welfare state officials in Denmark’s second city, Aarhus. The bulk of my analysis is primarily based on 13 months of fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2010 in Gellerupparken, where I lived in the homes of different Palestinian families and took part of their everyday life. I was researching the ways in which the parents navigated the Danish welfare state’s interventions into their family and neighborhood, raising the question: How do immigrant parents deal with normativity and how does it affect their being and belonging in community and the state? This fieldwork has been followed by a decade-long engagement with Gellerupparken and other marginal urban spaces in the city of Aarhus, including research among a range of social workers and police officers. While my data relate to the situation in Gellerupparken, they point to the effects of a much wider scope of politics of race, religion, gender, and national identity in the global north. My decision to work with Muslim families of Palestinian decent, whose sons were targeted by the state, was not random. As I will show, these families are emblematic figures of Gellerupparken and its controversial place in the national imagination and political construction of Arabs, Muslims, and their sons as The undesirable others. Of central concern is the future produced by these subjects, which positions the parents’ parental practices in the midst of policy debates.

Anthropologists have long documented how parenting has become a central subject of governmentality (Furedi, 2002; Hays, 1996) targeting all segments of western societies (Lee et al., 2014), but in unequal political manners (Faircloth et al., 2013). The perspective of parents in Gellerupparken provides us with a particular view, since they account for a radical version of state rationalities and their conflicts with other sets of rationalities and social norms. Due to the practices of their children, which ranged from petty crime and theft to arson attacks and violent fights, the families in my study had been targeted by multiple welfare interventions since their children were very young. At the same time, the practices of the children, and the ways in which the parents responded to these practices, subjected them to the moral gaze of people in their social circle. As a group, these parents were thus particularly exposed to moral judgment, authoritative interventions, and social and institutional “direction” (Foucault, 2014; Roux and Vozari, 2018: 13) of their parental practices. The parents’ experiences of the double-bind is thus specific and may not account for other Palestinian families that are not under such surveillance and whose children’s practices (and hence, whose parenting practices) are not interpreted as oppositional to the social norms of the state and community. We may see these other families in the same way as we see state workers—as people who experience the contradictions of the double-bind in certain contexts, but not as the context of their life and being. Having said that, research indicates that the experience of being caught between conflicting norms and practices of the state and family applies for a variety of immigrant youths (Mørck, 2000; Waltorp, 2015), as well as national identities other than the Palestinians, e.g. Turks (Sparre and Rytter, forthcoming), Somalis (Matthiesen, 2015) and Pakistanis (Rytter, 2013). Hence, while the chronic and punitive character of the double-bind may be specific to the parents in my study, we must acknowledge the common nature of immigrants’ experiences of having to balance irreconcilable demands embedded in cross-cultural complexity.

Writing about the particular experiences of the families in my study requires a careful management of the ethnography in order to avoid further stigmatization. Therefore, I have chosen not to focus on the particular character of the children’s practices or to go deeper into the specific causes of their troubles. This focus lies beyond the objective of my analysis, which instead aims to provide a better understanding of the effects of these troubles, and how they feed into the wider structure of relationships in Gellerupparken.

Conceptualizing the double-bind

In order to conceptualize the parents’ between and betwixt position, I draw on Gregory Bateson’s notion of the double-bind (Bateson, 1972; Bateson et al., 1956, 1963). Bateson depicted the double-bind as a position in which the individual is confronted by several contradictory messages, and the fulfillment of one necessarily entails the subversion of the other. The result of this perplexed position is that “no matter what a person does, he ‘can’t win’” (Bateson, 1972: 153). Building on communication theory, Bateson saw the double-bind as a matrix structured by three important elements: (1) it defines a situation in which messages contradict each other, (2) the contradiction cannot be communicated, and (3) the individual is not able to leave the field of interaction (Bateson, 1972: 157). The double-bind must be distinguished from other situations in which messages contradict each other. The concept does not only refer to the extremes of having to find a ground in between contradictory demands, but also to the highly disturbing social context in which these contradictions emerge. According to Bateson, the double-bind emerges, when a person is caught in a situation where the other person in a relationship is expressing two orders of messages and one of these denies the other. The nature of this relationship is of existential importance to the person, which means that he or she cannot escape the field of interaction (for instance, between child and parent). The punitive mechanism of the double-bind consists exactly in the existence of the relationship—if the person addresses the contradiction, his or her meta-communication will threaten the relationship itself. Bateson used the example of a mother who expresses hostile and withdrawing behavior whenever her child approaches her, but who acts in a loving and approaching way when the child responds to her hostile behavior as a way of denying that she is withdrawing. In this situation, the child is placed in a position where he must not accurately interpret her communication if he is to maintain his relationship with her (Bateson, 1972: 161). In my study, the double-bind did not occur within a singular relationship but at the interface between two or several binding relationships in the parents’ lives, such as the relation to the state, people in the community, and the children and partner at home. In this very different context, I argue that the parents in my study also experienced a set of built-in punitive mechanisms if they were to unpack the contradictions they were facing and the dilemmas they produced. This particular problem was not the result of an inability to discriminate between messages or figure out the norms and demands of the state or significant others, but the outcome of a highly threatening and violent context of the parents’ lives. As Dalia’s case will show, failing to comply with the norms and demands of the state was conceived as a major risk, since the state represented both the hope for the children’s future prospects and the fear of family break-up, child removals, and other perceived violent interventions into the family sphere. In a similar way, failing to comply with the social norms of the community (or partner or extended family) was also considered a risk, since it could lead to disputes, violence, moral condemnation, and threaten the family’s social survival in the community. What was at stake, thus, was the maintenance of the relationship between the parents and all of these vitally important actors. The real struggle of having to navigate the contradictory norms and demands occurred in situations when the parents were unable to speak about the contradictions and dilemmas without risking these relations or accelerating the violence they represented. In my analysis, I explore how they based their actions on this condition, and how it seemed to reproduce the “schizophrenic” nature of their relationship to both the state and the community. Anthropologists have examined how people have navigated conflicting social norms in different historical and cultural contexts, pointing to the social, political, and moral implications of their position. In Max Gluckman’s (1949) now classic study of the village headman in British Central Africa, he documented the difficulties of having to balance conflicting social norms within a hierarchy of power systems. The structural position of the village headman was of cardinal importance to the connection between kinship (and community) and the colonial state. His dilemma arouse from his embeddedness in overlapping power constellations in the village, where he simultaneously symbolized the corporate identity of the kin-based village and was political representative of the colonial state (Gluckman, 1949: 93; Thelen and Alber, 2018: 14). In this situation, the difficulties of the headman were aggravated in the political system. He and his followers in the village held a common set of values and did not accept the values of the British administration, but he was also a key official in the colonial administration and applied these unaccepted rules in order to avoid being punished by imprisonment or deposition (Gluckman, 1949: 93–94). The headman thus interlocked two distinct normative and social systems but he was caught personally in their internal conflicts (Gluckman, 1949: 93). The position of the parents in Gellerupparken resonates with this experience, but it is also principally different. The parents were not placed in authoritative roles or conceived of as central “symbols” of the values of neither the community nor the state. On the contrary, their parenting practices seemed to constantly place them in opposition to all of the social norms they were straddling. The Danish case thus demonstrates that not only do the parents interlock two distinct systems and their interrelation, but they do so by producing a crucial third relation, which we may regard as the margin of the margin. It is in this sense that we may think of them as doubly marginal.

The role of this particular position has also been discussed within the anthropology of morality. Recalling Greek tragedy, Cheryl Mattingly has shown how the clash of norms can create a moral tragedy, a situation of moral incommensurability “where one is confronted by two cherished moral goods and the fulfillment of one necessarily entails the subversion of the other” (Mattingly, 2012: 171). This situation has been argued to give rise to “moral breakdown” and ethical positioning (Zigon, 2007), but it has also been approached as intrinsic to everyday life (Lambek, 2010). Lambek proposed that morally betwixt positions are embedded in the ordinary where the moral requires practical judgment within the particularities of circumstances (Lambek, 2010; Mattingly, 2012: 170). What we gain from this perspective is an understanding of the ordinary as an arena of potentially incompatible meaning and practices, where people experience themselves as moral “failures” most of the time, or find themselves living a life in “moderate amorality” although they aspire toward the good (Das, 2015: 433–439). I build my analysis on this approach, but my material also challenges the definition of the double-bind position as merely ethical, pointing to the variety of perspectives, practices, and power relationships that it may also generate.

Parenting in Gellerupparken

Gellerupparken constitutes the largest, poorest, and one of the most notorious social housing estates in Denmark. It was built in 1969 and it was originally seen as an innovative modern housing project aimed at Danish middle-class families. However, after the oil crisis hit the country in 1973, it became a center for the accommodation of low-income working class residents, and during the 1980s, when refugees started coming to Denmark on a large scale, it became an attractive place for the municipal placement of immigrants on welfare benefits (Johansen and Jensen, 2017: 303). By the end of the 2000s, the district of Brabrand-Gellerup was populated by 9291 residents, out of whom 7887 came from “third world countries” (Aarhus Municipality, 2010) and the housing estate of Gellerupparken alone was populated by 7191 residents, 84.8% of the residents were of foreign ethnic origin (Aarhus Municipality, 2012). Over 50% of the adult population was on welfare subsidies and around 45% of the population was under the age of 18 (Ministry of Housing, Urban and Rural Affairs, 2010).

The architecture of Gellerupparken is square and functional, comprising massive gray concrete blocks with four to eight floors, five to six stairways in each block, and apartments with up to seven bedrooms. Since 2005, this housing estate has officially been defined a “ghetto,” fulfilling certain criteria and calling for thorough state intervention (Ministry of Transport, Building, and Housing, 2018). ¹ Already in the 1990s, the neighborhood became a hotspot for national policy intervention based on increasing crime rates, unemployment, and alleged lack of integration of the immigrant population. With the introduction of the so-called ghetto-list in 2005, the government developed a spatial anti-ghettoization strategy, the “Master Plan,” which was implemented in Gellerupparken in 2007 (Aarhus Municipality and Brabrand Housing Association, 2007), and followed by a large-scale national anti-ghettoization strategy adopted in 2010 (Government of Denmark, 2010). The Master Plan focused on gentrification and was based on an ethnic dispersal paradigm. It has undergone several revisions, the latest in 2018 (Government of Denmark, 2018). The Master Plan has legitimized increasing efforts to de-segregate the ghetto population through architectural interventions and extra-juridical regulations to exclude welfare clients from the area, educational regulation, such as a busing policy for children with Danish as second language, and finally through heightened security efforts. Furthermore, the 2018 revisions of the Master Plan include a string of measures for countering “parallel societies,” including legal exceptions, such as lowering residents’ welfare benefits, the loss of welfare benefits in cases of child neglect, implementation of zones of harsher punishment on crime, intensified policing, extra-legal duties to report issues of children’s welfare, and stricter responsibilization of parents (based on Act on Social Services no. 810, sec. 57a, of 19 July 2012; Government of Denmark, 2018).

Like in other places in Europe, these efforts can be seen as an escalation of the state’s attempts to reinforce order in a perceived disordered margin (Fassin, 2013), undergirded by exclusionary ethno-politics (Hervik, 2018) and a string of biopolitical policies aimed at developing proper citizens who are able to take care of themselves and their children. With this political development, the ghetto has come to mark an antagonistic anti-identity to Danish society. The discursive construction of the ghetto against society has had the effect of confirming Danish identity, while at the same time precluding possibilities of the ghetto’s integration in society (Simonsen, 2016: 1). This development has also had a major impact on the proximity of the state in Gellerupparken, and the intimate ways in which residents are being governed on the ground. Among the gray high-rises, you will find a landscape of institutions and schools, volunteer associations, development projects, police and social services. I understand this process in line with what Glück (2017) has called the production of “state spaces,” pointing to the transformation of urban space into sites where state authority is enforced through governmental measures (Glück, 2017: 300).

While the institutions and policies are targeting various segments of the ghetto population, it is evident that a dominant part of them focuses on children and youth and increasingly also on parents. In Danish preventive policies, parents of “non-western” ethnic background, who live in disadvantaged social housing areas, are classified as a primary risk group, while their children are defined at risk from their family and social environment (Government of Denmark, 2018). This approach has resulted in a broad spectrum of risk indicators pointing directly at gender (male), age (ranging from 0 to 18 years of age), geographical area (“high-risk environments”), low income, low education, and ethnicity (National Board of Social Services, 2017; Pedersen and Lindstad, 2011). Several scholars have documented the effect of this policy approach, arguing that immigrants’ parenting practices have become increasingly pivotal to the way they are being assessed by state officials in wider political issues (Gilliam and Gulløv, 2017; Olwig and Paerregaard 2011). But policy effects are also unequally distributed among ethnic minority groups in Denmark; while the stereotyping of young immigrants may be nationwide, it has been particularly intense in the ghettos, and while the reference to people of “non-western background” may be broad, certain national identities have been singled out as particularly challenging to the state—mainly those of Palestinian and Somali descent (Rytter, 2019: 6). Furthermore, while an increasing distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants has marked official responses to the alleged terror threat, Danish media and politicians have paid particular attention to a mosque and its religious youth environment in Gellerupparken (Suhr and Sinclair, 2016). Thus, we see that Gellerupparken holds a specific position in the national discourse on urban disorder, and that Muslim parents and children of Palestinian or Arab descent are particularly subjected to the gaze of the state, the public media, and mainstream society. This focus on the local undergirds the intense presence of the state in my interlocutor’s life. If the public domain of the ghetto has been transformed into a “state space” which is governed by rules of exception, so has the private domain of the families. In the following, I will investigate how the parents experienced and managed the presence of the state in their family by analyzing a particular conflict of norms between the local institutions and the community: the disagreement about the presence of young immigrant men in the ghetto streets.

Parents in a chronic double-bind position

I met Dalia in 2009, shortly after initiating my fieldwork in Gellerupparken. She lived in one of the big seven-bedroom flats in the concrete high-rises, two blocks away from the room I had rented in a similar kind of apartment. She was in her late forties, tall and plump, and with a warm smile. You could tell that she was hard-working; hands with callous skin, a sore back from carrying young children, and a rugose face with no make-up. Most days she had a pained expression on her face and talked about how overwhelmingly stressful she found her everyday life, but every once in a while, she broke into an infectious laughter and commented on her family in a sarcastic tone. In the late 1980s, Dalia and Ahmed fled to Denmark with two young sons, and Dalia was expecting their third child. They found cheap accommodation in Gellerupparken, where they also found the largest Palestinian community in the country and people they knew from back home. ² Ahmed, a former soldier of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, started teaching in one of the local schools. In the summer of 2006, the family went to visit their relatives in the suburbs of Beirut and got trapped in the July war. ³ Recalling their earlier war memories, Dalia used to refer to this moment as a critical event that changed Ahmed’s spirit at home. In the years that followed, he became nervous and tense from anxiety and depression and he stopped working in the school. In 2009, both parents lived on early retirement benefits, and Dalia spend most of her days attending to her children and home. It appeared to me that Dalia’s family constituted a “ground-project” in her life. As defined by Cheryl Mattingly, ground-projects refer to “the kinds of commitments that people find so deep to who they are that they might not care to go on with their lives without them, or would not know themselves if they no longer had them” (Mattingly, 2014: 12). But Dalia often complained that raising children in Gellerupparken was a difficult task. Each of her three oldest sons—ranging from 23 to 30 years of age—had been in prison. Her son at 19 years of age served a two-year sentence in a secured youth institution. Her two youngest sons, who were 8 and 10 years old, were approached as a problem by the local authorities. Her oldest daughter at 20 attended high school and spend her days helping with the house and taking care of her 3-year-old little sister. Due to these past and present difficulties, Dalia used to refer to her life as an ongoing crisis:

We have had a rough life… since I was a child in Beirut in the war, so many problems and suffering, and since the time we came here and it was hard to make a life. Since the children were little, I have worried …  sometimes I cannot get out of bed because of all theworries, they make my body heavy. I only remember my life like this.

Conclusion

This article has argued that the notion of the chronic double-bind position provides us with a heuristic to understanding the everyday production of marginality among some immigrant families in Denmark. The article takes its empirical starting point in Gellerupparken, a dilapidated immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, which has constituted a central arena for decades of welfare state interventions. It is in places like Gellerupparken that the social engineering of the Danish state emerges in its most radical version and where the consequences hereof are perhaps felt most acutely. Gellerupparken is also a site of strong communal life, among others within the local Palestinian diaspora, and a place of diverging social norms. The material in the article has demonstrated that parents, whose children are approached as a problem in the neighborhood, are exposed to two sets of irreconcilable rationalities and social norms on parenthood—that of the state and what is performed and discussed as community traditions. This creates an ambiguous zone of normativity, where the parents’ success of becoming attuned to the social norms of one particular relationship inevitably leads to an experience of radical othering and exclusion in another relationship. The analysis has accounted for the difficulties and work involved in navigating parenthood from this double-bind position, as well as its ethical, relational, and existential ramifications in everyday life. In Dalia’s case, we have seen that the double-bind emerges within a context of threat stemming from the ever-present possibility of violence and loss, and that the outcome of this is that parenting becomes fraught with anxieties and dilemmas.

As a way of concluding the article, I will briefly return to the larger theoretical discussion about the margin as produced by and productive of the interface between the state and other vitally important actors. While this article recognizes that marginalization is a multi-layered process, which is produced both at the structural level (through rules of exception, extra-legal interventions, and socio-spatial ordering) and the societal level (through exclusion and othering), the material has demonstrated that to capture the lived experience of marginality, we need to look at the deeper social context of people’s family life. In Gellerupparken, marginality is a function of the incompatibility of norms and practices between the state and the immigrant community, which is most urgently felt when success in one relationship leads to failure in another. This may not be an explicit conflict or even a correlation that people are aware of. State professionals are most often unaware of the social context that the parents are oriented toward and assume that only the institutional goals are of relevance to the families. In a similar way, people in the families’ immediate social environment are often excluded from knowledge about the parents’ institutional contact or the aims and objectives of the state’s interventions into these families’ affairs. Paradoxically, the doubly marginality of the parents is also productive of the interrelationship between the state and the immigrant community. As the parents become symptoms of the internal conflicts of norms, values, and interests between the state and the immigrant community, they seem to reinforce their mutually exclusive relationship. It is these mechanisms of exclusion that may turn out to result in the impossibility of family in places like Gellerupparken.