pktechgirlbackup | Not sure if racist...

UK anti-forced-marriage charity is recommending girls who are flying to their parents' countries of origin and believe they'll be forced to marry place spoons in their underwear, so they will trigger a private security screening, where they will be able to tell an authority figure . Not to take a pro-forced-marriage position, but I have several problems with this.

1. Then what? Is an accusation of planned forced marriage sufficient for the girls to emancipate themselves? Is there financial and support available for girls who do so?

2. Even if that exists, how much proof does it require? How sure does the girl have to be? If I suspect my parents are the kind to force me to marry, but they haven't said anything about this particular trip being The Trip, what do I do?

3. The charity is named Karma Nirvana, two things that don't really have anything to do with their stated mission of preventing forced marriages and honor-based abuse. I was going to suggest something really unkind about this being a straw charity designed to disparage Muslims, but I looked it up and the CEO has a Muslim-Punjabi name. So maybe I should just shut up now.

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1) "Is an accusation of planned forced marriage sufficient for the girls to emancipate themselves?"

Huh? Isn't this basically "my parents are going to give me to a stranger who will rape me", which I'd certainly *hope* would be sufficient.

The act itself, yes, but will social services immediately remove a child based on accusation alone? When the child may not even be able to honestly say the parents are definitively planning to do so, just that she's afraid of it?

I do agree that modern society may perhaps err too strongly on the side of "protecting the child", but I think that's just part a larger pattern in our society's approach to these matters. This reaction doesn't seem any worse than some of the reactions I've seen when children accuse adults of molestation, especially when it's cute blond white girls. So this honestly doesn't seem to stand out particularly to me. Nor in this case does it strike me as racist. Religionist or culturalist, perhaps, and that will of course have a disproportionate impact on some racial groups, but I am deeply uncomfortable with collapsing that relationship, because that would in effect say that all people with a particular skin color share a common religion and a common culture, and that actually *IS* inherently racist.

(Plus, I will posit that, logically, if one's culture does not recognized the phenomenon of marital rape (that is, a spouse's right to say "no" to sex, and more broadly, a spouse's right to terminate the relationship at will), then a forced marriage is equivalent to being turned into a sex slave. Yes, that's *totally* a loaded term, and it is in no way "fighting fair" on my part. :) And also, by parallel to the phrase "better that N guilty men go free, than 1 innocent man be convicted", what N would you use for "better that N lying children be taken away from their parents, than 1 innocent child be turned into a sex slave"? (There's a fascinating article by Sasha Volokh where he makes a broad survey of the values of N that have been posited at different times for different situations...))

On the other hand, would we want the process to be more like how our society treats rape accusations by adult women, where they're more or less assumed to be making it up or exaggerating? How much evidence should a traumatized victim be required to gather on their own, before approaching authorities? It is, quite frankly, *abusive* to require someone to gather legally sufficient evidence before merely talking about the problem with someone. If the girl can't simply call up someone from a child welfare agency and say, "hey, I'm having this problem, what should I do?", without getting a response of "we can't believe you until you present evidence", then...

To be clear- forced marriages are awful, sex within them is rape, calling them awful or noticing they're more prevalant among certain populations is not racist, fighting forced marriage is a very good thing. But...

My understanding is that social services is very, very reluctant to remove children based on a fear of what might happen. In the US, even parents who have lost custody of all their children are entitled to keep new children until the state proves otherwise. And even when problems are deemed to exist, the bias is for treating the family with the child in place. Taking the child away is an absolute last resort. This bias can end tragically in some situations, but it's often coming from a very good place. So no, I don't automatically assume there's an infrastructure in place to give these girls a good life once they put spoons in their underwear.

Imagine if a group started handing out rape whistles to prevent rape. Fighting rape is a good goal, but the whistles will only help if: there are people around to hear them, those people respond, their response is helpful to the woman. And it would certainly be useful if she knew the police would be supportive, that the trial wouldn't rip her apart emotionally. The whistle alone does nothing.

And even if all those things exist, the whistle will only be useful against stranger rape, which is a vanishingly small portion of rape. It doesn't cover women who are impaired (through their own actions or the rapist's), or who are financially dependent on men who have made it clear support will be withdrawn if they don't have sex, or women who are consenting because they've never been taught they didn't have a right to say no. It doesn't cover prison rape. It doesn't cover men who have been taught men always want to fuck, so saying either means they're not really men, or the woman who's offering is hideous beyond all reckoning.

This doesn't make rape whistles a bad idea. But it would concern me if a charity named Grace Penitance that framed itself as anti-date rape or victims' advocacy started touting them as a solution in and of themselves.

From what I can tell, this charity is largely composed of survivors, so I have to assume that they know what they're talking about? Possibly they have reached the conclusion that the first, most important thing to do is for the child to get out of the direct physical control of their parents, and into the presence of a different adult with some sort of authority. That certainly sounds plausible to me, anyway.

I really don't see anything on their site that implies that it wouldn't be better to change the problem at the source. What I do see is that they offer counseling to [other] survivors, which implies that they're thinking about the individuals involved. And from that perspective, I think it's a great idea to offer simple ideas that might work and that might not occur to a random 12-year-old.

And similarly, rape whistles shouldn't be treated as magic talismans, but they help. Every bit helps, right? Every extra percentage shaved off helps, every moment of an attacker's hesitation, every extra bit of attacker's doubt, all that helps. It's a matter of defense in depth, right?

From what I can tell, this charity is largely composed of survivors, so I have to assume that they know what they're talking about?

My reading of http://www.karmanirvana.org.uk/meet-the-team.html, was that there were some survivors but also a lot of highly educated people with no roots in the communities they were trying to help. But the idea that they knew more than I did and I should back off is in fact what I was getting at with the last sentence in the original post.

Every bit helps, right?

I don't think so, no. I think that the "rape prevention" e-mail forwards focus people on relative rare violent stranger rape, and by reinforcing this archetypal image make coercive acquaintance rape more common and harder to address. I also think it contributes to victim shaming and makes prosecution harder

I don't think so, no. I think that the "rape prevention" e-mail forwards focus people on relative rare violent stranger rape, and by reinforcing this archetypal image make coercive acquaintance rape more common and harder to address. I also think it contributes to victim shaming and makes prosecution harder

I've tried, but I just can't bring myself to endorse this. *shrug*

Are arranged marriages just a Muslim thing? My Hindu students seem to place a huge emphasis on marrying someone who is acceptable to their family.

My vague sense was that this was primarily targeted at muslims, but you're definitely right.

Not sure if racist...

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