Forced marriage is a deeply malign cultural practice – but it’s not the only one
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Version 0 of 1. This week saw Britain’s first forced marriage conviction, a year after forced marriage became a criminal offence under the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. As well as a judicial milestone, it is, as you would expect, an extremely disturbing case. The perpetrator had subjected his 25-year-old victim to serious, sustained criminal abuse prior to the forced marriage. He has been sentenced to four years in prison for that crime, plus 16 years for rape, a year for bigamy and a year for voyeurism, all to run concurrently. His name, which cannot be published lest his victim’s identity be revealed, has been indefinitely placed on the sex offenders’ register. He had also kidnapped, imprisoned and blackmailed the plaintiff. Related: Businessman is first person jailed under forced marriage laws It’s great that this woman was able to bring her attacker to trial, with the fact that forced marriage is now a crime acting as the catalyst that gave her the courage – and the independent proof – to go to the police. But it’s not so great that she had felt compelled to put up with all the rest, which have been serious crimes for a lot longer. Not so great – and horribly revealing. Significant as this case may be, it’s by no means archetypal. Forced marriage is generally characterised as a family conspiracy, conducted under the auspices of “cultural practices”. The shameful length of time it took for Westminster to make forced marriage a criminal offence (it only became a civil offence in 2004) is often attributed to a foolish reluctance to challenge cultural practices, however ugly. Thankfully, that reluctance seems to be coming to an end, not just for forced marriage, but for a whole range of physical and psychological mutilations visited mainly on daughters by their families, on behalf of their “culture”. However, while it would be nice to think that political-correctness-gone-mad was the sole cause of inertia over forced marriage, it’s more complex than that. Victims of abuse, cultural or otherwise, tend not to want to criminalise their families and loved ones. (Any idea that this is a marginal response may wish to recall that it’s not so long since the general population was having a thing called “battered wives syndrome” explained to it, or being informed that it was indeed possible for a man to rape his spouse.) This case is anomalous, because it doesn’t involve that difficult and confusing family-accusation element. That milestone will be the really important one, and it is yet to come. This perpetrator acted alone, manipulating “cultural practices” for his perverse and cruel desires. And this victim didn’t go to the police earlier because this man was threatening to reveal that she wasn’t a virgin, destroying her chances of marrying anyone but him. Her loyalty to her family and to her cultural practices made her vulnerable to him, even though no member of her family was involved in the crimes. This man raped his victim to destroy her cultural value as a woman. Anyone who thinks this is a cultural practice that has been imported to Britain from abroad should note that all rape victims are entitled to anonymity, in a gesture that confirms that it is the cultural norm for rape victims in this country to feel shame, too. Ione Wells, a 20-year-old student, recently wrote an open letter about her sex attacker, waiving her anonymity to point out that she was not the one who should be feeling shame. She is absolutely right, of course. It is crazy that women feel shame because of something that has been done to them against their will. But, as this case illustrates so starkly, it’s also a very effective way of gaining control over women. Forced marriage is essentially a form of people trafficking, whether from one country to another or from one home to another. It is underpinned by a profound contempt for women, and that’s the cultural practice that needs to be challenged more than any other. Any culture in which a woman needs anonymity to accuse a rapist is labouring under manipulative and nasty cultural practices to some degree. It’s important to pick off the most abhorrent of the excesses generated by these cultural practices that formalise and perpetuate the abuse of women. But it’s also important to understand that they’ll never be gone until the idea that the inadequacies and mistakes of men should be a source of shame for women is also eradicated. Criminalising the big stuff, such as forced marriage, is important. But making people aware of how insidious the small stuff can be is important, too. Related: Tim Hunt shows why old men should be banned from science | Dean Burnett I despair when I hear intelligent men bemoaning the awfulness of scientist Tim Hunt’s “punishment” for making a few “honest” and “light-hearted” remarks. The Nobel laureate has resigned as an honorary professor at University College London after saying to a conference in South Korea: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … [He’s 72.] Three things happen when they are in the lab … you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.” His trouble with “girls”? Hunt is surely describing his trouble with himself. “I get interested in them sexually. They get interested back. Then I berate them for doing so and this seems to upset them.” How can people not see the misogyny and contempt behind this man’s words? How can they not see that he is effectively saying, “It’s my job to chase women round the table, and it’s their job to run.”? Hunt is entitled to be as honest and light-hearted about his own shortcomings as he likes. But his belief that his own shortcomings are somehow instead the shortcomings of women, for which they need to be in separate labs, away from him – well, he and men like him need to achieve an understanding of the enormous destructive power of the cultural tradition his view springs from. Political correctness is the left’s broken-windows policy. Resisting the criminalisation of forced marriage was like focusing on fixing the windows in a building that was about to collapse. But the right’s belief that a few broken windows don’t matter is wrong as well. It’s wonderful that that man did not get away with forcing a woman to marry him. But his belief in his right to commit those crimes against her was underpinned by cultural traditions from all over the world, throughout human history, and that’s too big a problem for the law alone to solve. Unfortuntately. |