MULTICULTURALISM VERSUS FEMINISM
From an essay by Pragna Patel of the Southall Black Sisters (as featured in the 2003 book “From Homebreakers to Jailbreakers”):-
Following trends in the USA, some academics in the UK, with a few notable exceptions, now consider it fashionable to talk about the gender deficit inherent in the multicultural approach in Western democracies. The debate, which is not new to us, is often couched in terms of the insurmountable tension between feminism and multiculturalism. To put it crudely, in the USA a number of voices have argued that multiculturalism should not be encouraged since women in minority communities are denied their rights by their cultures. Recognising the group rights of minority communities, they argue, does not guarantee women’s rights within them. They point to the prevalence of forced marriages, female genital mutilation and even wife-killing to argue that minority cultures are harmful to women because they are still rooted in patriarchal value systems which have diminished in Western societies. In response to such views, feminists, including those from minority communities in the USA, have argued that to reject multiculturalism is to encourage racism. Some, however, go further in warning against the use of cultural arguments in law to explain actions by women such as those who kill their violent spouses, as there is a danger of reinforcing notions of minority communities as ‘barbaric’ or ‘backward’.
Both views sit uncomfortably with our experience. It is not sufficient to reject multiculturalism because in the struggle against racism it is still viable in promoting tolerance for diversity and in recognising the rights of minority groups, to which we as women also belong. Our identities and experiences are not shaped by gender alone. On the other hand, the women who come to our centre reveal the problems inherent in the multicultural approach in which the struggle for equality has become subsumed under the struggle for recognition of diversity. Women do face oppression in the form of forced marriage, dowry deaths or honour killings, all of which are often justified in the name of cultural difference. We are acutely aware that in the absence of democratic internal community mechanisms, there can be no substitute for resorting to the law. Women do not get a fair hearing, let along justice, when they turn to the community for help. Whilst women continue to experience many setbacks in making the law accountable to their needs, nevertheless it represents a safety net without which they would be worse off.
The problem with the academic debates on multiculturalism and feminism is that the struggles by women in minority communities are completely ignored, as if activism has nothing to offer such debates. Yet without an awareness of these political struggles, there is real danger that important insights of how to negotiate the minefield of race and gender politics will be lost. The reality is that black women’s activism has both illuminated the problems women have had in negotiating their rights within their communities and in the wider society as well as pointing towards possible solutions. The solutions do not lie in either steering clear of the law or placing one’s entire faith in a legal system which allows the space for personal laws or versions of ‘community justice’ to become entrenched.
The real concern we have with the law, however, is that it either ignores difference altogether or, in its effort to reflect cultural sensitivity, adopts multicultural norms which actually reinforce the patriarchal values of our community. A number of our cases, especially in respect of rights within the family, demonstrate the potential of the law to be differentially applied. In one case, a woman of Muslim origin had been made to endure a protracted and painful battle to retain custody of her daughter following a breakdown in her marriage due to her husband’s violence and her refusal to conform as a traditional Muslim wife. Her ex-husband refused to grant her a divorce, thus forcing her into cohabitation with her boyfriend, also a Muslim, which in turn led to a community outcry. Inside the court, however, the battle over custody of her daughter took an unexpected turn. The presiding judge failed to make a final decision based on a recommendation by a court welfare officer that the child’s interests were best served by remaining with her mother, who was the prime carer. Instead, the judge allowed herself to be distracted by the husband’s arguments that, in child custody and matrimonial/family matters, the Muslim community is guided by Shariah. Introducing experts who were Muslim theologians, the husband argued that according to Shariah laws, his wife was an adulteress and transgressor and should therefore return her child to him. He also argued that the ostracisation faced by the mother would affect her daughter’s well-being and moral and religious upbringing. Such arguments clouded the court’s notion of justice for the woman and for the young child, whose fate depended on the outcome of theological debates on the position of women in Islam rather than on rights enshrined in civil law. In the end, child custody was not granted to the father because he was imprisoned for a criminal conviction for violence.
The case raises some alarming possibilities about the future development and implementation of secular civil law in relation to women and the family in the minority communities in Britain. In classic multicultural, non-interventionist style, the judge appeared to allow Muslim personal law to supersede the civil rights of the woman. The assumption is that all members of the community uniformly interpret personal laws, and that the self-appointed religious leadership is widely accepted. The consequence is that women are excluded from the construction of the minority community in legal discourses. The actions and views of women are rendered deviant, whilst those of the community leaderships are accepted as ‘authentic’.
The ultimate danger of such rulings lies in the construction of minority women as the property of their families and communities. Such constructions in turn feed into a wider social and political culture which disenfranchises many minority women from their citizenship rights, demarcating the boundary of community and the right to belong.
The law needs to accommodate both differences between communities and differences within communities and yet ensure justice is delivered equally. Admittedly this is a difficult task since we require the law to reflect cultural pluralism but at the same time ensure that individual freedom is not undermined. We may rely on the use of expert reports, encourage judicial training and so on in an effort to minimise the risk of constructing and reinforcing legal notions of minority cultures, but because they remain strictly within the parameters of the law, they are bound to be at best only partially successful.
Since the cases of Karanjit Ahluwalia and Zoora Shah (women who were imprisoned for murdering their violent partners), we have often been requested to provide expert reports in other cases involving Asian and minority women. It is impossible to avoid some generalisations about minority cultures and women’s role within them irrespective of how many provisos we insert in such reports. This dilemma has helped us understand that we ought not always look to the law to find answers to the paradoxes that we encounter in the law. We need to mount effective challenges to the law’s power from the outside, through for example the creation of effective alliances between women of different backgrounds but with common agendas. On our campaign on forced marriages, we have resisted the ‘exoticisation’ of the issue by insisting that the debate, and indeed the general and policy responses to it, be framed within the general debate on domestic violence and women’s human rights. This helps to avoid the view that the majority culture is superior since women who are pressurised into a marriage against their will require the same response as those who experience domestic violence.