Life as furniture
An item from last August, which I hadn’t seen before. For about £5,000 a taxi driver in Bradford would track down women and girls who had run away from home to escape a forced marriage.
Zakir’s job was never to harm his targets, but to return them home to face their “destiny” of being made to marry someone their parents had chosen. Despite the fact that runaways can be beaten for having escaped, he sides with the families on the issue. The softly spoken driver, speaking to G2 on the condition his real name was not used, insisted: “I did it as a favour to the families, as I knew most of them. It wasn’t about the money. It was about izzat [honour]. I saw the effect it had on them when their daughter ran away. The worry and the shame from the community talking about them. I was part of the ‘taxi driver network’, so we shared information about who we picked up and where they got dropped off.
Of course, returning them home to be forced into marriage is harming them, to put it mildly. Returning them home to be beaten is also harming them. And notice how the concern is all for “the families” and not for all the individuals who make it up, which would have to include the escaped women and girls. Notice how the families are assumed to have every right to treat women and girls as inanimate objects to be forced to do whatever the families ordain.
One woman who knows what it feels like to be hunted down is Jaspreet. She ran away from her home in Sheffield after discovering that her father was arranging her marriage. The 21-year-old said: “I overheard my dad talking to his brother in Pakistan about getting me married to my cousin over there. He’d never discussed marriage with me.
“I didn’t want to get married yet. I wanted to finish my law degree. I would have been happy to have an arranged marriage in my mid-20s. But when I protested, my dad threatened me physically and said I would be letting the family down if I refused. I couldn’t take any more of the rows, so I ran away.”
Like that. It’s her life, but she doesn’t get to decide what she does with it, “the family” does, as if she were the dining room table.
Oh, dear, yet more cultural illiteracy from a secular fundamentalist. Why can’t you understand that it isn’t oppression if it isn’t us?
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Glendon Mellow and Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Life as furniture http://dlvr.it/8Dp3Q […]
This taxi driver has no idea what honour means. It is pure gangsterism, let’s not hide behind fictions that justify the thuggish collectivist mentality of cowards who hide behind gangs.
The sad thing is, I’m only about 90% sure that the above comment is parody.
The language used is simply wonderful. Since when is it called “running away from home” when we’re discussing a twenty one year old? A six year old “runs away from home”, when you’re twenty you just leave. It’s nice to see the Guardian doing their bit to infantilize women and (not so) subtly support the notion that the women involved needed permission to move out.
I think CW is being a little naïve. Running away from home involves disobeying authority. In the UK, a person is considered old enough to leave home when 16 years old (or, at least, that’s who it used to be when I was 16) whereas at that time in Holland (of all places) the law was that a woman could not marry without her parent’s consent till she was 27 (law since then repealed).
The point is, that whether authority is the law of the land or the law of the family, all law is au fond a matter of force. Whether that force is applied by the police carrying out the law of the country or the force is applied by members of the family – it is still force.
So, in 1960 or so, a 23-year old Dutch woman marrying an English service man in Germany just 5 km over the border would be acting perfectly legally but if her family kidnaped her and forcefully moved her back into Dutch territory they could have the marriage declared illegal, even if they used force to physically move the woman.
And what happens to a USA girl of 17 who gets married in Mexico? Can her parents kidnap her, haul her back into the USA and declare the marriage illegal? Even if they used force to move her?
It’s not just some backward Muslim or Parsee or whatever family seeing people as things but official governments also see people as things. In fact, the famous Habeas Corpus act is literally based on the idea that the family of the incarcerated man has the right to repossess his body – the prisoner himself has no right over his own body. You get the same in a hospital when someone needs an operation – the patient cannot give consent, but the consent has to be given by the people owning the body.
I’m afraid we’re all pieces of furniture
Does anyone have the slightest idea what Jan Frank’s point is?
No, not really.
Jan, that’s not even true about patients, is it? Patients can give consent if they’re able to; it’s only if they’re incapacitated that someone else is called on to consent. At least that’s my understanding, and I sure as hell hope it’s correct.
Jan says that “Running away from home involves disobeying authority.”
Yes, among other things it does. I am still left wondering how the position that a woman, legally an adult, is subject to the authority of her father as if she were a child is not infantilizing her or, indeed, women in general.
£5,000 a time but it is not about the money. Right.
I suspect that one, perhaps small, aspect of this foulness is that many of the women who are victims of this are at the higher end of the educational scale. Some measure of education might make a woman a more highly prized commodity but too much is a different matter.
When she has clearly become more educated, more socially adroit in the wider world, more valued by society and more financially successful than her father, then where is his authority? My simple hope is that my daughter has a ‘better’ life than me, however she chooses to define ‘better’. To feel threatened by that would be to be a failure at life. It’s difficult to understand the mind that takes the opposite view, to the point that they would rather see their child dead than happy, free and making their way in the world. Teach your children to judge well and trust their judgement, because it is for themselves and not you.
(OK, I was a bit unhappy with her infatuation with Žižek, but she grew out of it.)