Multiculturalism isn’t bad for women — but racism is
The idea that multiculturalism is bad for women is a popular canard. For example, a column by Sheema Khan about “discriminatory practices (imported) from the Indian subcontinent into North America” in the Globe and Mail last week warns that “multicultural sensitivities should never override gender equality, nor should they censor the expression of strong opinions.”
The insinuation is that Canadians’ fears about offending racial minorities are stifling vital criticism of practices that harm women.
However, far from being shielded by misplaced “multicultural sensitivities,” the “discriminatory practices” imagined to be rife in Muslim and South Asian communities are consistently singled out for heightened attention and exceptional condemnation — sustaining the stigmatizing myth that these communities are remarkably unsafe for women.
A study of the Globe and Mail by communication studies professor Yasmin Jiwani found 66 articles alone on the murder case of the three teenage Shafia sisters and their mother (which was widely represented as an “honour killing”), but only 59 on the “murder of women and domestic violence” in general from 2005 to 2012.
Canada’s Citizenship Guide proclaims that “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices (like) honour killings, female genital mutilation and forced marriage,” and the zero tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act is specifically dedicated to penalizing “honour killing,” forced marriage and polygamy. (Female genital cutting (FGC), and taking a child outside of Canada for FGC, are also both criminalized in Canadian law.)
Familial femicides of Muslim girls, such as the Shafia sisters and Aqsa Parvez, have been decried by judges and politicians as “horrible, evil and barbaric” atrocities that “have no place in Canada.” It is as if Canada is not a place where: One woman is killed by her partner every six days. Where 362,000 children witness or experience family violence every year.
Where police dismiss thousands of sexual-assault complaints every year as “unfounded” because of institutional internalization of rape myths.
Where 73 per cent of women who sought refuge from abuse at shelters last winter were turned away because there wasn’t enough room,
Where the law of provocation has reduced sentences for men who kill their wives or girlfriends because they were “provoked” into it — disproportionately excusing the violence of white men. A study from the University of Ottawa discovered that white men were more than twice as likely to successfully claim the defence in court as racialized men.
As University of California, Berkeley law professor Leti Volpp observes, “Part of the reason many believe the cultures of the Third World or immigrant communities are so much more sexist than Western ones is that incidents of sexual violence in the West are frequently thought to reflect the behaviour of a few deviants — rather than as part of our culture. In contrast, incidents of violence in the Third World or immigrant communities are thought to characterize the cultures of entire nations.”
Canada does not need to import misogyny from the Indian subcontinent, or any other region stereotyped as a source of “barbaric cultural practices” — it is already endemic here. The pretence that it isn’t — that the issue is “their” culture and not “ours” — permits Canada to avoid its own heavy responsibility for violence against women.
It allows us to discount all the social and economic reasons that racialized women are vulnerable to violence, reasons that have little to do with their culture but a great deal to do with the disadvantages they face in Canadian society.
And it perpetuates the dangerous idea that the way to save women is by punishing their cultures and their families and their communities — even against the protests of the very same women these rescue initiatives are claiming to help.
For instance, the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario (SALCO) has objected that the government “deliberately misused the data from SALCO’s recent study on forced marriages in Canada” to justify the criminalization of forced marriage in the Barbaric Cultural Practices Act.
“Forced marriage survivors have indicated they would be hesitant to seek any outside assistance if this would result in criminal and subsequent immigration consequences for family members,” the clinic wrote.
The problem is not that “multicultural sensitivities” are prohibiting Canadians from criticizing the oppressiveness of “others,” but that multicultural mythologies prevent Canadians from seeing their own.