Danish family-reunification policy rested on marriage-pattern surveys, not violence statistics

Evidence

The integration argument is bolstered not with statistics on the number of forced marriages or the number of women killed but rather, as in Living Visas, with surveys of the marriage patterns of immigrant groups living in Europe. For example, citing the figure that 47 per cent of immigrants married persons who resided abroad, a pattern that did not change from 1994 to 1999, the Danish government justified the need for reform of family reunification policy, adding that integration is particularly difficult for families where one spouse comes from outside Denmark. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 300

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is a concrete instance of policy justification grounded in a proxy (marriage patterns) rather than the actual harm (forced marriage) — worth checking whether this proxy-based reasoning pattern recurs across forced-marriage regimes.
• XREF: Connects to the Milgrom trader-reputation notes on how institutions define measurable proxies as substitutes for information that is hard to obtain — here states substitute marriage-pattern data for actual violence measures.