Muslim children’s detention evokes far less official anxiety than veiling

Evidence

If eleven-year-old girls wearing the hijab haunt our imaginations and provoke an anxious expulsion, other eleven year olds held in detention camps merit less attention. Around the same time that Asmahan Mansour was being ordered off the soccer field, giving rise to a mad scramble among officials for their laws and regulation books, another Canadian Muslim child, detained with his Iranian parents at a Texas detention centre for illegal immigrants, a place activists describe as a dismal prison unsuitable for children, occasioned much less interest. Had there been such a scramble in the case of this child, it is possible that no law would be found to secure his release. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 405

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how the spectacle of the veiled girl absorbs regulatory fury while the same community’s detained children are rendered legally invisible — a comparative anatomy of what provokes liberal moral panic.