Norwegian anti-immigrant advocates frame forced marriage as rape requiring criminalization

Evidence

Unassimilable, duplicitous, tribal, and prepared to sell their daughters into marriage and a life of continual rape, Muslim communities require the force of law to bring them into modernity. Human Visas has detailed suggestions about how this might proceed. Since forced marriage really entails rape, it should be treated as such in criminal law, the book suggests. A law that recognizes this must also consider that the family is an aggravating factor to the sexual assault and that forced marriage takes place in immigrants’ country of origin. Muslim women living in Europe also require that the right of divorce be stipulated in their religious marriage contracts, since ‘HRS is not aware of a single Muslim woman in Norway who has married in her country of origin and had the right to divorce included in her marriage contract.’ A number of proposals are offered in the realm of cousin marriage, among them one to study such marriages to ascertain whether the children they produce have birth defects and an outright ban on cousin marriages. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 265

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how ‘forced marriage as rape’ reclassification weaponizes feminist language to justify family-reunification restrictions and bans on cultural practices.
• XREF: Connects to the framing of Muslim women in western rescue narratives — parallels Razack’s broader ‘imperilled Muslim woman’ thesis and post-9/11 securitization literature.