Paper Short Abstract:

In my research on "forced marriage" in the UK, informants sought to preface talk about their marriages with accounts of prior abuse. This paper seeks to contextualise cases of “forced marriage” within other forms of force and abuse both before and after the act of “forced marriage” itself.

Paper Abstract:

My paper begins with a difficult and troubling question. It concerns the distortions that arise from a temporal privileging of the UK’s Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007, designed as it is, to prevent a “forced marriage” in its run-up, rather than to offer redress where one has already taken place, often many years ago. In effect, the law demands a discrete “time event” (for marriage, force) to be recognised, whereas the experience of these sits on a continuum that track retrospective and prospective temporalities to apprehend the subjectively lived past and to project forwards into future projects. This paper raises questions around contextualising the “forced marriage” within other forms of force and abuse both before and after the act of “forced marriage” itself. Such context is called for particularly because I was presented on numerous occasions by informants who sought to talk about their marriages by prefacing them with narratives about prior abuse. The argument of this piece is to find ways to think with my informants about this abuse, to present it ethnographically, and to navigate through their accounts the ways in which these experiences of abuse have propelled them towards making decisions and choices with regards the care of their own children in order to engage and remake those histories and generate alternative futures.