Trialling Culture, Protecting Women

There is a current interest, alongside increased public debate, on the links between culture, law and violence against women. Focusing on a series of racialised sexual violence and child abuse cases in Sydney, Australia and Rochdale, UK, this book puts forward multilayered arguments about legal and political conceptualisations of gendered violence. It argues from the outset that a putative women’s rights agenda overlays some racist, anti-multicultural perspectives which, at their core, rely on reductive legal and political understandings of ethnic culture. Through these Australian and British cases, the book makes an original and important contribution to socio-legal debates regarding the essentialist and reductive understandings of culture in legal and political discourses. It traces the extent to which reductive legal and official understandings of (ethnic) culture have enabled even its most progressively motivated invocations to be coopted for Islamophobic agendas and xenophobic nationalism in Western societies. In tandem with these explorations it examines how the banner of women’s rights has been subsumed to provide justification for popular, politically sanctioned racism. The book thus traces the trajectory of legal and official discourses around culture, gendered violence and immigration and their links to popular denunciations of multiculturalism within a socio-political backdrop of Islamophobia.