Enduring Violence, Times of Care: “Forced-Marriage” in the UK

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the distortions that arise from a temporal privileging of the UK’s Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007. It 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 have propelled them towards making decisions and choices with regards the care of their own children to remake those histories and generate alternative futures.