Culture Talk and the Politics of the New Right: Navigating Gendered Racism in Attempts to Address Violence against Women in Immigrant Communities

Abji, Salina; Korteweg, Anna C.; Williams, Lawrence H.

doi:10.1086/701161

Cited by 17 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…I examine the gaps in knowledge and cultural understanding that underpin the problematic institutional responses of the police to HBCs and FMs. My research builds upon the foundational work done by other sociologists, social workers, and activists in the DV sector to challenge the dangers of culture talk and to approach culture as a meaning-making process (see Abji et al, 2019;Korteweg, 2012Korteweg, , 2014Korteweg et al, 2013;Razack, 1994).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Police Understandings of and Responses to a Complex Vignette of “Honour”-Based Crime and Forced Marriage

Aujla

2021

IJCYFS

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Police understandings of honour-based crimes (HBCs) and forced marriages (FMs) vary in terms of an individual officer’s level of expertise, knowledge, and experience in handling such situations. This study applied constructivist grounded theory approaches to analyze individual interviews with 32 police officers and 14 civilians in police agencies operating in urban and rural settings in Alberta, Canada. Specifically, this paper seeks to answer how police officers and civilians who work in police agencies experience, make sense of, and understand HBCs. Participants received a hypothetical vignette about a young woman who had reached out to the police. The vignette illustrated various forms of abuse by the woman’s father, the involvement of other actors (mother, brother, family friend) and the culmination in an FM. After reading the vignette, participants were asked to respond to six questions. Analysis revealed that both police and civilians recognized the need in the vignette scenario for intervention, while experiencing uncertainty about how to respond. The findings showed that not everyone in policing would be able to identify reliably the need for police intervention, and that investigations could proceed differently depending on the investigator’s level of knowledge and awareness of HBCs and FMs. Police have achieved some successful interventions, but still lack sufficient guidance on how torespond to these crimes. Clear, appropriate policies regarding which cases need to be directed to specialized domestic violence units for follow-up are needed. A significant finding points to the importance of considering cultural sensitivity discourses as well as the impact of cultural and racist stereotypes when responding to situations like the one outlined in the vignette.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Police Understandings of and Responses to a Complex Vignette of “Honour”-Based Crime and Forced Marriage

Aujla

2021

IJCYFS

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“…Crimmigration scholars have pointed to the mirroring of police tactics by immigration authorities as a key component of the criminalization of irregular migration, and often buttressed - -----------------------6 Importantly, the regulatory changes introduced by the federal Conservative party were the culmination of decades of both Liberal and Conservative restructuring of the refugee and immigration system introduced through neo-liberalization of social services such as settlement and migration in the 1990s. These "reforms" were intensified with the rise of more right-wing Conservative policies on immigration and security in the post-9/11 period (Abji, Korteweg & Williams, 2019;Bhuyan et al, 2014). 7 In May 2019 the Liberal party in power removed all countries from the DCO list.…”

Section: Crimmigration and Migrant Justice In Canadamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Crenshaw's early work on the structural violence of immigration controls for survivors of gender-based violence has been followed by a burgeoning feminist field addressing this issue (Abji, 2018;Abji et al, 2019;Bhuyan et al, 2014;Glenn, 2015;Maynard, 2017;Stasiulis & Bakan, 2005;Walia, 2013). Taken together, feminist critiques of immigration controls in Canada illustrate what I have termed a growing nexus between migration, security and gender-based violence.…”

Section: Advancing Feminist Intersectional Approaches: Centering the Survivorship Of Migrant Women Of Colourmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Crenshaw defines structural intersectionality as the co-constitution of gendered, racialized, and classed structures of state power in law (see also Bhuyan, Osborne, Zahraei & Tarshis, 2014;Maynard, 2017;Walia, 2013). I apply this approach to extend crimmigration scholarship, providing a reading of Lucía's case that is informed by my own fieldwork and interviews with service providers working within the anti-violence against women sector in Toronto, Canada (Abji, 2016(Abji, , 2018Abji, Korteweg & Williams, 2019;Bergen & Abji, 2020). I argue that what gets criminalized in such cases is not only irregular migration, but also the strategies of survivorship that racialized and migrant women have developed to address the multiple forms of violence in their lives.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Punishing Survivors and Criminalizing Survivorship: A Feminist Intersectional Approach to Migrant Justice in the Crimmigration System

Abji¹

2020

SSJ

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Scholars have identified crimmigration – or the criminalization of “irregular” migration in law – as a key issue affecting migrant access to justice in contemporary immigrant-receiving societies. Yet the gendered and racialized implications of crimmigration for diverse migrant populations remains underdeveloped in this literature. This study advances a feminist intersectional approach to crimmigration and migrant justice in Canada. I add to recent research showing how punitive immigration controls disproportionately affect racialized men from the global south, constituting what Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo have called a “gendered racial removal program” (2013). In my study, I shift analytical attention to consider the effects of the contemporary crimmigration system on migrant women survivors of gender-based violence. While such cases constitute a small sub-group within a larger population of migrants in detention, nevertheless scholarly attention to this group can expose the multiple axes along which state power is enacted – an analytical strategy that foundational scholars like Crenshaw (1991) used to theorize “structural intersectionality” in the US. In focusing on crimmigration in the Canadian context, I draw attention to the growing nexus between migration, security, and gender-based violence that has emerged alongside other processes of crimmigration. I then provide a case analysis of the 2013 death while in custody of Lucía Dominga Vega Jiménez, an “undocumented” migrant woman from Mexico. My analysis illustrates how migrant women’s strategies to survive gender-based violence are re-cast as grounds for their detention and removal, constituting what I argue is a criminalization of survivorship.The research overall demonstrates the centrality of gendered and racialized structural violence in crimmigration processes by challenging more universalist approaches to migrant justice.

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“…In the context of neoliberalization of social services such as child protection services, carceral logics are used to obscure the structural violence of state retrenchment of social supports, in effect scapegoating marginalized groups as the cause of social problems in ways that reinforce ongoing histories of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and heteronormative patriarchal oppressions. Importantly, feminist social work(ers) have been implicated in the development of the carceral state, where efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to hold the state accountable for addressing and preventing violence against women dovetailed with carceral state responses to social problems and the growth of mass incarceration and mass deportation among countries in the global north (Abji, Korteweg, & Williams, 2019; Abji, 2016; Bergen, 2020a; Bhuyan, 2012; Kim, 2018; Mehrotra, Kimball, & Wahab, 2016; Whittier, 2016). Our analysis of the pipeline between child protection, prisons, and deportation/detention thus highlights a key dimension of how the carceral state functions and the role of social work(ers) in facilitating the carceral pipeline for noncitizen youths.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Facilitating the Carceral Pipeline: Social Work’s Role in Funneling Newcomer Children From the Child Protection System to Jail and Deportation

Bergen

Abji

2019

Affilia

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This article examines the intersections of the child protection, immigration and criminal systems, and the carceral logics that undergird all three systems. Taking seriously Patricia Hill Collins’ (2017) call to analyze “intensified points of convergence” (p. 1464), we analyze the role of social work in perpetuating carceral systems and the tools that feminist social work provides for disrupting them. Using a case analysis of a foster child in Halifax, Canada, who in 2018 was faced with deportation after social workers failed to secure his citizenship status, we argue that a pipeline exists between child protection and a growing “crimmigration” system. The carceral logics of this pipeline not only draw from anti-Black, Islamophobic, and settler colonial histories of oppression, but they also position certain noncitizen families as unassimilable and requiring of state intervention rather than social supports. With this carceral pipeline in mind, we then draw from feminist anticarceral and intersectional approaches to consider a range of resistance strategies. Ultimately, we argue for a transformative justice approach that goes beyond reforming the pipeline and instead takes seriously the insights of abolitionist movements as an alternative to purely reformist approaches.

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Culture Talk and the Politics of the New Right: Navigating Gendered Racism in Attempts to Address Violence against Women in Immigrant Communities

Cited by 17 publications

References 47 publications

Police Understandings of and Responses to a Complex Vignette of “Honour”-Based Crime and Forced Marriage

Police Understandings of and Responses to a Complex Vignette of “Honour”-Based Crime and Forced Marriage

Punishing Survivors and Criminalizing Survivorship: A Feminist Intersectional Approach to Migrant Justice in the Crimmigration System

Facilitating the Carceral Pipeline: Social Work’s Role in Funneling Newcomer Children From the Child Protection System to Jail and Deportation

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