Should arranged marriages for teenage girls be allowed?

Abstract

In this article I offer a framework for thinking about how public schools in liberal societies ought to respond to instances of arranged marriages for girls from deeply communitarian cultural groups. Focusing on three cases of culturally and religiously arranged marriages from the Hmong, Islamic fundamentalist and Mormon fundamentalist communities, I show that neither the type of tolerance demanded by group rights theorists, nor Susan Okin's claim that liberals should `enforce' women's rights, provides liberals with a satisfactory response. Instead, I argue that Rawls' concept of overlapping consensus provides us with a more just way to think through these tensions between cultural values.Through this discussion it becomes clear that: (a) specifics matter; and (b) what we must not do when making policies is move girls from one autonomy-limiting situation into a different non-autonomous situation.