Between Care and Criminality examines social welfare’s encounter with migration and marriage in a period of intensified border control in Melbourne, Australia. It offers an in-depth ethnographic account of the effort to prevent forced marriage in the aftermath of a 2013 law that criminalized the practice. Disproportionately targeted toward Muslim migrant communities, prevention efforts were tasked with making the family relations and marital practices of migrants objects of policy knowledge in the name of care and community empowerment. Through tracing the everyday ways that direct service providers, police, and advocates learned to identify imminent marriages and at-risk individuals, this book reveals how the domain of social welfare becomes the new frontier where the settler colonial state judges good citizenship. In doing so, it invites social welfare to reflect on how migrant conceptions of familial care, personhood, and mutual obligation become structured by the violence of displacement, borders, and conditional citizenship.
Series Foreword by Péter Berta
Introduction: An Emergent Regime of Truth
Chapter 1: A Genealogy of Forced Marriage Prevention
Chapter 2: The Threat of Suffering: Configuring Victimhood in Forced Marriage Scenario Planning
Chapter 3: Reluctant Disclosure: Epistemic Doubt and Ethical Dilemmas in Prevention Work
Chapter 4: Phantom Figures: The Erasures of Biopolitical Narratives
Chapter 5: Beyond Criminality: Narratives of Familial Duress in Times of Displacement
Conclusion: Reflections on the Coercive State
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index