“Human Rights Protection, Democratic Deliberation”
63
which young women from ethnic groups and representatives of
liberal-democratic states should deliberate is the condition of being
free from manipulation and/or coercion, physical or psychological.
Under such condition, what emerges from democratic deliberations
will most likely be the genuine views of the participants. Setting aside
for the moment the imposed
practice of veiling,
31
with regard to
honor killing, forced marriage, and female genital
mutilation, once
released from the clutch of their group and social, familial, and moral
pressure of elderly women and men, it is hard to imagine that young
women would consent to honor killing, forced marriage, and female
genital mutilation. Now there might be a few exceptions (Shweder,
2002), but it is nigh impossible that young women
en masse
would
want to maintain the practices of honor killing, forced marriage, and
female genital mutilation
when these social practices will most
certainly mean death, thwarted desires, and unfulfilled lives,
respectively. And if by
—
some
—
chance should some young women
have positive views about these practices, virtually no liberal-democratic
state would sanction them, say, by codifying these practices as legally
permissible. In short, there appears to be little to no work done by
attending to local contexts in these cases such that the outcomes of
context-sensitive and context-insensitive solutions are basically
indistinguishable.
With regard to veiling, the controversy has largely been
surrounding the ban, most notably, by the French state in public
31
I have examined the 2004 French ban (On, 2006: 185-190). Below I shall discuss
the involuntary (imposed)
practice of veiling, or wearing the headscarf, in France
only. Now in and outside of France, veiling may or may not entail coercion. If it
does, the question becomes whether the sort of coercion applied qualifies as
VAW. Sometimes, “coercion” may take the form of peer pressures or obedience
to family members, very often the husband, which may be less than an entirely
free choice, but not necessarily qualified as a form of VAW. It is impossible to
know
a priori
since some Muslim women have testified that they themselves
choose to wear the
hijab,
or the
burqa
, or the
niqab
in keeping with their
conceptions of a requirement of their faith.
