70
E
UR
A
MERICA
cultural justice and sexual justice. But researchers within this
overlapping, specialized area have tended to gravitate toward a type
of all-inclusive framework within which the special (embedded)
protections might be properly configured, i.e., with legitimacy and
varying degrees of sensitivity to local contexts by relying on
democratic deliberations. Now little has been said about the law
41
and police work, especially the exemplary cases, where police
enforcements of the special protections within circumscribed remit
do
not
necessarily undermine the enforcements of protections for
women.
To be sure, the ways in which the contextual protections
served to give sustenance to institutions of patriarchy, such as
polygyny, applied within a number of contexts only, not across the
board. However, the thrust of the argument is that in many
situations that had been documented, if not sensationalized,
enforcements of these protections had vitiated enforcements of
protections for women. Taking this point at face value, it seems to
me, Okin’s and later scholars’ range of considerations is too narrow,
delimited to a relatively small number of oft-cited cases;
42
in so
doing, it has obscured situations that may not fall within that
specific purview, for example, local contexts where enforcements
of special protections do not erode enforcements of the protections
for women but the other way around: public safety, awareness of
and sensitivity toward women’s rights as human rights have
fostered innovations in police enforcement of protections for
women, especially from VAW. Moreover, for the moment, let us
assume the worst-case scenario where
in every context
the police
enforcement of special protections is always translated into lack of
police enforcement of the protections for women. Even in such
circumstance, that sort of situation does not capture the concept of
police enforcement in its entirety. That is, the idea doing most of
41
Notable exceptions include Eisenberg (2003); Merry (2006: chap. 6), where the
emphasis is mostly placed on the process of mobilizing the victim’s consciousness.
42
See footnote 30 above.
