Failed and Friendless: The UK's ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ Programme

This article suggests that Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE), the government's ‘hearts and minds’ response to the threat of domestic Islamist terrorism within the wider CONTEST strategy, has been exposed as both failed and friendless by growing political and academic scrutiny. PVE's monocultural focus on Muslims is in stark contradiction to the overriding policy goal of community cohesion, while its implementation has provoked accusations both of surveillance and of engineering ‘value changes’ within Muslim communities. Local conflicts relating to the operationalisation of PVE result from political disagreement over the balance between community engagement and policing within the Labour government, and these problems leave the future of this key anti-terrorism policy area unclear

Legislating gender inequalities: the nature and patterns of domestic violence experienced by South Asian women with insecure immigration status in the UK

Research on domestic violence documents the particular vulnerability of immigrant women due to reasons including social isolation, language barriers, lack of awareness about services, and racism on the part of services. Based on qualitative interviews with 30 South Asian women with insecure immigration status residing in Yorkshire and Northwest England, this article explores how inequalities created by culture, gender, class, and race intersect with state immigration and welfare policies in the United Kingdom, thereby exacerbating structures of patriarchy within minority communities. It is within these contexts that South Asian women with insecure immigration status experience intensified forms and specific patterns of abuse

Coercion, consent and the forced marriage debate in the UK

An examination of case law on forced marriage reveals that in addition to physical force, the role of emotional pressure is now taken into consideration. However, in both legal and policy discourse, the difference between arranged and forced marriage continues to be framed in binary terms and hinges on the concept of consent: the context in which consent is constructed largely remains unexplored. By examining the socio-cultural construction of personhood, especially womanhood, and the intersecting structural inequalities that constrain particular groups of South Asian women in the UK, we argue that consent and coercion in relation to marriage can be better understood as two ends of a continuum, between which lie degrees of socio-cultural expectation, control, persuasion, pressure, threat and force. Women who face these constraints exercise their agency in complex and contradictory ways that are not always recognised by the existing exit-centred state initiatives designed to tackle this problem