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Cronulla, conflict and culture: How can muslim women be heard? Christina Ho explores high-profile leaders and commentators’ use of women’s rights as a tool to further anti-muslim sentiment- particularly in light of the tensions caused by the Cronulla ‘riots’ of December 2005. December 2006 I’ve been noticing a very interesting thing happening in political debate lately. All kinds of conservative male public figures seem to have become feminists. Recently, Prime Minister John Howard has been defending gender equality in Australia and expressing his opposition to negative attitudes toward women from some members of society. Of course, this is a very selective concern for women’s rights. Ultimately, people like John Howard only seem to be concerned for women when they have been victimised by a certain group in Australian society – and that group is Muslim men. Conservative politicians and commentators are suddenly defending women’s rights because this has become a way of articulating an anti-Muslim nationalism. As Herald journalist Julia Baird put it, ‘the wars against Muslim nations in recent years seem to have brought out the previously hidden inner feminist in Western leaders’. This kind of discussion really hit me during the time of the Cronulla riots, when I kept hearing about how Lebanese Muslims were harassing ‘our women’ on the beach. There was so much talk about ‘our women’ and ‘their women’, I began to wonder when women had reverted back to being the property of men. This is what really got me thinking about how the language of women’s rights had been so successfully appropriated by paternalistic men, out to protect women from the hordes of Muslim rapists and misogynists. This is what I see as the link between the Cronulla riots and gender issues. Although there were obvious racial tensions at Cronulla, what struck me was how gendered these racial tensions became. The cases of ‘Lebanese Muslim’ men harassing women on the beach were just the latest in a long list of bad behaviour on the part of young MOMEA, as they’ve been called (i.e. Men Of Middle Eastern Appearance), in particular, the gang rapes of young women in the last few years, the subject of Paul Sheehan’s latest book. From the beginning, these notorious crimes were overwhelmingly represented as Lebanese or Muslim men raping non-Muslim women, and this made them a particularly un-Australian crime. They were not just crimes against women, but crimes against Australia. Of course I have no interest in defending men who sexually assault and harass women. As a feminist, I am outraged at all acts of violence against women. Although John Howard says we are in a post-feminist age, thousands of women’s lives continue to be damaged every year in Australia by sexual assault. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey conducted last year, over 400,000 women in Australia had experienced some form of violence in the previous 12 months (ABS 2005: 5). And as the feminist movement has long argued, the legal system is still failing women who make complaints of sexual assault. According to the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, less than 1% of sexual assaults lead to conviction. What troubles me is when sexual assault gets popular attention only when it is part of a larger anti-Muslim agenda. This is really key. The problem with having these kind of advocates is that they insist on representing rape as if it were a racialised crime. As if violence against women is to be blamed on ‘Muslim’ or ‘Lebanese’ culture for being intrinsically disrespectful of women. As if Lebanese or Muslim men have a monopoly on misogyny. More recently, in our own era, this same logic was used to justify the American crusade against the Taliban. As I’m sure you remember, the invasion of Afghanistan started as a war against terrorism, but somehow gradually became a mission to ‘liberate’ Afghan women. A war that began as a campaign to bring Al Qaeda to justice and to apprehend Osama Bin Laden somehow turned into a campaign to save Afghan women from the Taliban.
And this was a war that the US won, according to George W Bush. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush baldly stated that the US invasion had liberated Afghan women, proclaiming: ‘The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free’. Of course it came as no surprise that this concern for Afghan women was short-lived. The concern for Afghan women vanished as soon as it was no longer needed in the war propaganda machine. Five years on, Afghanistan’s oldest pro-democracy women’s organisation, RAWA, states that everyday violence is at unprecedented levels and that the US simply replaced the Taliban with other fundamentalist warlords (www.rawa.org). But these words are falling on deaf ears in the West. In a similar way, Muslim women’s concerns about everyday violence in Australia are also falling on deaf ears. The Australian government’s supposed concern for women oppressed by Islam has not been matched by a concern for the hundreds of Muslim women who have been victims of violence at the hands of ‘mainstream’ Australians. As HREOC (2004) and other organisations have documented, Muslim women, particularly those who wear the hijab, have borne the brunt of recent tensions, with hundreds of reported incidents of physical and verbal assaults, including being stalked in public, having objects thrown at them, and having scarves ripped off their heads. Not only have our political leaders not expressed their outrage at the victimisation of Muslim women in public places; politicians like John Howard, and of course, Bronwyn Bishop, have contributed to the situation we have today, that defines putting a scarf over your head as an act of provocation that can undermine your physical safety. So why are politicians not devoting the same kind of energy to defending Muslim women’s right to go about their everyday lives in safety? Obviously when it comes to protecting women’s rights, some forms of violence are unacceptable and un-Australian. Others are just part of everyday life. So how should women be responding to this political logic? In a recent column in the Sydney Morning Herald, conservative columnist Paul Sheehan blames Western feminists for abandoning their Muslim sisters by not speaking out against Muslim rapists. He writes, ‘In Australia and Europe, [feminists’] response to the growing levels of sexual intimidation, harassment or suppression of women by Muslim men has either been a deafening chorus of silence, or denial and blame-shifting’. In response to this accusation, I’ve been hearing various Muslim Australian women saying thanks very much, but we don’t need Western feminists to be speaking on our behalf. As Shakira Hussein (2006) put it, Articles demanding to know why “Western feminists are mute on the plight of their Islamic sisters” are a little confusing for those of us who are simultaneously Western (even if not White), feminist and Muslim. Her argument is that Muslim women do not need to be defended by Western feminists, because this assumes that Muslim women don’t have a strong voice of their own. And this is the assumption that is at the heart of a lot of current public debate. The more Muslim women are represented as simply passive victims of an oppressive culture, the less we can hear what they have to say for themselves. As an outsider to the Muslim community, I feel that this is the best contribution I can make – not to try to speak on behalf of Muslim women, but to understand and change the political context within which they can be heard. I don’t have any grand, arrogant plans for saving Muslim women or liberating them from oppression. There is a lot that can be done to open up a space where women can speak on their own terms, rather than constantly having to respond to the latest attack. We also need a space that can hear the diversity of women’s voices, because obviously, not all Muslim women want the same thing. Ultimately, to bring this discussion back to where we started, what we all need to work towards is breaking the shackles that have tied women’s rights together with an anti-Muslim agenda. It’s clear that John Howard and Paul Sheehan’s pseudo-feminist contributions have less to do with any real concern for women, and more to do with peddling their long-standing prejudices. Women’s rights are important. They’re too important to be simply used as a tool in a political war against cultural diversity in Australia. This is an extract of a public lecture given by Christina Ho in September at the University of Technology, Sydney. |
