If you’re in London June 11 there’s a thing you can go to. (Funny how much I advertise events in London, isn’t it. I don’t know – I have contacts there. I see stuff.)
Multiculturalism and Child Protection – Sharia Law and Other Failures
London School of Economics,
Anne-Marie Waters and Baroness Cox will be speaking about their newest report on the state of children’s rights in Britain. The talk is going to be chaired by Professor Eileen Munro, CBE and review the effects of state multiculturalism on the matter of child protection in Britain.
Anne-Marie Waters and Baroness Cox say that the report will show that a multicultural approach, adopted by local authorities and other public authorities, to child protection is placing children in danger and creating parallel …societies. Furthermore, the talk is going to topicalise sharia tribunals and their increasing authority in the issue of child custody, questioning the impact this has, and is likely to have, on the equal protection of children regardless of race or ethnicity.
Anne Marie Waters is spokesperson for the One Law for All Campaign. She campaigns against Sharia and religious Laws as she believes they represent a sacrifice of the rights of women in the name of legal and cultural relativism. She is a council member and campaigner for the National Secular Society, and campaigns more broadly for gender and race equality. She also writes and speaks on the importance of trade unionism, democracy, and Government and public sector accountability.
Baroness Cox is a cross-bench member in the House of Lords. She also is the founder and CEO of an organisation called the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART). She has campaigned for humanitarian causes, particularly relating to disability, women’s rights and children’s rights.
Eileen Munro is currently Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In June 2010, the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, asked Professor Munro to conduct an independent review to improve child protection in England. Her final report was published in May 2011 and contained fifteen recommendations, all of which were subsequently accepted by the government. For services to children and families, Professor Munro received a CBE in the New Year’s Honours 2012.
Please find more information on this event on the LSE public events page.
The LSE won’t have segregated seating at this event, will they?
Heh. Obviously not.
Part of the problem in the UK is that being ‘not racist’ matters more to most people than doing what is right or necessary. The African girl having her genitals carved off is ultimately out of sight out of mind for most people, including most immigrants, but the Guardian reader or ‘community advocate’ shouting ‘racist’ in your face is not.
As an illustration, UK FTB user, walton, who smears as ‘racist’ the very notion of having immigration controls of any kind (not an exaggeration of his views), told me without shame that he could not support examining girls from at risks groups because that would be ‘racial profiling’. Better a girl have no external genitalia than some hurt feelings about racial and cultural sensitivity abound.
Accordingly the UK has never prosecuted a single person under an anti-FGM statute despite hundreds of thousands of immigrants from cultures that practice FGM.
Tell the grieving family of Jackie Nanyonjo that Britain’s immigration controls are not racist. Or how about the women of the Yarl’s Wood Movement for Justice. Apparently the guards who killed Jimmy Mubenga weren’t racist, either.
Yes, I do support the end of immigration controls. And if you’d spent time working with the asylum-seekers and immigration detainees – overwhelmingly people of colour from the developing world – who are being made to suffer by Britain’s immigration controls, you might take the same view.
That’s a distortion of my position. I have repeatedly reiterated my view that FGM is wrong and should be illegal, and I support measures to prevent it.
Walton, you take a virtue, empathy, and then pervert it into a reason to disengage from reason. How would you manage the labour market, public housing, the NHS, etc, if anyone who could reach the UK was allowed in?
Further your ’empathy’ has a strong whiff of paternalism and self-loathing. You clearly have no respect whatsoever for the right British citizens to manage our own nation by democratic rule of law.
The fact you decline once again to lay in any detail what these “measures” are shows what a craven fraud you are. You reflect nothing but the status quo of making FGM illegal and then doing absolutely nothing effective about it, because any useful action inevitably means some trampling on the feelings of “people of colour from the developing world” which we all know in the UK is far, far ‘worse’ than having your genitals cut off.
This is a terrible defence of immigration controls. You’re essentially arguing that in order to protect British citizens’ social and economic privilege, the state should forcibly exclude those who happened to be born in other countries. You’re presupposing that British citizens’ interests are more important than those of migrants. I do not accept that.
Nationality is a characteristic usually acquired by the accident of birth. It’s utterly arbitrary and utterly unjust to deny people equal civil rights on the basis of the accident of birth. And I would point out that many of the people currently suffering at the hands of the Home Office in hellhole immigration removal centres like Harmondsworth and Yarl’s Wood, many of the people facing deportation, are from countries which Britain itself colonised and violently exploited in earlier decades: as some activists have said, “we are here because you were there”. Some come from countries which are still war zones today, like Afghanistan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo – and the Home Office is still deporting people to those places. You don’t seem to care about those people.
I also don’t accept your premise. If we, as a society, can afford for billionaires to grow ever richer, and can afford to wage wars and kill people in foreign lands, then we can afford to feed and house everyone who needs it.
Immigration controls are the opposite of democratic, because the very people who are affected by them – immigrants – are disenfranchised and excluded from the political process.
Rebekah, It seems you want mandatory physical examinations of genitalia for girls of specific ethnic heritage regardless of whether there are any reasonable grounds to suspect they have been subjected to genital mutilation.
Is that what you really want ?
Evidence and logic, please, Rebekah!
The legislation applies only to the mutilation of those who are either citizens of the UK or permanently resident here.
I agree that the law should have been used many times by now but, given the above, someone arriving here already mutilated could not use it if she wanted to.
Unlike Walton, I might be persuadable that a sensitive examination of those citizens and residents who return from countries where it happens might help.
One thing is certain, though. I would not want it done or supervised by the ignorant, brutal and indifferent to human rights UKBA. Would you?
@walton
We live in a world of nation states, where citizens have certain rights, including voting on the course of their nation, and non-citizens, and certainly non-residents, do not. Since you have abandoned that reality to wallow in a self-righteous utopianism, no reasoned argument could ever reach you.
@Matt
FGM is linked to specific ethnic groups; it is not a random phenomenon. Ethnic groups that practice FGM can have rates as high as 99%. Thus being a woman from that ethnicity is highly “reasonable grounds” to any rational person. Unless you want to examine every girl in the UK, ethnic profiling is an unavoidable step to identify at-risk girls.
So yes, I really want perhaps the most horrific crime being committed en masse against women in the UK and the world today to be ruthlessly stamped out, even if it means, horror or horrors, a woman has to show her genitals to a qualified medical official.
What do you want Matt? The totally toothless approach heretofore or actual progress?
@Maureen
Please cite where I suggested otherwise as to where UK law applies. I mean, really.
Of course I want the examinations to be done in a humane, compassionate way, but they need to be done and violations need to be prosecuted with mandatory punishments. This is a monstrous crime that needs to be stamped out, full stop. The complacency of Britons, especially smug, white leftists like walton is vile beyond words.
If white Christian minorities were committing similar crimes against human dignity, we would not even have to have this discussion.
This is just a restatement of the status quo, not a moral defence of it. A defender of segregation and Jim Crow laws from the early twentieth century could have equally argued “We live in a country of segregation, where white people have certain rights, including voting on the course of their nation, and people of colour do not.” The reasoning is equally horrible in both cases. Why should people’s rights depend on the accident of birth? Why should you have special privileges that other people are forcibly denied?
Walton I will take you seriously when you post proof that you have long since renounced your UK citizenship and become an official stateless person. After all, if being part of the universal “status quo” of nation states is “equally horrible” to segregation in terms of moral reasoning, then surely such an empathic, right-thinking, pure and noble soul such as yourself would never voluntarily take part in such a fundamentally racist endeavour and be so arrogant as to indulge in the “special privileges” of being a citizen.
An utterly meaningless argument. Is no one allowed to criticize capitalism unless they boycott all the fruits of capitalism and starve themselves to death? Is no one allowed to criticize the pharma industry unless they forswear modern medicine entirely? Futile displays of self-righteousness don’t do anyone any good. Explain to me how the kind of action you describe would actually do anything to stop deportations or immigration detention, or to support immigrants’ rights.
And show me where I ever claimed to be pure or noble. This isn’t about me. It isn’t about you, either. You seem to be intent on avoiding discussion of the issue. I’ve provided extensive evidence to back up my claim that immigration restrictions involve a great deal of violence and cruelty, and that this is in practice overwhelmingly directed against people of colour from the developing world. You haven’t provided any evidence to the contrary.
You’ve leapt to the defence of immigration controls, while ignoring the lives of the human beings they affect.
And how about the women jailed at Yarl’s Wood for nothing other than being foreign?
How about the LGBT people facing deportation to countries where homophobic violence is rife, because the Home Office refuses to believe that they are telling the truth about their sexuality? And I’ve already posted about Jackie Nanyonjo, the Ugandan lesbian who was beaten so badly by security guards from the private contractor Reliance, while being deported, that she later died of her injuries.
Not to mention the mental health crisis in immigration detention. And the continued detention of children in immigration removal centres in shameful conditions. Something the coalition government pledged to stop, but hasn’t.
And at no point have I disagreed with you that FGM is a serious crime and should be stopped. I agree with that wholeheartedly, and always have.
Which is why I oppose the deportation of women facing FGM.