In the face of 'culture'

Since March 2011, Germany has imposed a five-year maximum prison term on those convicted of forcing another into marriage. In May 2012, the Australian Parliament began considering the criminalisation of forced marriage, with a maximum penalty of seven years. Earlier, in 2007, the UK addressed the issue through immigration law, to raise from eighteen to twenty-one years the age at which a marriage visa could issue for a foreign national outside the European Union. In Quila & Anor v. Secretary of State and Ors the Court of Appeal struck down the UK legislation on the basis that, 'not withstanding its proper objective', the 'arbitrary and disruptive impact of the rule on the lives of a large number of innocent young people' meant that the rule could not be justified, at least where one of the spouses was a UK citizen.

Nevertheless, the Court recognised that forced marriage 'is not merely a cultural or social problem': 'A woman forced into marriage is in [UK] law … a victim of false imprisonment and rape, and those arranging and procuring it are likely to be guilty of kidnapping and conspiracy.'

This meant the Home Office 'is justified in doing everything it properly can to prevent or inhibit it'. However, the method of immigration control chosen was not an 'appropriate means' of doing so. This follows, too, in that as SIGI and UNICEF indicate, forced and arranged marriages are not isolated to legal marriage, but figure in relationships where girls are obliged to live as 'married' partners with men despite being under-age.

To conclude that these forced marriages take place only outside Australia, Germany, the UK and other countries of 'the north' is to avoid the depth and breadth of the trafficking of persons prevalent around the world. Children and young people are trafficked for forced labour (including domestic labour), and for sexual exploitation – which can include being forced to live in a 'marital' relationship which has religious imprimatur despite the girl being just that – a child and not of an age to marry legally. The Australian approach recognises this.

Although a world away from underage marriage, the controversy recently exercising Facebook commentators and mainstream media, of the narrow range of clothing available for girls between seven and fourteen years of age, has resonance. Control creeps in through commerce.

Ana Amini of Port Macquarie and Gretta Hawkhead of Patterson Lakes complained on Target's Facebook page of the 'sluttish' style of clothing on the 'low cost' retailer's '7-14' racks:

'Dear Target, Could you possibly make a range of clothing for girls 7-14 years that doesn't make them look like tramps … You have lost me as a customer when buying apparel for my daughter …' [Daughter eight years]

'… much of Target's 7-year-plus range [is] made up of short shorts and dresses, low-cut necklines, sheer lace, or "grungy" clothing …' [Daughter seven years]

'It's very provocative and not appropriate for young girls at all. They're still children and you want to keep that innocence for as long as you can. But Target seems to think that once they turn seven, they're young adults.' [Daughter seven years]

On the Monday following a weekend of Facebook fury, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Mrs Amini's post 'had attracted more than 44,000 "likes" and 2300 comments – most … from parents criticizing the retailer for selling "hooker-style" clothes to young girls.' An Age and Sydney Morning Herald poll posing the question 'How do you generally rate the style of young girls' fashions sold in major stores?' recorded 18,830 votes, of which sixty-four per cent answered 'too sexy', twenty-five per cent said 'cute but occasionally too grown-up', six per cent plumped for 'mostly acceptable', with five per cent recording 'always acceptable and value for money'.

One mainstream journalist said Target was 'not to blame'. Rather, the commercialisation of childhood and contemporary social and cultural mores were. An online commentator held otherwise, contending that those articulating concern were projecting their own sexualised contentions upon girls, with girls being consigned to a 'prudes' category from which they should be freed. The 'moral majority' was hard at work, with Puritanism and mediaeval (sic) horrors of naked female flesh on the rise … This view appeared to be that 'sluts' rule, to be celebrated at whatever age, and that adult concerns for their children's wellbeing was misdirected.

Yet is it 'fair enough' that seven to fourteen-year-olds are presented with images of adult-as-prostitute as 'trendy' and 'desirable', with their own contemporaries or almost-contemporaries arrayed in similar attire, so that girls' aspirations are limited to an identification with (at best) 'celebrities' adopting 'grunge' or 'sexy' modes of dress, singers and pop stars living in a world where 'making it' or remaining at the top is dependent upon videos in which dress or the state of undress seems equally important as voice? Is it really 'okay' that what once was 'standard streetwalker' is sold as 'standard seven-year-old'?

Western culture no longer consigns girls into wifehood before their time. Now the message is that girls must conform to an adult sexualised image. In both cases, childhood vulnerability is ignored and the potential woman-as-independent, as her own woman, disappears. In under-age marriage, girls are forced into childbearing, childrearing, housework and husband-work, grown-up and grown old long before their time. Culture dictates control through submission of person. With Target-wear and its equivalents, girls are forced into seeing themselves as 'real' through adopting a sexually objectifying style of adult dress. Western culture sets girls on a trajectory toward early capitulation to the body-image imperative. How long before they conclude that Botox and breast implants are next on the 'must have' list?

Subjugation to marriage may seem and be aeons from subjection to the commercialised image. Yet whether controlled through marriage or commercialised images of what it is to be a girl-woman, East or West, North or South, culture thereby denies girls the right to be girls.