ABSTRACT
Socially responsible educators in multicultural Britain need to address the issue of gendered risk which young ‘ethnicised’2 women can face within their own communities and families. Young women growing up in minority ethnic communities who are subject to specific forms of cultural domestic violence, such as honour killings and forced marriage, are caught up in the contradictions of the cultural relativism of British multiculturalism on the one hand, and the private/public divide which characterises our approach to domestic violence on the other. Liberal multiculturalism is popularly conceived as celebrating diversity and ‘tolerating’ different cultural and religious values between groups. However, in this model the notion of mutual tolerance is fragile. One way in which multiculturalism negotiates this fragility is to maintain a laissez-faire approach to gendered cultural difference. This chapter looks at some of the tensions and confusions involved in dealing with the hard and sensitive issues of gendered human rights violations which can become issues in our multicultural schools.
