Barriers to Canadian justice: immigrant Sikh women and izzat

Abstract

The concept of honour has been superficially understood in recent media coverage of the so-called ‘honour killings’ of Muslim and Punjabi-Sikh women. Drawing on qualitative socio-legal research, this paper examines the gendered significance of izzat in mediating both private and public spaces in the everyday lives of five immigrant Punjabi-Sikh women. Within the corporate family structure, Punjabi-Sikh women contribute to the continued regulation of other Punjabi-Sikh women by upholding patriarchal conceptions of izzat. Transplanted understandings of Indian law and society, coupled with Punjabi-Sikh understandings of izzat, shape these women's cultural and legal consciousness, as well as the perceived role of Canadian law. As such, the cultural importance and complexities of izzat reveal how it constrains the five women in this study from accessing the Canadian legal system with regard to personal and family problems except in violent, life-threatening circumstances.

Keywords:

• immigrant women
• izzat
• honour killing
• multiculturalism
• access to justice
• legal consciousness
• legal pluralism
• Punjab

Acknowledgements

This paper benefited from the insightful comments of Werner Menski, Roger Ballard and Margaret Walton-Roberts. Fieldwork support and guidance were provided by Lesley Jacobs. This paper was remarkably improved by the critique of Dayna Crosby.

Notes

While in the UK context, research reveals that South Asian women are three times more likely to commit suicide versus other women (Patel 2012), in the Canadian context, there is a lack of research investigating mental health and cultural integration of visible minorities to confirm the research significance of female immigrants from South Asia or the Middle East (Papp 2011).

The Islamic Supreme Council of Canada issued a moral ruling (fatwa) officially condemning honour killings, domestic violence and misogyny as ‘un-Islamic’ (Young 2012).

Canadian state and society in the early twentieth century were characterized by the colonization of Aboriginal peoples and the bordering of ‘non-preferred’ races as outsiders to the nation (Thobani 2000, p. 286). In 1906, the first Indian immigrants arrived on Canada's shores. None of the 5000 (mostly Sikh) men who first settled in British Columbia were permitted to have their families join them. Regarded as morally and politically undesirable, Indian migrants were believed to be inassimilable, too distinct in culture, religion and physical appearance (Agnew 2003).

In the post-war period, European emigration decreased and Canada introduced a policy on multiculturalism in 1971 and the Immigration Act of 1976–1977 to respond to its labour needs.

Orientalist (immigrants from India, China and Japan) discriminatory landmarks include 1885 Chinese Immigration Act, 1923 Exclusion Act and 1908 Continuous Passage Act, which resulted in the 1914 Komagata Maru incident.

Although this paper refers to immigrants from Punjab, India, Punjab encompasses a region that spans the Indian–Pakistan border as a ‘fertile plain bounded by the Indus to the west and the Yamuna to the east, rising into the foothills of the Himalayas to the north and tailing off equally fuzzily into the desiccated deserts of Rajasthan to the south’ (Ballard 1999, p. 4).

As a first-generation Canadian woman of Indian descent, my investment in the study of South Asian immigrant women (see Puwar 2004, p. 22), in this case, Sikh women, is to put forth a qualitative study of how women negotiate their subject positions with multiple patriarchies that overlap and intersect through membership in cultural and religious communities, which play mediating roles in local, national and global contexts of migration and citizenship.

Pseudonyms have been used for participants in this research project.

This title is taken from Ewick and Silbey's (1998) book The commonplace of law.

‘Model jurisprudence’ refers to the phenomenon of legal centralism that is exclusive, uniform for all persons and administered by a single set of state institutions (Griffiths 1986).

The other two Kaurs lived elsewhere before coming to Canada (England and Central Africa) and explained that they were better prepared for the Canadian immigration and settlement experiences.