"Mr. Trump, by portraying gendered violence as a threat that comes from immigrants ... reframes the issue from one of protecting women to one of demonizing migrants."

...................................................................................................................................................................
Portraying Muslims as a Threat to Women, Donald Trump Echoes ‘Us vs. Them’ Refrain
By Amanda Taub, August 16, 2016



Donald J. Trump, reiterating his call to restrict Muslim immigration to the United States, has adopted a tactic that has long been a mainstay of strongmen and sectarian provocateurs: portraying outsiders as a threat to women’s safety.

In a foreign policy speech on Monday, Mr. Trump referred to the practice known as honor killings in Pakistan and the mass sexual assault on New Year’s Eve in the German city of Cologne, implying that Muslim immigrants pose a threat to women in the United States.

He also cited the case of an Iraqi immigrant who murdered his daughter in 2009 in Arizona out of anger that she was “too Westernized.” “Shockingly,” Mr. Trump said, “this is a practice that has reached our own shores.”

Mr. Trump, knowingly or not, joined a long line of people who have justified harsh policies against a group by portraying its members, often in sexualized terms, as perilous to women. White supremacists justified lynching in the Jim Crow era by depicting black men as predators targeting white women, for example, and British propaganda during World War I featured lurid tales of German soldiers raping Belgian women.

By using women to measure moral distance between “us” and “them,” such messages portray outsiders as not just different, but dangerous. History has proved this rhetoric effective — though more at rallying people behind the messenger and ostracizing the outsiders than at actually protecting women.

Miranda Alison, a University of Warwick professor who studies women in conflict, wrote in a 2007 article that such material “presents the (male) enemy as those who would rape and murder ‘our’ women and the war effort is directed at saving ‘our’ women.”

Such messages tend to follow a script. The first step is to condemn an individual male member of a group — a group seen as outsiders by the mainstream audience — for an outrageous attack on an innocent woman or group of women. The next step is to portray the attack as evidence of the poor moral character or depraved culture inherent to the man’s social group, arguing that it therefore poses a danger to the mainstream society’s families and values. Finally, that danger is used to justify harsh, sometimes violent, action against that group.

He recounted particular horrifying attacks on women: the murder of Qandeel Baloch, a Pakistani social media star, by her brother; and the killing of the young woman in the United States by her Iraqi-immigrant father. There was the more generalized outrage: He described honor killings as examples of the “hateful ideology that provides the breeding ground for terrorism to grow.”

Though this was couched as part of Mr. Trump’s tirade against “radical Islam,” the reference to honor killings implied that Muslim culture as a whole is morally flawed and dangerous. This is despite the fact that honor killings are not exclusive to Muslim societies. Many occur in India, a mostly Hindu country — something Mr. Trump ignored as he used such examples to bolster his argument for restrictions on Muslim immigration to the United States.

A similar flawed logic was used to defend lynching in the South: Black men, the theory went, by some innate nature threatened the honor and safety of white women. But historians have documented that many black men who were lynched had not even been accused of rape. Rather, the deaths were a product of the portrayal of black men as an undifferentiated mass who had to be terrorized into submission.

“The myth insisted that black men were driven to assault white women and that, as a deterrent, ‘black beast rapists’ should pay with their lives,” wrote Lisa Lindquist-Dorr, a historian, in her book, “White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960.” “For whites, responding to black men’s alleged assaults was both a means of racial control and a way to assert white supremacy.”

Similarly, in 1930s Spain, nationalist propaganda falsely claimed that republican fighters had raped nuns during the civil war. Because nuns held an especially respected position in Catholic Spain, the accusations served to demonize the republican forces as monstrous, and to generate support for Franco’s nationalists.

Britain’s use in World War I of lurid tales of rapist soldiers was part of a campaign to pressure the United States into joining the war effort. Once the United States joined, American propaganda used the same imagery to encourage people to enlist. One poster portrayed Germany as King Kong, carrying a swooning woman in one arm and a club in the other. Its tagline read, “Destroy this mad brute: enlist!”

There is wide variation across these cases — such British propaganda served a less nefarious end, for instance, and Mr. Trump is hardly proposing anything like lynching. But they share a basic blueprint. And they share a common goal: to unify “us” against “them” by portraying “them” as inherently threatening to “our” women.

Although Mr. Trump denounced honor killings in his speech, he was embracing a line of argument that itself stems directly from honor culture, in which men’s ability to control and protect their families, particularly the women in them, is a key element of masculine social standing.

This is not really about actual women. Rather, it turns women — specifically, the protection of them — into tokens of male honor, a way for men to keep score against enemy outsiders and to secure their status in their own societies.

Mr. Trump, by portraying gendered violence as a threat that comes from immigrants — even though domestic violence and sexual assault are severe problems in the United States that hardly need to be imported — reframes the issue from one of protecting women to one of demonizing migrants.

Sanghamitra Choudhury, a professor at Sikkim University in India who studies women in conflict, wrote in a 2009 paper that “during conflict situations, female ‘purity’ becomes the boundary determining membership in groups and a means of segregation from other identities.”

For this reason, portraying social groups as a threat to the purity or safety of “our” women can effectively rally men against that group, as Mr. Trump did in highlighting the Cologne attacks to suggest that Muslim immigrants pose a sexual threat to Western women.

But this rarely has the effect of actually making women safer from real threats. Rather, Ms. Choudhury wrote, using “women as identity markers” can invite “control and targeting of their sexuality and reproduction.”

This is not to say that Mr. Trump or others who invoke such rhetoric do not genuinely care about women’s safety. But it highlights how appeals to honor culture often have the opposite effect, because they are really about guarding the honor of men, not the safety of women.

To be sure, violence against women is an enormous problem that leaders across the globe struggle with daily. Many efforts do focus primarily on women’s safety. And the honor killings Mr. Trump mentioned are a serious problem that takes the lives of thousands of women each year.

But history has shown that it can be all too easy to exploit those dangers toward very different ends, indulging male honor culture to rally social groups against one another and to unite “us” against “them.”
...................................................................................................................................................................