Reluctant Disclosure: Epistemic Doubt and Ethical Dilemmas in Australian Forced Marriage Prevention Efforts

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the ways in which secondary school administrators, nurses, and teachers in Victoria, Australia, are being taught to identify forced marriage as an emerging configuration of familial violence that has been codified in federal law. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Melbourne, Australia and its suburbs, I argue that school staff’s discomfort with the policy’s demand that they conduct risk assessments on their students produce non-disclosure as a more ethical expression of care for student wellbeing. Nondisclosure emerges as a strategy that hesitates to employ modes of victim recognition demanded by liberal biopolitical risk assessment protocols. Rather than viewing nondisclosure as a disengagement from the subject, this article shows how social welfare practitioners view nondisclosure as a way to re-engage with the broader political conditions that structure migrant families’ marital practices, including intensified border control policies and economic precarity in the wake of displacement.