Victims and Villains: The Rhetoric of Exploitation as a Temporal Strategy of Migration Control

• In Event: Criminology of Mobility. Panel 3. Migrants, labour and exploitation

Abstract

In Europe, marriage and family-related migration has become the target of political concern, state intervention and increasingly punitive measures. In Ireland, marriages of convenience have been referred to as facilitating the exploitation of women for immigration purposes, abusing the immigration system, and attacking the institution of marriage. Prior to 2014, the majority of claims made around the illegality of marriage focused on protecting the state against potential immigration abuses. After 2014, the majority of claims made hinged on the potential risk of abuse to vulnerable European women.
Drawing on Ashworth and Zedner (2014), this paper explores the use of ‘exploitation’ as a discursive tool of preventive justice within ‘penal humanitarianism’ (Bosworth, 2016). This examines Project HESTIA, a two-year pan-European interagency project was established by the European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control as part of the drive to associate marriages of convenience with human trafficking.
As a discursive tool, the Exploitative Sham Marriage requires less justification or due process, even if punishment is experienced (Zedner 2016). In the Irish case, this has led to pre-emptive punitive approaches under the guise of protecting against potential exploitation to justify state intervention and an exclusionary rhetoric that legitimises racial discrimination against ‘undesirable’ couples (De Hart, 2014).
This paper problematises the articulation of exploitation as a symbolic device which has a range of multiple meanings that serve multiple purposes which can be ‘activated’ depending on the context. It argues that the Exploitative Sham Marriage provides an insight into the interplay between prevention and punishment; recasting women simultaneously as potential victims and villains, acting as an extended network of punishment that sits primarily outside of traditional criminal justice settings, ultimately broadening and justifying the reach of state prevention.

Author

• Stephanie Hanlon, University College Dublin