The Role of the State in the Problem of Intra-group Vulnerability: Addressing Polygamy and Forced Marriage Practices in Minority Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the intra-group vulnerability of minority women subject to polygamy and forced marriage practices. The thesis focuses on these vulnerabilities in the context of the Bedouin-Arabs in Israel, and explores two questions: 1) should the liberal state address concerns about the oppressive potential of minority cultures’ practices for women? And, 2) if so, what approach should be taken to this end, and how should this approach inform state laws?Critical work discussing liberal multiculturalism has generated different proposals for addressing intra-group vulnerability concerns. But if we attempt to practically implement these proposals, we find that the proposed solutions come down to a binary choice between heavy-handed interventionism and a laissez-faire approach. Looking into actual cases of intra-group vulnerability to critically reflect on this theoretical scholarship reveals that the scholarship suffers from a striking gap in its proposed solutions – it overlooks the state’s role in creating and perpetuating the problem. This oversight can explain the tendency of scholars to fall into this binary. Viewing the state as a bystander restricts these scholars to ‘response strategies,’ either intervening against other community members, or holding back from acting at all. Investigating the vulnerability of Bedouin women to oppressive marriage arrangements highlights how the state could be implicated in this problem on different levels. This investigation illustrates how Israel’s policy of pushing the Bedouin out of their lands has reinforced this vulnerability. It further elucidates how Israel’s legal treatment of these practices has been significant in perpetuating this vulnerability. Finally, it reveals how discriminatory accessibility barriers to public resources, including family courts, welfare assistance, and protection against domestic violence, have made it harder for Bedouin women to resist and break away from oppressive marriage arrangements. This investigation also allows us to see why recognizing the (partial) responsibility of the state for this problem provides the key to escaping the laissez-faire/heavy-handed interventionism binary. Most significantly, it indicates how removing barriers impairing minority women’s access to various public resources can open up paths for these women to leave and resist unfavourable aspects of their community life, without forcing them to exit their community altogether.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".