Posthumous Rescue

The Shafia Young Women as Worthy Victims

Yasmin Jiwani
a

ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the coverage of the murders of the young Shafia women.
Based on an analysis of the coverage published in The Globe and Mail (July 2009
to March 2012), I argue that the young women were constructed as exceptional
and worthy victims of a particularly heinous crimehonor killingallegedly
imported from Afghanistan by the Shafia patriarch. I interrogate the different
threads that were interwoven to construct these young womens representations
to make them intelligible as girls and young women. Within the coverage, the
trope of culture clash anchored in an Orientalist framing worked to consolidate
their representations as worthy victims and re-inscribe the national imaginary of
Canadian society as egalitarian, tolerant and beyond gender violence. These different maneuvers served to accomplish a kind of posthumous rescue in a domestic
context akin to the strategies of rescue implemented by Western powers in the
War on Terror to save Afghan women.
KEYWORDS
Canada, culture clash, consumption, heteronormativity, Islam, Muslim(s), Orientalism, victim.

Introduction
On 30 June 2009, local policing and harbor authorities patrolling the
Kingston area of the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ontario discovered a sunken
car with the bodies of three young women, Zainab (aged 19), Sahar (aged
17), and Geeti (aged 13), as well as the body of Rona Amir (aged 52) who
was the first wife of Mohammad Shafia. On 23 July 2009, Mohammad
Shafia, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their eldest son, Hamid
Shafia, were each charged with four counts of murder. On 30 January 2012,
they were convicted. The murders, framed as honor killings, galvanized
national and international attention, bringing journalists from around the
globe to witness and report on the Shafia trial, which lasted for three months,
culminating in the conviction of the father, step-mother and brother of the
Girlhood Studies 7, no. 1 (Summer 2014): 27-45
Berghahn Journals
doi: 10.3167/ghs.2014.070104
ISSN: 1938-8209 (print) 1938-8322 (online)

YASMIN JIWANI

victims. Anchored in the Afghan cultural background of the family the

honor-killing frame offered an explanation of the murders as resulting from
a clash of cultures for the young women. Interestingly, The Globe and Mail
(1 February 2012) published a statement released by the Afghan embassy
denouncing the links between Afghan culture and honor killings.
While much popular attention has focused on these murders, my aim
in this article is to deconstruct the ways in which the Shafia victims, specifically the young women, were transformed into worthy victims, galvanizing
widespread public outrage. My argument in this article is that the exceptional victimhood of the young Shafia women derived its legitimacy and
potency from the construction of their murders as an instance of honor
killingan exotic import the family had brought with them when they
migrated to Canada. The honor-killing frame invoked, explicitly and implicitly, connotations of Afghan culture as tribalistic and pre-modern, and connotations of Islam as also sharing those same attributes, given that the family
identified itself as Muslim. This, combined with the positioning of these
young women as belonging to a stigmatized group (Muslims) in the post
9/11 milieu, and their desire to adopt Western normative values and practices (through consumption, heterosexual relations and so on) to distance
themselves from their own culture, contributed to making the young Shafia
women seem more like us rather than them. In other words, they adopted
mainstream norms in dress, comportment and behaviour. The photographs
that were circulated throughout the various news media conferred an added
degree of authenticity to the representation of these women as normal young
women who had the misfortune of belonging to an oppressive, backward
and traditionalist culture, and who had been subjected to an ultra-patriarchal
Islam. The press coverage analyzed here suggests that the recuperation of
these young women after their deaths emblematized a posthumous rescue
a way in which these victims could be salvaged much in the way that imperial powers had sought to rescue Muslim women in the historic past, as well
as in the contemporary regime of the War on Terror.
In tracing the strands that are interwoven to construct these representations, I draw attention to the ways in which cultural clash, heteronormativity, and consumption were highlighted, producing the young Shafia women
as subjects deserving of sympathy. My analysis is derived from an informal
discourse analysis of sixty stories that were published in The Globe and Mail
over a span of two and half years, from July 2009 to March 2012. As a
national paper, The Globe and Mail is touted to be a paper of record enjoying
a considerable degree of legitimacy. Although right of center, the paper rep28

THE SHAFIA YOUNG WOMEN AS WORTHY VICTIMS

resents the national imagined community and stands as an alternative to the

more right-wing National Post. Owned by the Thomson family (also owners
of Thomson-Reuters) and Bell Media, a major media conglomerate, The
Globe and Mail publishes sixteen newspapers across the country. Hence, its
stories circulate nationally and internationally. In concentrating on these
stories, I underscore the dominant discourse as opposed to the subordinate
and contesting discourses that were often articulated in the letters to the
editor and opinion pieces (see Jiwani and Hoodfar 2012). While important,
the latter constitute a form of soft news in contrast to the hard news reported
by journalists on site at the Shafia trial and by the news editorial, which
reflects the papers position.

Girls, Power, and Agency

In their analysis of girlhood, Aapola et al. (2005) draw attention to the construction of girlhood as, one the one hand, a period of crisis, marked by the
transition to adolescence and accompanied by bodily changes, lack of voice
and a general helplessness and, on the other, as agentic, embodied most
explicitly in the girl power movements. This bifurcated doubling discourse
hinges on notions of agency. Where girls manifest agentic power, it is usually
in the form of the commodified girl power movement (see Driscoll 2008;
Harris 2003), readily exploitable by marketers. To this, I would add representations of girls in the area of crime where the construction of the nasty
mean girl (Barron and Lacombe 2005) is also reflective of the agency of girls.
In contrast, the lack of such agency is made more apparent in those who are
represented as victims (of eating disorders, self-harm, addictions, and such
like).1 Harris (2003) complicates this bifurcation by drawing a distinction
between representations of girls and young women as either risk-takers or
as embodying girl power. Again, risk-taker behaviour is agentic but negatively valued, whereas the girl power embodiments of agency are positively
valued (by marketers if not by the rest of society). Risk-takers, according to
Harris, tend to follow behaviors that are considered socially taboo and/or
deviant and that invoke increased surveillance and regulation.
While Harris analysis situates risk-takers within yet another age-old
dichotomy of the bad girl versus the good girl, it fails to take into consideration the kinds of risks that girls within the demarcated categories of class,
race, sexuality, and ability actually take in order to fit in or assume a level of
normality that is desired of them by the hegemonic norms (see Gonick
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2003). Here, I want to argue that girls and young women of color are risktakers but not in the sense of Harris view of these girls as traditionally falling
into the category of bad girls but, rather, as risk-takers having to play by
rules that are not of their own making, but those of the dominant society.
And it is this risk-taking behavior that actually castigates them as bad girls
from within their own communities or kin networks and makes them,
simultaneously, salvageable and useable within the dominant society. As
racialized girls, they are situated in the interstices between their own communities and the dominant society. They are, as Indy Batth (1998) suggests
in the title of her work, walking the hyphen. Faced with racism from the
dominant society and exclusion from their own communities if they violate
the norms, the very act of walking the hyphen involves taking risks. Race
marks them in a way that leaves few options open. However, it is the corporeality of race and processes of racialization that we need to account for
to better understand the lives of young women like the Shafias.
In their analysis of the genealogy of racialization, Barot and Bird (2001)
argue that many existing studies of race and racism tend to minimize its
corporeality, focusing instead on its signification in discourse. In contrast,
Fanon 2 (1967) emphasizes that it is through external attribution that the
physical markers of the body are made real and given social significance as
in the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes,
stories. (111) Moraga (1981) would suggest that this is theory in the
flesh since it emphasizes the materiality of the body in conceptualizing
flesh as the site on or with which the woman of colour experiences the
painful material effects of living in a particular social location (cited in
Bannerji 2000:24).
It is this violence of racism to which I wish to draw attention, especially
with regard to how girls of color have to navigate not only discursive constructions and terrains, but also the structural reality of their location as
marginalized and minoritized within a dominant host society that values
whiteness. Their difference is made manageable, if not palatable, to the external society through conformity paved by consumption and an interiorization
of the dominant culture. In this regard, a range of technologies that work
to manage race and neutralize the threat of racialized difference are at play:
exclusion/ostracization; victimization through brute and discursive violence;
normatization through conformity; and exoticization and commodification.
In the following section, I outline the interplay of some of these technologies
of domination in the context of the lives of young Muslim women in
Canada, bearing in mind Veningas observation of the ways in which the
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THE SHAFIA YOUNG WOMEN AS WORTHY VICTIMS

body acts as a productive site in the construction of racial categories and

social identities (2009: 113).

Situating Muslim Girls and Young Women

Although the events of 11 September 2001 marked a flashpoint signaling
the increasing stigmatization and criminalization of Muslim identity and
Islam as a religion, these currents clearly predate this period. The discourse
of Orientalism that Said (1979) so lucidly described continues to underpin
constructions of Muslims in the dominant media. Orientalism incorporates
multiple dimensions emanating from the unequal relationship between West
and East. For the present analysis, it is Saids third component of Orientalism
that is of import: the ideological suppositions, images, and fantasies
aboutthe Orient. (1985: 90)
In Orientalist thought (permeating the media), the narrative of the Muslim woman or girl has coalesced around a bifurcated construction: the exotic,
erotic Other versus the oppressed and victimized Other. Between these two
ends are various configurations that nonetheless operate as a doubling discourse (Jiwani 2009, 2010; Yeenolu 1998) sutured around notions of the
good Muslim and the bad Muslim (Maira 2009; Mamdani 2004). 3 Framed
through the lens of Orientalism, Muslim girls and women are constructed
as passive, powerless victims of an ultra-patriarchal Islamabject others
needing to be rescued from their tyrannical patriarchs (Abu-Lughod 2002).
This is counterpoised by representations of Muslim women as sexualized,
erotic but dangerous Others in entertainment media (Shaheen 2001).
However, in contemporary news accounts, representations of Muslim
women as abject victims prevail. Muslim girls, generally, are perceived as
victims or potential victims who are subjected to forced marriages, wearing
the hijab or niqab, denied access to education, and vulnerable to honor
killings should they defy the conventional moralities of their community
(Scott 2007; Werbner 2005). Indeed, as Razack (2008) frames it, Muslim
women (and girls by association) are imperiled. So powerful are these images
that they have percolated into popular consciousness, infusing stereotypes
throughout the different sectors of society. These images have also leaked
into policy documents and laws, as evidenced by the recent debates and proposed legislation in Quebec denying services to women who wear the niqab,
not to mention the expulsion of Muslim girls in Quebec schools for wearing
the hijab (Lenk 2007; Todd 1998; Wong 2013), or the disqualification of
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YASMIN JIWANI

girls in particular sport competitions because of their desire to wear the hijab
while competing. The victim status of young Muslim women and girls then
derives from this overarching narrative of their persecution and oppression
by patriarchs within the family and the larger Muslim community. The focus
on the oppressed Muslim woman serves to reinforce the notion of Western
women and girls as being more liberated, while also deflecting attention
from womens oppression here.4
Much like the tropes of rescue that undergird existing representations
of Muslim women from this state of abject victimhoodrecalling Spivaks
famous phrase that White men are saving brown women from brown men
(1994: 93)so, too, are Muslim girls and young women subjected to rescue
attempts which seek to recoup them from the clutches of barbaric, traditional cultures. Even young adult novels represent Muslim girls as abject victims in need of saving. These books, as Sensoy and Marshall (2010) argue,
advance a missionary ideology of saving the Third World One girl at a
Time (295).
Trapped in their barbaric cultures, young Muslim women are then
regarded as suffering from culture clash when they express dissatisfaction
about their communities or its norms, and seek to emulate Western ways
and mores. Missing from this account is how these girls and young women
are made to feel about belonging to a stigmatized racialized group and the
harassment they experience when they do attempt to conform to the standards and norms of their communities. Writing about Canadian Islamic
schools, Zine (2012) documents the persistent and prevailing Islamophobia
that the girls she interviewed experienced. The stereotype of the oppressed
veiled Muslim girl also fails to account for the embrace of the hijab as a form
of resistance against racism. In their interviews and observations with American-born Muslim girls, Gurbuz and Gurbuz-Kucuksari (2009) note that
for these young women, headscarf adoption provides a powerful source for
identity (re)construction in a minority situation in a secular environment
(388). This agency is not always positively valued even though it reflects
young Muslim women occupying subject positions that offer them some
power. In contrast, when young Muslim women want to leave their cultural
fold, or turn to outside sources to be rescued, their agency is more often
than not validated.
In this light, the perseverance of the cultural clash to explain Muslim
girls who adopt Western dress and norms or who are victims of violence
suggests ideological significance. Culture talk as Razack (1994) reminds
us, is a double-edged sword (896). Anita Handa (2003) comments on
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THE SHAFIA YOUNG WOMEN AS WORTHY VICTIMS

how this discourse of culture clash masks the unequal relations of power
between dominant and minoritized cultures. That aside, such a clash also
assumes that cultures are static and frozen in time, sealed from any form of
cultural contact, exchange or evolution. More importantly, the focus on culture effectively occludes attention to race. Rather than attending to racial
differences and racialization, as a process that continually inferiorizes, stigmatizes and excludes cultural groups, culture talk shifts the blame to Others
(Narayan 1997).
Zareena Grewals (2009) observations are particularly apt in this regard:
In cases when white males perpetrate violence the focus is on the psychological
portrait of this individual: family history, childhood, mental health. Yet when a
Muslim woman is killed violently by a Muslim man, we are willing to accept culture as an explanation in a way that would never be satisfactory if the perpetrator
were white, just as we tend to look for cultural explanations for teen pregnancy
among blacks and Latinos but treat pregnant white teens as individual cases (4).

In the post 9/11 climate in which Muslims are targeted (OdarteyWellington 2009; Khalema & Wannas-Jones 2003), culture talk becomes
one way in which to legitimize the rescue of Muslim girls and young women
from their violent, misogynist, terrorist brothers or fathers (Bhattacharyya
2008). Saving brown girls occurs primarily through state intervention not
to mention engaging in wars out therein Afghanistan and elsewhere.
However, when the women and girls cannot be saved, the reasoning is that
it is their culture that is beyond redemption (Arat-Ko 2002). How then do
young Muslim women navigate this terrain?
If identity is stigmatized, policed and disciplined in a particular context,
as for example Muslim identity in the post 9/11 climate, then it could be
argued that one way out of this is to deploy technologies of presentation
and performativity that cohere with and derive from the reigning passional
economy (Miller & Rose 1997: 32) of consumer culture. One way that the
young Shafia women tried to fit in was through donning Western clothing
and following the habitus of their youth counterparts. In her analysis of the
conditions faced by Muslims in the US post 9/11 under the Bush regime,
Inderpal Grewal (2003) contends that:
freedom has come to imply the freedom to consume, since this seems to be
the arena in which the liberal idea of choice has become operative in new and
powerful ways. It is a consumer citizenship untethered from, but also supported
by the nation-state and linked to nationalisms that provide identities. These identities are, however, not stable or essential but provisional and thus both powerful
because they cannot be avoided, and negotiable since they are contingent (541).

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In speaking to the links between girls and consumer culture, McRobbie

(2008) reasons that the hyper-visibility of pre-teen girls as the ideal subjects
of feminine consumption marks out the contours of new modalities of gender performativity now routinely required of young girls, as a condition of
their wider intelligibility, so that they can in effect count as girls (546
emphasis added). Consumption then offers girls and young women an
avenue through which they can obtain a desired level of conformity to dominant social norms, and thereby gain a sense of belonging.
Deutsch and Theodorous (2010) ethnographic analysis of teens highlights the ways in which teens use consumer goods to both mask and mark
identities. Class background, for instance, can be masked through the purchase of goods associated with a higher social class. Similarly, styles of fashion
may be purchased to mark identity and express belonging. Style failure,
as Croghan et al. (2006: 463) suggest, may result in exclusion and stigmatization. The Shafia girls came from a wealthy family, their father having
emigrated to Canada under the preferred investor category. The family lived
in a middle-class neighborhood, and the father owned several properties.
So, clearly class was not something that these young women wanted to mask.
Indeed, class privilege is what allowed them to purchase goods that would
mark them as normative. What the young women might have desired to
mask was their Afghan origins and religious affiliation. This, they were able
to do through performing gender in ways that were and are readily intelligible. Miles et al. (1998) contend that
[c]onsumer goods, and most visibly clothing, play a key role in projecting who
young people are to the outside world. such a projection reflects how young
people as individuals want to be seen, something that might in fact, be quite different from who they actually are (91 emphasis in original).

Methodology
The analysis presented below is based on 60 stories culled from a key word
search (Shafia) of the Canadian Newsstand database, excluding letters to the
editor, film and book reviews, as well as articles which simply mentioned
the case in passing. The stories span the period between July 2009 to 17
March 2012 after the verdict had been announced. The corpus was limited
to stories published in The Globe and Mail. Following van Dijk (1993) I
conducted an informal discourse analysis). The stories were thematized
according to the categories that emerged from the data. In the section that
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THE SHAFIA YOUNG WOMEN AS WORTHY VICTIMS

follows, I describe the emerging representations with reference specifically

to those stories that focused on the victims.

Constructing Worthy Victims

Throughout the span of coverage examined, the young Shafia women were
consistently portrayed as trying to fit into their newly adopted cultural environment, and it was shown how this was believed to have resulted in their
death. They were victims of a culture clash. The Crowns opening and closing
statements in court sealed this definition of the situation. The medias consistent focus on these young women also lent their status a currency
unmatched when compared to similar instances of femicide among racialized victims who are not considered as deserving or worthy (Gilchrist 2010;
Jiwani 2006, 2011; Meyers 2004; Stabile 2006; Stillman 2007; Wilcox
2005).
Accompanying most of the full-length stories were pictures of the young
women, in various poses and, in most of them, in Western dress. Other photos
were included as trial exhibits and then made available to reporters. Photographs, Susan Sontag (2003) argues, lay down routes of reference, and serve
as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph
than around a verbal slogan (85). The photographs of the young Shafia
women direct us to look at their physical appearance in a way akin to how we
would look at models of women in beauty magazines. Their poses are deliberate. Moreover, many of these pictures were taken using their cell phones.
There is, thus, a combination of the contrived pose as well as the instantaneity
of the moment. Further, some of these pictures were clearly intended only for
private consumption as indicated by the content of the photograph (some featuring the young women in lingerie). There is thus an element of intimacy
that comes through them. We see the private lives of these young women,
their aspirations to conform to and embody normative standards of beauty.
That the Shafia girls were beautiful and photogenic undoubtedly contributed
to the currency of their photographs in the media. Their looks, comportment,
and behavior suggested that they were like other teenagers. This, I argue, contributed to their representation as worthy victims.
The Crown prosecutor described the murders as resulting from the
young womens violations of cultural norms, most of all their interest in
dating young men (Appleby 2011: A12). Heterosexuality is one element,
among many, that helped to make these young women worthy victims for
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it naturalized a commonalitymaking them like us. At the same time, the

heteronormative gaze that the coverage privileged also made it possible to
imagine these girls as becoming like us with the assumption that through
their dating behavior they might leave their cultures and join the dominant
society which, given the binary of modern/premodern, offers them freedom,
sexual and otherwise. The Globe and Mails publication of extracts of the
texts that Sahars boyfriend had sent to her, and which he read out aloud in
court, were sure to strike a chord of resonance in the public imagination: I
love you with all my heart and I cant love anyone more beautiful than you
(Appleby 2011: A18).
These published extracts gesture to a doomed romance, playing off the
archetypal template of Romeo and Juliet (although both die at the end of
the play). More than that, they signal the helplessness of a young woman
who has fallen in love with an unsuitable partner only to realize that she
might be killed as a result of this transgression. Indeed, in subsequent court
testimony, witnesses indicated that Sahar was aware of this and that is why
she kept her relationship secret. The very title of this storyFor dating,
teen feared: I will be a dead woman acts as a cognitive organizer (van Dijk
1993), foretelling the tale to come. The subsequent finding of condoms in
the teens bedroom also concretizes the romantic relationship, making it
apparent that there was more to this than a platonic relationship (Appleby
2011: A18; 2012: A6).
In an article titled Defiant act led to womens deaths, Shafia trial told,
Appleby (2012) notes that the other young women had also defied familial
norms and strictures. Sahar had an authorized boyfriend, he noted, and
Geeti, the youngest, was, in the Crown Prosecutors words quite simply,
uncontrollable she didnt follow the rules, cultural or otherwise, and she
made it clear she didnt want to be part of a family that imposed those rules
(A4). The use of the term defiant in the headline speaks to these young
womens rebellion against familial rulesnot uncommon among adolescents
and youth. Yet, here it takes on another charge, colored by the association
with culture, and made evident with the use of the hyphenated term
Afghan-Canadian in the text.
It is apparent that Zainab and her sisters (based on testimony presented
during the trial) had taken proactive steps to remove themselves from an
abusive environment. Referring back to the discussion in the earlier section
of this article about the different valuations of agentic behavior among girls
and young women, here it is clear that such behavior is viewed positively,
and likely contributed to their construction as worthy victims. However,
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this agency was framed as a response to a culture clash/conflict rather than

to the violence they experienced. The violence itself became culturalized.
The theme of culture clash appeared more frequently after the verdict
had been delivered. It was in the context of interrogating the failure of the
system to intervene that such conflict became a focal point of attention, promoting an explanation as to why these young women were not rescued. John
Allemangs (2012) article, which offers a soft critique of the social and police
services, extends the following observations:
In the Shafia case, a conflict between teenagers and parents has taken on new significance with the explosive addition of competing cultural values. According to
the prosecution, the sisters died because they chose to behave in a more modern
Canadian way than their patriarchal family leaders could tolerate (A6).

This quote clearly attributes the murders to competing cultural values thus
reinforcing the Orientalist binary of the modern West versus the traditional
East. The simple attribution fails to account for the multiple migrations that
the family had undergone prior to coming to Canada; they went from
Afghanistan to Dubai, then to Australia and, finally, came to Canada. Nor
does it explain why a traditionalist, pre-modern family would allow their
children to attend Western schools, obtain an education (especially in light
of the Talibans strictures), or even live in the West.
In an account somewhat forgiving of the lack of social intervention,
Lysiane Gagnon (2012), penned the following:
And two of the girls recanted their accusationsagain, typical behaviour from
ambivalent immigrant kids caught in cultural and generational conflicts, torn
between rebellion and submission, anger at and love for their parents (A13).

Whether this is typical behavior or not needs to be established, but here

it is simply taken for granted. Certainly, children who live in an abusive
environment are ambivalent about confessing the abuse for fear of losing
their families. Gagnons association of such behavior with immigrant status,
and the collocation of wordscultural and generationalwith the young
womens recantations of abuse, suggests that not only is it their fault that
social services could not effectively intervene, but that this conflict was ultimately rooted in their culture. The use of immigrant in this extract invokes
a chain of associations about Others and Other cultures. Indeed, the failure
of social services to intervene was explained away in terms of the latters
respect for cultural differences!
In testimony presented by an unnamed relative of Mohamed Shafia, the
court heard and the media relayed the following: He told me Zainab, she
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is a stubborn lady and she doesnt listen to me, the relative quoted Mr.
Shafia as saying. He added:
She keeps going to library and [on the] Internet. ... She doesnt work at home.
She goes outside and she has Canadian, other friends and she has contact with
them and she has contact with a Pakistani guy and she wants to marry him and
these are the reasons I want to kill her. This is against custom and our culture
(Jones 2011: A6).

The mention of custom and culture in this extract effectively secures the
explanation of these murders as honor killings, rooted in custom and culture. Shafias own words are then used to define the crime. But what does
custom and culture mean in an immigrant context? Why the insistence
to cleave to them as a way of disciplining the young women? These questions
are not interrogated in the reportage. Clearly, part of the discursive weight
of this construction is informed by the exotic aura surrounding honor
killings. Seen as an import from foreign lands, the very notion of honor
killings occurring in Canada signaled not only the potential of an invasion
of Islamic practices, but the fear of a deluge of immigrants changing the face
and texture of Canadian society as well. However, the extract above also
demonstrates the nature of Zainabs excursions outside the homegoing to
the library, being on the Internet, having Canadian friends, having
boyfriends and so on, all of which work as signifiers of the normative world
of youth.
Several months after the trial verdict had been announced, The Globe
and Mail carried an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a well-known anti-Islam
proponent. In response to a question about the Shafia case, Hirsi Ali
responded:
The fact a daughter would put on make-up, have a boyfriend, lead a lifestyle that
for Canadians is so normalthat that could get you killed in another culture?
Canadians turned a blind eye to that. These kids got caught between the culture
of their parents and the Canadians thinking this is not going to happen because
they are like us (Dhillon 2012: F3).

It is noteworthy that Hirsi Ali is the interlocutor in this exchange. A woman

who has publicly renounced Islam, is widely known for her scathing critiques
of Islam, and who now works for a conservative American think-tank is
given a platform through which she can continue to articulate views that
are expected of her. An authorized voice is strategically used to articulate the
so-called commonsense perspective that these murders were a result of culture clash, and more critically, that Canadians turned a blind eye. Implicit
in this charge is the critique against multiculturalism that peppered the cov38

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erage, all the while leaking into and reinforcing the dominant national selfconcept of a benevolent though nave Canada. As Eve Haque (2010) points
out in her media analysis of the murder of Aqsa Pervaz, also purportedly a
case of honor killing, a narrative emerges where the integrative promise of
tolerant multiculturalism is jeopardized by the fundamentalist barbaric practices of her cultural community (91).
Perhaps the extract that best summarizes the portrayal of these young
women as exceptionally worthy victims is one articulated from a liberal feminist perspective. Judith Timsons columns regarding the Shafia murders
appeared several times in the corpus of news stories collected for this analysis,
albeit in the later pages of the newspaper. Timsons (2011) account encapsulates how the victims were like us.
Weve come to know such intimate and tender things about these girls and women,
their belly button studs, their purple nail polish, the lushly romantic texts their
forbidden boyfriends sent . So-called honour killings are a crime against nature,
against humanity, against family love and, above all else, against females (L3).

Timsons account underscores the degree of intimacy that was established

through the coverage of the Shafia victims. As noted before, such intimacy
is not the norm in the routine coverage of femicides except perhaps in cases
of serial killers and victims who are high profile and/or whose deaths can be
used in a strategic and ideological manner. In a way, these young women
were recuperated after deathmade to seem normal like other teenagers
and hence, more like us. They were exceptional victims.

Conclusion
I have argued that the murders of the young Shafia women elicited considerable sympathy as evidenced by the coverage they received. The intimacy
that the media coverage established between the victims and the public was
accomplished through a series of discursive maneuvers. These included the
consistent and persistent circulation of their youthful images, most often
taken from their cell-phones, the use of the cultural clash/conflict trope to
make sense of their murders, the invocation of a binary between West and
East which cohered around the polarities of traditional and modern, and
their normalization through references to practices common among Canadian youth. The associations between and among whiteness, modernity, and
gender equality is implicit throughout this coverage. These young women
showed the promise, if not the actuality, of being/becoming like us.
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Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia could not be rescued even though they
had, at different times, alerted a range of authorities. The framing of their
deaths by culture, to quote Zine (2009: 152), marked their status as victims. But what also made them worthy victims was the Othering of Islam
and Muslims, the commonplace and mediated knowledge about the patriarchal culture of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the overall mantle of the
War on Terror resting as it did, on a legitimized rescue attempt to save
Afghan women. They were thus constructed as worthy victims deserving of
widespread public sympathy.
What is most interesting in the construction of the young Shafia women
as worthy victims is its ideological signification. These young women could
not be saved while they were alive, primarily because of the lack of effective
interventions (by the state and its agencies). However, their own agency in
seeking help also contributed to their status as worthy victims in demonstrating their desire and willingness to leave their home. As a result, they
were rescued posthumously. In the theatre of mediated representations, the
saving of these young women was not only predicated on their being more
like us but also, on the flipside, it was a tactic to prop up the national imaginary of Canadian society as being beyond such violence, as a nation that
practices gender equality, offers sexual freedom and is, ultimately, too tolerant of Others. The coverage of the Shafia murders performs the ideological
labour of orchestrating a critique of multiculturalism by highlighting its limits, and thereby enabling and mobilizing anti-immigrant sentiments. Clearly,
further analysis is needed as to how subordinate discourses and contesting
frames challenged this dominant perspective.
a

Yasmin Jiwani is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies

at Concordia University, Montreal. Her research interests include mediations of race, gender and violence in the context of war stories, reporting
of sexual violence and femicides in the press, as well as representations of
women of color in popular mainstream media.
b

Acknowledgements
This research was supported by an SSHRC standard research grant, as well
as a CIHR grant. I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for
their helpful comments, and Mariam Esseghaier for her research assistance.
40

THE SHAFIA YOUNG WOMEN AS WORTHY VICTIMS

Notes
1. While there has been much criticism of the crisis construction of girlhood, it overlooks
girls specific vulnerabilities to gendered violence (Girls Action Foundation 2013).
2. Fanons title, Black Skin, White Mask (1967), connotes how the white mask becomes a
strategy of survival but also that whiteness can exist only if blackness acts as its foil.
3. There is now a vast literature that traces Muslim womens representations in the media
including their sexualization and use as suicide bombers. However, space constraints
prohibit the referencing of these works here.
4. According to Statistics Canada, an average of 58 women per year are murdered as a
result of intimate partner violence.

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