Between Care and Criminality examines social welfare’s encounter with migration and marriage in a period of intensified border control in Melbourne, Australia. It offers an in-depth ethnographic account of the effort to prevent forced marriage in the aftermath of a 2013 law that criminalized the practice. Disproportionately targeted toward Muslim migrant communities, prevention efforts were tasked with making the family relations and marital practices of migrants objects of policy knowledge in the name of care and community empowerment. Through tracing the everyday ways that direct service providers, police, and advocates learned to identify imminent marriages and at-risk individuals, this book reveals how the domain of social welfare becomes the new frontier where the settler colonial state judges good citizenship. In doing so, it invites social welfare to reflect on how migrant conceptions of familial care, personhood, and mutual obligation become structured by the violence of displacement, borders, and conditional citizenship.

HELENA ZEWERI is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia–Vancouver and affiliate faculty with the UBC Centre for Migration Studies. 

"Between Care and Community, a well-documented, well researched analysis of forced marriage prevention policy, both informs and unsettles. Helena Zeweri makes a real contribution to studies on the anthropology of marriage and biopolitics of intimacy, and poses important questions concerning first generation migrant women and notions of family, culture, and the domestic."— Frances Julia Riemer, author of Working at the Margins: Moving Off Welfare in America

"This exquisitely nuanced ethnography takes anti-carceral feminism to new heights! In tracing how 'coercive violence' amongst migrant families in Australia comes to be defined and policed, Zeweri demonstrates how Muslim women are still being used to justify anti-immigrant policies, whether they are framed as victim or threat. Most importantly, she shows that intimate forms of violence cannot be understood outside the violence of war, displacement and detention." 
 — Miriam Ticktin, author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France

"Between Care and Criminality offers unique insights into how social policies are lived on the ground by frontline workers, community leaders, and the young people who they target. The book resists the static portrayals of forced marriage in providing empirical examples of families who negotiate tensions surrounding marriage decisions within the context of family dynamics."— Reva Jaffe-Walter, author of Coercive Concern: Nationalism, Liberalism, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth