Making Girl Victims Visible: A Survey of Representations That Have Circulated in the West

Abstract

In a 2017 volume of essays titled The Big Push, the feminist political scientist Cynthia Enloe reminds readers of the importance of language in shaping thought and, therefore, in shaping governmental and non-governmental policy-making in the field of human rights. She draws her example from recent controversies over the plight of refugees from the conflict in Syria—controversies, as she points out, that have also involved the subject of so-called “child marriage” in refugee communities. That very way of naming the problem affects both attitudes toward it and the kinds of initiatives being proposed, for by “adopting the phrase ‘child marriages,’ one is suggesting that boys are just as likely as girls to be married while still in their childhood, and this is not true”1; instead, as she makes clear, “in reality, these are not ‘child marriages.’ They are girl marriages.”2 Why does this matter? As Enloe asserts, “[e]ach of us helps to sustain patriarchal ideas and practices when we hide the workings of gendered inequities behind a curtain of ungendered language,” and this has significant consequences in terms of action or inaction, as well as in terms of who will ultimately benefit or lose out.3 Almost from the first moment when, in the early 1990s, reports began appearing in the West about the organized system of war crimes that were committed against Asian women during the Second World War by the Japanese Imperial Army, this subject has been inextricably bound up with the issue of language, and of what language makes visible or invisible. On 28 November 2014, the online Bloomberg News reported that the Yomiuri Shimbun—one of the major national daily newspapers published in Japan—had just issued an apology to its readers for using “the term ‘sex slaves’ in stories about Asian women trafficked to Japanese military brothels before and during World War II.”4 That same U.S.