Introduction

This chapter analyses how issues pertaining to the Turkish minority in the Netherlands have been framed in parliamentary discussions and in newspapers (see also Schrover 2011). It focuses, in particular, on three issues that dominated debates between the 1960s and the 2000s. The issues are described here separately, but they are very much related. They occurred more or less in parallel and influenced one another. The first was the multicultural policy in the Netherlands, which included provisions for granting subsidies to Turkish organisations. Dutch multicultural policy thus stimulated and subsidised differences. In the 1980s, ideas about multiculturalism changed, and organisations lost most of their subsidies. One exception was a Turkish women's organisation. However, that organisation's exceptional position led to a coup which heralded its end. Second was the large-scale publicity campaigns conducted to prevent the deportation of Turkish women with a dependent residence status after they had been left or divorced by their husbands. There was a strong emphasis in the campaigns on the risks these women faced, within the Netherlands and after their return to Turkey. Third was the so-called ‘honour killings’. Before the 1970s, Turkish men and women, like Dutch men and women and others, were occasionally involved in crimes of passion and related violence. Until the 1970s, however, these were never framed as honour killings. In the 1970s, newspapers systematically specified whether a perpetrator or a victim was Turkish and ran headlines like, ‘Turk kills man’, ‘Turk shoots man’, or ‘Jealous Turk kills girlfriend’. In the mid-1970s, the term ‘honour killing’ entered debates after experts had used this notion to explain and predict violence among Turks in the Netherlands. The leading question of this chapter is how and why the problematisation of these three issues occurred.

Materials and methods

Problematisation is the process in which actors (academics, politicians and journalists) analyse a situation, define it as a problem, expand it by attaching issues to it, finally suggesting a solution (Foucault 1984: 388-389). Problematisation always serves a purpose. In earlier research I showed how problematisation, via an emphasis on the vulnerability of migrant women, enabled rules to be bent without changing them (Schrover 2009a, 2010a, 2011).