Should Church and State Be Joined at the Altar? Women's Rights and the Multicultural Dilemma

The first section of this chapter (Women and family law) demonstrates why women living in minority groups are more vulnerable than men to maltreatment in the family‐law context. In the second section, two extant approaches to family‐law accommodation (the ‘secular absolutist’ model, and the ‘religious particularist’ model) are discussed that exemplify the family‐law arrangements adopted in numerous legal democracies. In the last section, a new alternative multicultural approach is developed to family‐law accommodation. This is called the ‘joint‐governance’ model, and while it respects the crucial identity‐preserving function of family law, it also seeks to provide women living in close‐knit religious or cultural groups with the legal protection guaranteed to them as state citizenship.