Polygamy Is a Riot
By Stephen Brown



While many social critics were quick to cite racism, unemployment and insufficient social programs as causes for the recent riots in France, one possible stimulus was glaringly absent from their list of complaints, namely, polygamy.

Last month, Gerard Larcher, France’s Minister of Employment, caused an uproar when he stated that polygamous families (consisting of men with two or more wives) were one of the causes of the violence that swept his country for three weeks this fall. Bernard Accoyer, the head of the conservative coalition party UMP in France’s National Assembly, supported Larcher, calling polygamy a negation of individual and women’s rights, which prevented the imparting of “the proper education necessary in an organized society.”

Naturally, the politically correct, multicultural crowd in France immediately condemned Larcher for having the temerity to shine a light on a social blight that exists among North and West African families, especially from Mali and Senegal, in the urban housing projects, called banlieues, where the rioting took place. The National Assembly’s socialist leader, Jean-Marc Ayrault, predictably, said it wasn’t necessary to look for sinister causes for the riots, since it was simply a matter of France’s social elevator not working any more, calling any connection between the violence and polygamy “an absurdity.”



Even French president Jacques Chirac jumped into the fray, also saying recently at the France-Africa summit in Mali that polygamy had no connection to the riots in France.



However, if Ayrault and Chirac were acquainted with life in the banlieues (the riots proving they weren’t), they probably wouldn’t have dismissed their political colleagues’ views so abruptly.



Social workers involved with polygamous families there say they sometimes consist of twenty members, or more, crammed in a two-room apartment, which leave the living and developmental conditions of the children only to the imagination. One family of 24, for example, was reported living in a single apartment where the children have to take turns sleeping. The small ones sleep with their mothers and the bigger ones sleep in the living room in an “unhealthy confusion”, one social worker told a newspaper. The report goes on to say that the father is one of three brothers residing in this particular banlieue, who, together with their wives and children, form a family of 65 members.



In Les Mureaux, a city near Paris, eighty polygamous families from Mali live with their 1,000 children in conditions just as crowded. In fact, children are told to stay outside for lack of room in the apartments. So it isn’t unusual to see children as young as eight on the streets late at night, sometimes in large groups, misbehaving. Also not surprising, authorities report a higher delinquency rate among minors from polygamous families.



But while living conditions may be bad for the children, it is the affect on them of internal family relations that seem to worry social workers the most. The mothers, they say, are often the victims of forced marriages. They live under difficult circumstances in cramped apartments where jealousy is often “the reigning emotion”, according to one social observer. Each wife tries to convince the other(s) that she is the favourite spouse and even goes as far as to tell her rivals about imaginary presents she has received from their common husband. As a result, conflicts, petty hatreds and rivalries arise with the children taking the side of their mother against the other mother(s) and her children. This, in turn, has led to violence and mistreatment of one mother’s children by another mother. The violence the child has learned in the home is then sometimes used outside of it.



Moreover, an academic observer said such children are “completely incapable” of drawing their family. They know their immediate brothers, she said, but the others in the family are strangers, perhaps even rivals. The number of people in an apartment and the familial confusion is such that when the police phoned one father of a large polygamous family about his son who was in an accident, the parent wasn’t sure which child the police were talking about.



People in polygamous situations in France number between 150,000 and 300,000 and cost the French taxpayer about 300 million Euros a year in welfare payments and health costs. But the number may also be higher, since French authorities admit they have difficulty in identifying polygamous families.



And although polygamy was outlawed in France for foreigners in 1993, it is tolerated, since authorities are reluctant to deport mothers whose children were born in France. Husbands and extra wives, however, even those who arrived before 1993, are now supposed to separate if they want their residency permits renewed. But housing shortages and the wives’ reluctance to divorce have thwarted this measure. As a result, French authorities close their eyes and take the path of least resistance when issuing the permits.



But even if polygamy had nothing to do with the recent violence in France, this strange, foreign social custom is still serving to tear an even larger hole in France’s already tattered social fabric, diluting her culture even further. This, of course, only delights many of those anti-Western civilization lib-leftists in France who defend polygamy’s allegedly benign nature and may constitute the reason for its presence in France in the first place.