Identifying and Representing the Voices of Minority Women in Policies – An Intersectional Study

Abstract

Every year, 2.4 million people fall victim to Domestic Violence and Abuse (DVA) in England and Wales. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s Report (2021) characterises the victims of domestic violence with insecure immigration status as occupying the most precarious positions in the society. The overlapping constraints created by the intersection of structural inequalities like gender, race, culture, class and state policies, the difficulties faced by women in negotiating cultural-religious identity in the context of their belongingness within immigrant communities, and the varying service responses to women from different cultural backgrounds, makes them disproportionately disadvantageous and vulnerable to abuse.

With a policy of No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF), the UK denies those with insecure immigration status access to public funds preventing them from accessing a range of support measures, including access to facilities such as refuges financed through public funds, creating an additional layer of economic dependency on the abusive partner, and is a case of ‘immigration abuse’. At the dissolution of a relationship due to DVA, only those women on spousal-visa are entitled to apply for a concession to lift the NRPF and to apply for an Indefinite Leave to Remain.

This research looks critically at the distinction made among DV victims based solely on immigration status and evaluates the policy of NRPF from an intersectional perspective of gender, race and immigration status in creating vulnerability. The aim of the project is to bring in the voices of DVA victims from minoritised communities into policy analysis looking deeper into their lived experiences to reveal how their vulnerability is visualized and represented in policy documents. Understanding the differential impacts of policies on different categories of people and representing their voices is vital to produce socially just outcomes.

Bio

Arya Suresh (she/her) is the recipient of a fully-funded 2022 NTU PhD studentship and is a Doctoral Scholar at the School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University. She is an affiliated Research Fellow at the International Institute of Migration and Development (India). Her research focuses on Intersectionality in the study of immigration policies and gender-based violence in the UK. She has previously been part of the European Commission’s EURA-NET research on Temporary Trans-nationalism and has published papers on Climate Change, Migrant issues in the Middle East and the wage dynamics for unskilled labour in the context of international migration.