Description
This research argues that the hostile environment in the UK utilizes domestic violence as a deterrent measure, thus weaponizing this endemic form of interpersonal violence against migrant women. I argue that the state’s own processes of accountability and responsibility for domestic violence fatalities, and the active exclusion of migrant women from state-provided services that are key in intervening in cases of domestic violence, are sufficient for domestic violence against migrant women to be constituted as a complex form of state violence. I consider what an ontological security approach can offer to our understanding of the multiplicity of encounters and experiences that migrant women have with a state apparatus that is designed to offer both security and accountability to address the particularly gendered insecurity of domestic violence. I find that the active exclusion of migrant women from these mechanisms embeds both an emotive/ affective and a very real, lived, empirical insecurity in the lives of migrant women. While ontological security studies offer a conceptual pathway to understand security in a way that incorporates the experiential, in order to understand this unique form of insecurity and how it is made and exploited by the state in practice it is necessary to situate these local and micro experiences of insecurity in systemic forms of intersectional discrimination embedded in national security narratives.
