Description
Drawing on the concept of ‘situated citizenship’ (Behl 2019), this paper analyses life-history interviews of Asian women who have experienced or witnessed domestic abuse within kin and community networks in East England. It focuses specifically on the experiences of British women from the Mirpuri Pakistani diaspora in Peterborough, to demonstrate how women’s experiences with service providers in a region with minimal presence of ‘led by and for’ services, produces a form of precarious gendered and racialized citizenship that
sharpens the conducive context (Kelly, 2016). Women’s participation in transnational marriages with men from Pakistan, under varying degrees of ‘choice’ and coercion, is coded as a community-rebuilding exercise in a context where scattered diaspora emerges against socio-economic precarity and political conflict. When abuse occurs, women are pressured to stay, with gossip among kin and community taking on a vitriolic force to ensure conformity and silence. On seeking support from statutory service providers, women encounter
racialized stereotypes and the threat of migration-related abuse which highlight the liminality of their citizenship status. Voluntary services emphasize ‘exit’ as a solution, demanding a form of ‘forced migration’ (Bowstead,2015) to refuges, disregarding social consequences for victims-survivors and their children. The persistence of gendered and racialized forms of discrimination, despite the possession of ‘passport privilege’,
urgently calls for intersectional, decolonial and culturally responsive modes of service provision by state and voluntary services, and hints at a potential solidarity between migrant and citizen victims-survivors of domestic and sexual abuse in England and Wales.
The data presented in this paper is part of an ongoing investigation into the domestic abuse vulnerabilities of Black and racialized women in East England, funded by Anglia Ruskin University, a Home-Office funded service at Peterborough Women’s Aid, and the Medical Research Council’s UKPRP VISION research consortium.
