Description
There has been a rapid rise in migration from Asia to Europe and North America in the past decade. While these migrant groups have been the subject of policies, political debates, and scholarly research, not much has been written about the transnational bonds that remain between migrants and their families back home and their role in sustaining interpersonal forms of violence. This paper will look at how transnational bonds between migrants and their anchor families continue to have a gendered impact on migrants. In particular,
through cases of women migrants, I will show how interpersonal forms of violence not only continue but are often exacerbated by the transnational networks of kinship control exercised by those who remain in their home countries. Key forms of such violence include control over reproductive decisions, financial decision making, emotional abuse, and relegated physical abuse.
Through semi-structured interviews conducted with migrant people from South Asian communities living in Ireland from an intersectional postcolonial feminist theoretical approach, the author will analyze the various ways in which coercive control is exercised transnationally on these migrant women. Focusing on this particular aspect of interpersonal violence will also unpack the intersection of cultural, legal and social ramifications of differential understandings of what constitutes violence. The paper will also show how
cultural and religious markers are often employed to exercise coercive control on women, and now the lack of transnational laws and contradictory national laws deem any relief impossible. The paper ends with a discussion on the forms of challenges such transnational forms of interpersonal violence brings up for domestic violence agencies working within national frameworks.
