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Why dont you go home?

Investigating the British states responses to family violence against women of Middle Eastern origin
J OANNE P AYTON C ARDIFF U NIVERSITY

This dissertation is submitted to Cardiff University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF SCIENCE September 2011

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0834897 Ms Payton Joanne Lee

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ABSTRACT
Violence against women occurs in all communities, but there are high levels of variance between them. The experiences of minoritised survivors of violence are under-researched, particularly those who are members of less prominent minorities. Minoritised women may face additional barriers in accessing state help, through linguistic and cultural barriers, and may experience differential treatment in terms of stereotyping and lack of awareness of their cultural milieu. This research held three focus groups, one where the participants were caseworkers assisting survivors of violence with origins in the Middle East, and two in which the participants were survivors of violence themselves. These latter focus groups were conducted in Farsi and Kurdish with the assistance of interpreter/co-moderators. Findings suggest that Middle Eastern survivors of domestic violence have numerous difficulties in achieving assistance in dealing with their experiences, including isolation, lack of awareness of their rights, family pressures, financial exclusion and language problems. Services were often found to be unsympathetic and to lack knowledge of the particularities of the needs and situations of minoritised women.

Acknowledgements:
Kharman Adhim Muzafar Ali Debbie Epstein Naila Hadid Diana Nammi Maryam Nourbahksh Fionnuala Murphy Daniel Payton Laura-Jane Ratcliffe Nasrin Sami Elizabeth Stokes Rachael Sweeting Deepika Thathaal Eloise Woods Marianne Woods and all the women who generously and bravely shared their experiences

I could not have done this without your support, trust, patience and inspiration. Thank you.

CONTENTS
Glossary and Abbreviations ..................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Introduction ........................................................................................ 3 Family violence in Britain ................................................................................................. 5 Defining abuse ....................................................................................................................... 7 Intimate partner violence (IPV) .....................................................................................11 Honour-based violence (HBV).......................................................................................13 Forced marriage ...................................................................................................................15 Chapter Two: Policy, ethnicity and violence ................................................... 19 Its their culture ................................................................................................................20 From multiculturalism to multi-faithism ................................................................24 Safe borders, no havens ...................................................................................................29 Chapter Three: Methodology ................................................................................ 32 Epistemological dilemmas ..............................................................................................35 Researching the social ......................................................................................................39 Interpretations and moderations ................................................................................43 Chapter Four: Analysis ............................................................................................ 48 Police .......................................................................................................................................51 GPs and the NHS .................................................................................................................56 Interpreters ..........................................................................................................................59 Housing ..................................................................................................................................61 Social Services .....................................................................................................................64 Chapter Five: Conclusion ........................................................................................ 66 Appendix ...................................................................................................................... 70 References ................................................................................................................... 72

Why dont you go home?: British state responses to Middle Eastern DV survivors

GLOSSARY AND ABBREVIATIONS


ACPO Association of Chief Police Officers: a professional organisation that which intends to develop best practice policing within the United Kingdom. BACP British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy BAMER Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and Refugee: an acronym to indicate the range of minority identities. For the purposes of this document, it should be understood that this term is also intended to include asylum seekers, who have a different legal status from refugees, but share their backgrounds and experiences. ESOL English for Speakers of Other Languages FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office FMPO Forced Marriage Protection Order FMU Forced Marriage Unit FGM FGM refers to female genital mutilation, which while being most prevalent in Africa is also practiced within certain Middle Eastern countries and communities, including Kurds living in Iraq, where in certain regions prevalence is over 80% (WADI 2010 : 3). FGM amongst these groups tends to be Type I or Type II, involving the removal of the clitoris, or the clitoris and labia. FGM is considered a harmful traditional practice due to the health and psychological damage that can be caused.

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Fitna The word fitna comes from an Arabic verb which means to "seduce, tempt, or lure." Within the Quran, this often connotes unrest; however it is also commonly used to refer to women. Hadith (pl. ahadith) Sayings or actions attributed to Muhammad as the prophet and founder of Islam. IKWRO Iranian and Kurdish Womens Rights Organisation: London-based NGO that provided access to respondents in this research. ILR Indefinite Leave to Remain: an immigration status granted to a person who does not hold right of abode in the United Kingdom (UK), but who has been admitted to the UK without any time limit on his or her stay and who is free to take up employment or study, without restriction IRI The Islamic Republic of Iran Imam Islamic prayer-leader KRI The Kurdistan Region of Iraq: A semi-autonomous region, with its own government (the Kurdistan Regional Government) in Northern Iraq, with a largely Kurdish population. NRPF No Recourse to Public Funding: This applies to people from abroad who are subject to immigration control and have no entitlements to public housing, welfare benefits, or Home Office support for asylum seekers. Quran The sacred writings of Islam believed to have been revealed by God to the prophet Muhammad during his life at Mecca and Medina Surah A division within the text of the Quran, similar to a verse or chapter.

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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION


On New Years Eve 2004, a distraught young woman, barefoot and bleeding, was picked up by the police in Wandsworth, claiming to have escaped an attempted murder by her father. The attending officer dismissed the young woman as hysterical and attention-seeking, finding her claims - that her father was part of a conspiracy of family members determined to take her life - unbelievable. Before the end of January, the young woman had been garrotted, her body stuffed into a suitcase and buried in waste ground. Five men, including her father, her uncle and her cousin, are currently serving life sentences for her murder. The victim was Banaz Mahmod, a young woman who had been born in Pshdar, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), but who had lived in Britain since childhood. She had contacted the police in search of help five times prior to her death (Payton 2010 : 71). Failures to implement training within the Metropolitan Police were held partly responsible for their failure to implement appropriate protection measures (Dustin and Phillips 2008 : 414). Banaz Mahmod is perhaps the highest profile victim of honour-based family violence within the Middle Eastern diaspora in the United Kingdom; however the pattern of inadequate or inappropriate interventions by state authorities is borne out in other notable cases. Heshu Younes and Tulay Goren, Kurdish girls with origins in Iraq and Turkey respectively, both had encounters with state professionals - in Heshus case, with a teacher, who inadvertently informed her father that she was involved in a relationship (according to the investigating officer, DCI Brent Hyatt), and in Tulays, multiple encounters with police (Bingham 2009) before both were murdered by their fathers. In each of the cases above, appropriate interventions by the state agencies involved could have saved the lives of these young women.

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This dissertation examines the experiences of Middle Eastern women who have come into contact with state services as a result of victimisation within the family. Typologies of abuse are defined and discussed. Policy is discussed at a conceptual level, addressing debates around ethnoreligious identity, which I argue have tended to homogenise minoritised1 communities and which have sustained internal patriarchal hierarchies through creating a dynamic of privacy around abuse within minoritised communities. In methodological terms, I discuss the utility of the focus group method for generating data with vulnerable groups and the difficulties of dealing with translation and interpretation within the research context. Within the analysis, several substantive themes from the findings are addressed and contextualised within the literature, relating them to state policy and practice.

I am using the term minoritised as opposed to the more conventional minority in imitation of Burman, Smailes et el. (2005) who suggest that the term minority tends to imply that there is some inherent property attached to minoritised individuals, rather than acknowledging their status as the result of historical and social processes.
1

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FAMILY VIOLENCE IN BRITAIN


Outside wartime, the home is the most dangerous environment for women (Okin 2000 : 30). Domestic violence is an almost universal phenomenon, although levels of violence differ from society to society and across history (Kaya and Cook 2010). The illegality of spousal violence was not clearly stated in British law until 1853 (Clark 2000 : 30). In the early nineteenth century, a woman leaving an abusive husband was also forced to abandon her property; and between 1839 and 1878, husbands retained custody of children above the age of seven (Euler 2000 : 200). Rape was long considered a husbands right; this was codified into law in 1736, and not considered as an offence until 1980 (Mama 1996: 137). As S Laurel Weldon (2002) argues, the most significant factor in determining a states response to domestic violence is the existence of a committed and independent womens movement. The current system of protection for victims of family violence is in many respects the product of both first and second wave feminism. From the 1840s, women such as Caroline Norton and Catherine Napier criticised the acceptance of violence by husbands against wives; by the 1870s, suffragists and other reformers campaigned for the enactment of laws against marital violence, which was achieved in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Clark 2000 : 35-36). The second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s refocused attention upon violence in the home, and instigated widespread social and policy changes, including the institution of a national network of refuges, increased use of pro-arrest policies, with the most significant changes being established in the Home Office Circular 60 of 1990 (Hoyle 2000). While domestic violence units remain overstretched and officers overtaxed (Plotnikoff and Woolfson 1998), domestic violence is entrenched as a serious issue of research and policy. Minoritised victims of family violence have attracted less academic interest in the UK than persons from the majority population (Wellock 2010 : 182), and Malley-Morrison and Hines (2007) identify an urgent need to carry out more research in this area. There are specific cultural and political barriers which limit minoritised womens abilities to seek external help (Burman et al. 2004;
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Burman and Chantler 2005; Kulwicki et al. 2010). Problems such as ethnoreligious stereotyping, institutional racism, language barriers, and fears around confidentiality and immigration status affect womens abilities to exit dangerous situations. These are supplemented by cultural fears about honour, respectability, family reputation and tradition: fears which may appear incomprehensible outside the milieu (Mama 1996: 112-113). Swedish studies suggest that foreign born women originating in economically disadvantaged countries have an increased risk of victimisation, which can be connected largely to poor socioeconomic status (Fernbrant et al. 2011); this is also indicated in US studies (Raj and Silverman 2003; Abu-Ras 2007). In 2009, the Annual Population Survey estimated that there are 65,000 people who were born in Iraq, 58,000 people born in Iran, and 56,000 people born in Afghanistan currently living in Britain (Office for National Statistics 2009). An estimated 100,000 Kurds are resident in the UK (Kurdish Human Rights Project 2006); however, as Kurdish populations are distributed across the nation states of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Armenia, recording the country of origin obscures Kurdish identity, imposing alternate identities which efface an individuals preferred self-identification (Holgate et al. 2009 : 3). Due to the umbrella categories used in demographic recordings, such identities are obscured in large-scale surveys (Garland et al. 2006), and the only current research into violence against women within this group (Begikhani et al. 2010) focuses upon the phenomenon of honour crimes, rather than less sensational, but far more common, experiences of domestic violence.

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DEFINING ABUSE
Terms such as wife-battering and intimate partner violence are often deployed to discuss male violence against women with whom they have a familial or sexual relationship; where parents are violent against children this is considered child abuse. Such connotations assume relationships between the actors based in the majority culture of the West, where the violence of parents against adult children, mother-in-law abuse of young brides (Fernandez 1997; Raj et al. 2006) and young men coercively policing the behaviour of their sisters and female cousins, are less usual. Certain forms of violence against women - forced marriage and honour based violence - are prevalent within Middle Eastern cultures. While it is important not to essentialise these as cultural (Dustin and Phillips 2008 : 408), it is still necessary to define and acknowledge their particularities in order to provide effective and appropriate responses to victimisation. Failing to train police officers, for instance, not only disallows them vital knowledge they need in order to provide appropriate services to women at risk, as the example of Banaz Mahmod makes all too plain, but also allows the proliferation of unthinking cultural stereotypes (Dustin and Phillips 2008 : 414). Looking for disparities in culture between communities not only fails to explain the experiences of gender violence, but also leads to misrecognition: women may display no cultural markers of difference and still be at risk of forms of violence which require specific and specialist forms of protection and support. Forced marriages are common to many groups within the UK, despite being primarily associated with South Asian and/or Muslim communities, including some communities which would be considered white, such as Eastern Europeans and certain Christian sects (Chantler et al. 2009 : 599). It is therefore important not to ascribe forms of violence an ahistorical phantasm of culture, whether or not they are uncommon within the majority population. Culture decontextualized in this manner has no explanatory power whatsoever, forming little more than an extension of alterity from practices to groups. Thus practitioners in the domestic violence sphere need to negotiate a double strategy: being aware of the particularities

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of manifestations of violence which may occur within certain groups, without essentialising these to the individuals or the group as a whole. Kandiyoti classifies the Middle Eastern family structure as being rooted in classical patriarchy. She describes this as arising within particular material conditions: The dominance of younger men by older men and the shelter of women in the domestic sphere were the hallmarks of a system in which men controlled some form of viable joint patrimony in land, animals, and commercial property. (1988 : 282) Male-dominant structures are reproduced within the patrilocal extended family, where: Girls are given away in marriage at a very young age into households headed by their husbands father. There, they are subordinate not only to all the men but also to the more senior females, especially their mother-in-law. (1988 : 278) The bedrock for this particular iteration of patriarchy, rooted in the conditions of agrarian life, has become eroded since the mid-20th century (Dodd 1973), through the processes of modernisation: urbanisation, industrialisation, technologisation and the globalisation of the capitalist mode, all of which have produced seismic change to the material bases of family life leading to disruptions in the mode of reproduction of patriarchal power. Economic immiseration also means that the male breadwinner is less able to hold up his end of the patriarchal bargain, leading to challenges to the established family structure (Ahmed and Bould 2004). Male/elder power, no longer rooted in material conditions, is increasingly staked in symbolic turf through nostalgic appeals to cultural and religious authenticity. Women thus become emblems of cultural integrity, so that defending beleaguered cultures becomes equated with preserving traditional forms of femininity, (Jaggar 2000 : 1) and vice versa, in an attempt to allay what amounts to a crisis in tradition. (Benhabib 1995 : 239) Activists for women state that the most prevalent strategies of religious fundamentalists in every global region are the deployment of discourses of family disintegration and gender essentialism (Balchin 2010 : 25 (Table 1)).
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Islamist discourse on the subject of women has three key themes, according to Shehadeh (2003): domesticity as the primary role of womens lives; intransigent gender essentialism; and a frisson of danger associated with womens sexuality, conceptualised as a potential source of social chaos (fitna) which, like the congruent concept of honour, justifies the control and seclusion of women. The experience of translocation by Middle Eastern migrants to Europe concretises these stresses of social change: while the West and the Modern are by no means to be treated as identical, the abrupt change in modus vivendi is precipitous and vividly jeopardous to established gendered power relations and identities, creating insecurities around traditional gender hierarchies. Yakin Ertrk, UN Rapporteur on Violence Against Women (2009 : 66) identifies dislocation, dispossession and migration as transgressions of the alien/central normative system and considers these to be experiences which impel communities and individuals seek to exert and maintain control over women. This backlash aspect to the control of women is suggested through findings from India, through the Kerala Paradox: women who conformed to traditional forms of femininity were less likely to experience violence within the family than those who would be considered more empowered through education and employment (Mitra and Singh 2007; Rocca et al. 2009). Within the context of backlash against womens empowerment in an era of rapid social change, the discourse of Westernisation versus cultural integrity cannot be considered innocuous. To those persons who stand to lose status in a world full of dislocations and profound insecurities (Narayan 1997), conservatism and fundamentalism, identification with imagined communities, reinvented traditions and myths of unchanging continuities become a deeply seductive means of justifying established power structures. In addition to the cultural dislocation and trauma of migration, asylum seeking and refugee persons also suffer from a high preponderance of mental health problems, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and

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psychosis (McColl and Johnson 2006), which can be related to the events leading to the decision to flee their country of origin, which may include war, threats, imprisonment, torture and the continuing insecurity of family members in the country of origin. Asylum seekers who have been confined within detention centres have an increased prevalence of mental illness (Robjant et al. 2009). Males with experiences of pre-migration violence have been found to have lower tolerance for stress, anxiety, depression and to have a lack of trust (Guruge et al. 2010 : 109). These mental health issues may lead to a heightened likelihood of abusive behaviour (Kessler et al. 2001). Middle Eastern families can be considered collectivist (Haj-Yahia and Sadan 2008) or high-context (Gilligan and Akhtar 2006 : 1363) whereby the individuals desires are expected to be subordinated to the collective will of the family, where the individual is crushed by the force of the collective ego (Boucebi 1982 : 36); Amartya Sen suggests that familial identity is so overwhelming in certain societies that women have little ability to conceptualise their own personal welfare as separate from the interests of the family collective (cited in Okin 2000, p. : 38). Within abusive contexts as described by Hassouneh-Phillips (2001 : 943), this can manifest as a pathological negation of self on the part of victims of abuse. While it is not the case that the majority of Middle Eastern families believe that violence against women is acceptable, there is less expressed support for the strategy of ending violence through ending the relationship within Middle Eastern families (Haj-Yahia 2000 : 240) and a preference for strategies intended to limit abuse without ending the relationship (Haj-Yahia 2002). Families may therefore provide limited support to female relatives suffering from spousal violence, but women are often expected to tolerate long-term abuse in the interests of maintaining the integrity of the family. This is particularly the case where marriages are endogamously arranged, where there is a collective interest in preserving the familial relationships formed by the match. According to IKWROs 2010 user statistics, 22% of their casework clientele needed help with active issues of intimate partner violence (IPV), 10% with
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honour-based violence, and 4% with forced marriage. As these distinctions between forms of violence are in wide use I delineate the differences below:

INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE (IPV)


Intimate partner abuse is that which occurs within the context of an intimate relationship, and can have physical, emotional, and psychological aspects. It is the most common form of violence against women across the world, and a national health problem, causing homicides, injuries, mental health problems, and lost days at work and in education for victims. Domestic violence and Islam Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in their sleeping places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great. [Shakir translation] The above surah, 4:34, is possibly the most scrutinised section within the Quran, central to many discussions of the phenomenon of IPV as it occurs in Muslim-identified families: it is often invoked to justify discriminatory laws in Middle Eastern countries (Hajjar 2004). However, it has been variously interpreted, with many divergent readings, from those which straightforwardly accept that the Quran does indeed grant license to discipline a wife violently, to those that deploy sophisticated hermeneutics to create a reinterpretation. It can be argued the verb used (idribuhunna) does not, in its proper historical and linguistic context, signify an act of violence (Ammar 2007). Lelah Bakhtiar, for instance, uses this strategy in her radical translation of the Quran. It is also commonly argued that the verse attempts at a reduction of violence against women, which is held to be have been endemic amongst pre-Islamic Bedouin Arabs, by restricting it to a last resort, thereby instituting a positive trajectory ultimately aimed towards eliminating marital violence altogether. Many will point out counterexamples of surah and ahadith which recommend kindness and reciprocity within marital relationships.

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While the debates around 4:34 are doubtless salient (notably, even the most generous interpretations tend to posit a wifes behaviour as subject to control by the husband, as long as this is not violently expressed) the scholarly attention this surah has received may have exaggerated its significance within Muslim environments. A combination of Orientalism, identity politics and totalising Islamist discourse has elevated Muslimness to a master category (Ahmad and Evergeti 2010), wherein every aspect of a Muslims life is ascribed to their faith (Said 1978 : 338). Discussions of all aspects of Muslim experience have taken a form described as theologocentrique by Maxine Rodinson (in Abukhalil 1997 : 92) whereby a person identified as a Muslim becomes a member of the putative species homo islamicus, entirely orthodox and orthopraxic. Tibi observes that this Orientalist conception finds a close correspondence in the Islamist vision of the good Muslim (Tibi 2001 : 26). Hence, if domestic violence occurs in Muslim contexts, the reason is assumed to be found between the covers of the Quran, or other Islamic sources, rather than within many other sociocultural or material factors which are routinely applied to explanations of domestic violence within other identity groups. This does not merely culturalise abuse as a Muslim trait: it also evades responsibility for the poor material conditions in which many minoritised people live, which may themselves be correlated with abuse. It also circumvents the discussion of abuse in non-Muslim minoritised households which may be otherwise similar. Abu-Ras found nugatory differences between the experiences of abuse of American Arabs who identified themselves as Christian in comparison with those who identified themselves as Muslim (Abu-Ras 2007). Martin Luther, who instigated the Protestant Reformation, supported male headship within families, in which male authority could be asserted through violence. Of his wife, Katherine von Bora, Luther said, When Katie gets saucy she gets nothing but a box on the ear. (in Cooper-White 1995: 51) Pellauer, a Lutheran scholar, presents an analysis of his statement with an identical mitigatory intent to those of progressive Muslims discussed above: she
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makes the proposition that this may have represented a restricted form of violence within a society where wife-beating was commonplace (1998 : 12). Misogynist views have been expressed by numerous Church Fathers, including John Knox, John Calvin, St John Chrysotom, St Anselm, St Augustine, and St Thomas Aquinas (Cooper-White 1995 : 50-51); however, few people relate the high levels of domestic violence in the UK generally - with 23% of all British women being victimised at some point in their lives (Mirlees-Black 1999) - with Britains Christian Protestant heritage, reserving this religious reification for Islam.

HONOUR-BASED VIOLENCE (HBV)


Honour killings punish women who make autonomous decisions about issues such as marriage, divorce, and whether and with whom to have sex. (Susskind 2007 : 15) Honour-based violence has three distinctive features: crimes are collective, committed within the family, the extended family and the community; crimes are often premeditated and the result of a collective conspiracy; and crimes are justified by an ideology of male control over womens bodies (Sen 2005; Ertrk 2009; Gill 2009) where heterosexual men are the victims of HBV, this is not justified by their own loss of honour, but by their presumed dishonouring of a woman or girl belonging to another family. Activities that may expose a woman to the risk of HBV include refusing an arranged marriage, having a relationship which is not approved by family members, particularly if this relationship is with a member of an out-group, the loss of virginity, and spending time without supervision by a family member, amongst many other reasons, some seemingly very trivial to outsiders. HBV is often popularly associated with Islam, on the basis that the majority of honour killings occur in Muslim-dominated countries such as Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey, and that many of these countries have, or have had, provisions in their legal codes which allow for a reduced sentence for killers who claim justification through honour (Zuhur 2005 : 22-53). These laws are not normally derived from Islamic principles however, but from colonial, often Napoleonic law, where the still-current concept of the crime of passion (Baron 2003) has been extended to allow for a wider range
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of perpetrators within the family than the presumed intimate partner of Western definition, and where the requirement for spontaneity is ignored. Legal exemptions for honour killings have a much longer history than Western colonialism within Mesopotamia, being traceable to the Assyrian law codes of 3000 BCE (Kiener 2011 : 194). HBV frequently occurs in nonMuslim contexts, particularly in contemporary India, where families from all the main religions (Hindu, Sikh and Muslim) commit HBV and honour killings at a similar rate to their neighbours in Pakistan (AFP 2011). While it is tempting to link HBV in Islamic contexts to the harsh treatment of people who have engaged in extra-marital relationships under Islamic jurisprudence, which includes flogging and stoning as pre-set hadd2 punishments for fornication and adultery, there is no mandate for vigilantism and stringent evidentiary standards for proving such sexual crimes. Using the term honour-based violence has been identified as problematic; like the similar formulation of the crime of passion, which also is commonly used to exculpate male violence against women, it takes the motivation or justification of the perpetrator as definitional, and gives the impression that certain crimes may be, in some sense, honourable. On the other hand, the need to classify this category of crimes is significant, because the normative Western definition of domestic violence is premised upon the model of a single potential assailant, who has rather more limited resources than the network of an extended family. According to the Director of IKWRO, despite being a minority of cases dealt with by the organisation, HBV takes up a disproportionate number of woman-hours due to the need to control the variety of potential risk factors, such as the use of paid assassins or the networking potential of families with professional or community influence. So while the term is problematic, as Aisha Gill (2009; 2010) argues, and can serve to culturalise, and thereby excuse and reify, abuse, it remains essential that the risks of HBV be recognised and appropriately addressed. Honour is the terminology used by the perpetrators; however, it is also the terminology
Hadd (pl. hudud) is used in Islamic literature to refer to the bounds of acceptable behaviour and the proscribed punishments for severe crimes.
2

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used by the victims - and as the current term that is in widespread use it may be counterproductive to attempt to create a neologism that will tend to obscure and further complicate a phenomenon which is already widely misrecognised and surrounded by misperceptions. Within Europe, HBV is a particular locus of a bright boundary between supposedly incompatible Western and Eastern cultures, based in the presumption that such practices are ethnonational or religious in origin (Korteweg and Yurdakul 2009 : 219). This occurs within a debate framed around the polarities of normalcy/deviance, rather than recognising that, although HBV is prevalent in certain communities, this does not mean that it necessarily connotes normalcy for that culture. The practice is in fact fiercely contested (Mojab 2002). There are many overt and tacit rejections of violence against women, and the construct of honour within all communities, as the existence of numerous organisations and activists across the Middle East and diaspora demonstrates. While cases such as the murders of Banaz Mahmod and many other UK victims have made the subject more widely known, responses to these forms of violence remain mixed: the Association of Chief Police Officers strategy on HBV notes that while there is growing awareness of the issues in Britain, that the disjointed and inconsistent nature of the police and collective partnership responses (ACPO 2008 : 8) is negatively impacting outcomes within the police force.

FORCED MARRIAGE
Choice depends on substantive conditions. These include, at a minimum, having the political and civil freedoms that enable one to voice an objection, and the educational and employment opportunities that make exit a genuine choice. (Phillips 2001 : 136) Forced marriage, meaning a marriage where one or both partners are married under duress occurs almost uniquely within societies where arranged marriage is normative. Forced marriages are defined as those in which coercion is deployed by parents/family to attempt to bring about an undesired match. Coercion may range from emotional blackmail,
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manipulation and deception to death threats: in some cases crimes are committed. An estimated 10% of arranged marriages in the UK are forced under this definition (Working Group on Forced Marriages 2000). The case of Hirani v. Hirani [1983] established that the threat of social ostracism can also be considered as duress (Bano 2010 : 205); cases prior to this (Szechter v. Szechter, and Singh v. Singh, both in 1971) had held the position that consent would be assumed in the absence of physical threats to the spouses (Phillips and Dustin 2004). Prior to 2002, police routinely returned women escaping forced marriage to the protection of their families (Phillips and Dustin 2004 : 535). While there have been attempts to delineate sharply between arranged and forced marriage this distinction is far from clear in reality, as individuals undergoing marriage may be permitted, and may desire, widely variant levels of autonomy in spousal choice. Whereas some families may limit their role in arranging marriage to introducing a family member to potential partners they consider eligible, and thereafter leaving any decisions to be made by the couple, other families may arrange a wedding where both parties are complete strangers before the event. The factors which make a marriage eligible to parents often fail to coincide with those of their children: Buunk, Park et al.s (2009 : 55-6) study of young Kurdish people living in Holland found that while parents were most likely to value social capital in arranging marriages, in the forms of in-group membership, wealth and social status, young people themselves were more likely to desire positive personal qualities, such as good hygiene, intelligence and humour. While identifying arranged marriage as a site of intergenerational conflict (Bhopal 2000; Lacoste-Dujardin 2000), it is important to acknowledge the lack of clarity around the concept of consent. Deveaux suggests that the British conceptualisation of forced marriages places rather too much weight on the notions of consent and duress, and that this fails to allow for the restricted autonomy of women and girls within high-context families (Deveaux 2006 : Chapter 6). The hinging of the definition on consent and duress gives the inaccurate impression that arranged marriages which are
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not clearly forced are therefore unproblematically consensual. However, there is a great deal of slippage between the categories of forced and arranged (Gangoli et al. 2006 : 10), where consent may neither have been explicitly sought or given, or where spouses may have had insufficient contact in advance of marriage to make an informed decision. Ilkkaracans (2001) survey of 599 women from Eastern Turkey (which has a significant Kurdish population) found that 50.8% of women were married without their consent; 45.7% were not consulted during the arrangement of the marriage, and that 51.6% had not met their husband before marriage. By current standards of duress, Phillips and Dustin (2004 : 540) claim, many more than 10% of marriages arranged within the UK must be considered nonconsensual. Marriages of legal minors have been recorded in Kurdish families in the UK (Chantler et al. 2009 : 605) which are considered de facto forced due to the incapacity of the partners to give legal consent. While a common image of forced marriage is that of intransigent parents forcing their will upon their children, this fails to capture the ecology of the extended family. Parents are also nodes in a complex web of familial relationships and may themselves be subjected to similar pressures from their own relatives to bring about a union desired by their own kin, particularly in families where endogamy is expected. Policy responses to forced marriage have been commonly conflated with debates on immigration, holding womens rights in tension with populist sentiment (Bredal 2005). Forced marriage has been conflated with bogus marriage in order to give a human rights gloss to immigration limitations, whereas the two categories have little in common: a forced marriage may not fit the conventional British understanding of what marriage is, and certainly some forced marriages are influenced by the desire to acquire British citizenship for an incoming partner, but they are not bogus in the sense that, for instance, the Home Office (2002) document Safe borders, Secure havens discusses. The Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act of 2007 has provided legal protection measures Forced Marriage Protection Orders (FMPOs) which have been successfully deployed, far exceeding initial expectations of
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uptake. Of these, a third were issued for persons below the legal age of consent, and a third for under-18s. It appears that many of the extant FMPOs have been issued through courts in Birmingham and Leeds, and the number of courts that are able to issue FMPOs remain currently limited. While the police have proactively taken up the measures of the Act of 2007, other sectors have been less ready to utilise them (Perks et al. 2010 : 85) suggesting that the use of FMPOs has not yet been mainstreamed across all areas and state bodies. Uniquely, Britain has a specific Forced Marriage Unit (FMU), founded in 2001 and operating out of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with a particular responsibility to British citizens who have been taken abroad in order to be forced into marriage. 1735 forced marriages were reported to the FMU in 2010 (UK Government 2011 : 51), of which 86% of the victims were women or girls. The FMU has also issued comprehensive guidelines to all state bodies in appropriate means of dealing with the issue, which were made statutory with the passing of the Act of 2007. Despite the historic availability of these guidelines, in 2006, Gangoli et al. found that only 11% of agencies they surveyed had a definition or policies in place for dealing with forced marriage (Gangoli et al. 2006).

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CHAPTER TWO: POLICY, ETHNICITY AND VIOLENCE


Subtle, but nonetheless powerful, conceptual barriers enter into how services engage with minoritized women. (Burman et al. 2004 : 336) While minoritised women may face the same pressures and obstacles in ending violent relationships as other women, these may be inflected externally by racism and low socio-economic status (Burman et al. 2004 : 336). Burman, Smailes et al. (2004, p. : 333) make use of Phoenixs (1987) dialectic of homogenised absence/pathologised presence to characterise the trends of state intervention: either the existence of abuse within minoritised groups is ignored, normalised or minimised for cultural reasons, or it is treated as a pathological indication of cultural inferiority. Anxieties around ethnicity and culture fuel a dynamic of cultural privacy (Burman et al. 2004 : 336) which renders abuse invisible: externally, providers of mainstream services evade the complexities of dealing with the needs of minoritised victims through dismissing it as cultural; internally the family and community attempts to control and confine experiences of abuse. These combine to prioritise a victims identity as a minoritised woman over her needs as a victim of violence. Pathologising violence as cultural is not merely negative because of the broader effects of stigmatising ethnoreligious groups; it also reduces the likelihood of women reporting violence, as they seek to evade further stigmatisation of an embattled community, or become fearful of discriminatory treatment within hostile atmospheres. Abu-Ras notes that in the aftermath of 9/11, Arab women in the United States were less likely to express willingness to approach the police to report domestic violence (AbuRas 2007 : 1022) although the levels of abuse were thought to have actually increased over this period (Ammar 2007 : 516). This collective aversion was also indicated in the UK, where calls by Muslim women to Manchesters domestic violence helpline dropped dramatically after 9/11 (Burman et al. 2004 : 351).

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ITS THEIR CULTURE


Domestic violence cannot truly be considered an aspect of any unique culture as it occurs in almost every society in the world (Jean Zorn, cited in Hajjar 2004, p. : 251). However, within the UK, abuse occurring within minority cultures has frequently been mediated through conceptions of culture rooted in multiculturalist policies. Throughout the 1990s, the shallow but widely endorsed multiculturalism (Dustin and Phillips 2008 : 405) which was practised in Britain, came increasingly under feminist criticism, most provocatively in Okins (1999) blistering challenge Is Multiculturalism Good for Women? The feminist critique of multiculturalism should not be conflated with contemporaneous attacks which were directed against pluralism, diversity and immigration policies, and which often had an undercurrent of xenophobia. Nor should it be assumed that criticising multiculturalism is necessarily an argument for assimilationism (although Okin arguably verges into this territory upon occasion), but rather a critique of the communitarian aspects of the multicultural position, and an argument for a diverse, egalitarian democracy founded in the principles of human rights, where group rights do not occlude those of the individual. Yasmin Ali identifies multiculturalism as a slippery pragmatism, which provided the ideological justification for policies designed to contain and isolate certain communities from politics, or alternatively to mediate their entrance through patronage (Ali 1992 : 103). This patronage tended to take the form of picking tall poppies: through the selection of individuals with extant bases of organisational power, vertical hierarchies of power within the community were maintained and concretized. It is unsurprising that an approach so radically undemocratic should also be felt as unrepresentative: according to research in Bradford, the only people who were not critical of so-called community leaders were those community leaders themselves (Bagguley and Hussein 2008 : 104). The discourse of multiculturalism largely neglected gender within its analyses. Phillips and Saharso (2008 : 294) illustrate this, by noting that:
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a substantial index to the influential collection Ethnicity and Group Rights (edited by Shapiro and Kymlicka, 1997) includes no entry for sex or sexual violence, three entries for gender, and only half a dozen for women. Mirza notes that in the 314 page report from on the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, published by the Runnymede Trust in 2000, only three of those pages address women (in Meetoo and Mirza 2007 : 190). Certain advocates of multiculturalism were only too ready to explicitly throw women under the community bus: in Feminism, Liberalism and Oppression, Jeff Spinner-Halev states avoiding the injustice of imposing reforms on oppressed groups is often more important than avoiding the injustice of discrimination against women. (in Deveaux 2006: 46) Androcentricism appears, for Spinner-Halev, to be a lesser offence than presumed ethnocentricism, even where women within subordinated groups are already multiply silenced through exclusion from the wider society and through the operation of gender heirarchies extant within their communities. It has been the particular task of feminist activism in the area of gendered violence to draw back the living room curtains and expose the private life of the family to scrutiny. Britains most prolific multiculturalist writer, Tariq Modood (1997 : 20) delineates only two possible versions of multiculturalism: one which tolerates difference in the private sphere only, and one which tolerates it both in private and public: the private sphere remains, for Modood, sacrosanct - the living room curtains must remain pulled tight. This dynamic of cultural privacy renders domestic violence within minoritised communities invisible, creating further barriers to services (Burman et al. 2004 : 336-7). Central to the dynamic was the assumption that they look after their own, identified by Saghal from the very inception of minority womens engagement with abuse in their communities (1992 : 173), and which continues to be salient:

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[A]ssumptions of they look after their own also work to leave both the explanation for the abuse and the responsibility for intervention with the community. There is obvious scope for communities both to deny or cover up abuse, while women seeking support may be correspondingly reluctant to approach services from within their own communities This of course coincides with general reluctance on the part of minoritized women to approach mainstream services for fear of encountering racism and even fuelling it further through their disclosures. (Burman and Chantler 2005 : 53) Modood, (Beishon et al. 1998) for example, identifies Pakistani and Bangladeshi families as having particular structures: finances are controlled by the paterfamilias, patrilocality is valued despite this placing incoming women in highly vulnerable positions within the marital family, marriages are arranged without any consultation with the intended spouses, married women are expected to remain within the home and undertake a traditional division of labour with little practical support in the home from their husbands, even where these husbands are unemployed. The authors conclude that multiculturalism has to be aboutsupporting what may be called conservative family forms. (Beishon et al. 1998 : 81) If multiculturalism is about supporting what may be called conservative family forms (which are, in fact, recognisably patriarchal), then this engenders an environment in which male violence, if not actively supported, may be tolerated or ignored. Gill claims that throughout the 1990s, UK judges accepted cultural defences as mitigatory, downgrading premeditated murder to manslaughter where the killer was a member of a minoritised community (2009 : 481). Beishoon, Modood et al acknowledge the price of their vision of multiculturalism, arguing that even where families are coercive and unhealthythe costs of intervention would have to be weighed against the costs of non-intervention which costs they bathetically enumerate as conflicts within the communities, race relations, state authoritarianism and so on. (1998 : 80). They do not enumerate the costs of non-intervention - in coercive marriage for instance, this would include the acceptance of threatening behaviour, abduction, imprisonment, physical violence, rape
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and in some cases, murder, (Deveaux 2006: 167-8), and which also imply an abrogation of human rights to the victims of forced marriage, as free choice in marriage is enshrined as a human right by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 16(2)) and the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (Article 16(1.b)).

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FROM MULTICULTURALISM TO MULTI-FAITHISM


The "take me to your leader" school of community relations cuts out the majority of Muslim voices, particularly those who have little institutional clout within their own communities namely women, young people, and minority ethnic communities present within broader Muslim communities. People must have the freedom to represent themselves, to deny representation. The British government has been reluctant to extend that privilege to a minority group that is increasingly seen as the indigestible other, the so-called "enemy within". Control has taken precedence over democracy. (Malik 2007) Prime Minister David Camerons Munich Speech of 5th February 20113 represents the final official disavowal of multiculturalism, as a position which had become increasingly unpopular - the laissez-faire multiculturalism of the 1990s is increasingly seen as untenable across Europe (Phillips and Saharso 2008), not just due to feminist critique, but also because British syle pluralism has notably failed to integrate certain minorities economically resulting in high crime, and low levels of employment and educational attainment; and politically - resulting in violent expressions of political extremism (Joppke 2004). Increasingly European countries are beginning to indentify core values that they will not allow to be sacrificed to cultural sensitivity, identifying some level of gender equality as a crucial part of a tolerant democracy (Phillips and Saharso 2008 : 293). Simultaneously, rising religiosity has led to religious motivations being applied to the phenomenon of gender violence: while previously, minoritised women were victims of their culture, they are now considered victims of their religion (Yildiz 2009 : 466), within an environment where religion is increasingly considered the preeminent aspect of identity (Ramm 2010). British colonial policy was based on the principle of Indirect Rule, where governance of the natives was delegated to selected tribal rulers (Crowder 1964). From the 18th century onward, British colonialist rule in South Asia required the religious identification of the governed peoples:

This speech was delivered to the Munich Security Council. The full text can be seen at http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/02/terrorism-islam-ideology
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Under the colonial state, the category of Muslim took on a new fixity and certainty which had previously been uncommonIdentities which were syncretic, ambiguous or localised gained only limited legal recognition. (in Sahgal 1992 : 168) British modes of dealing with diversity appear to continue to follow this colonial pattern: postulating fixed identities, then selecting leaders from these identity groups, rather than comprehending minoritised persons as individuals and citizens in their own right. Thus, nave, gender-blind multiculturalism has not been replaced with a mature, gender-sensitive form of negotation between group and individual rights, which would be able to draw judicious distinctions between those aspects of culture that may reasonably be accommodated within a liberal democracy, and those which run counter to human rights. Instead, it appears to be replaced by an insidious move to multi-faithism that threatens to reinscribe patriarchal values into minority communities through replacing cultural with religious justification (Patel 2008; 2011). Rather than locating the failure of multiculturalism in the tolerance of local inequalities, it has been reformulated into an historical failure to respect and facilitate religious identity. (Patel 2008 : 15) Funding has thus been diverted from secular organisations dedicated to reducing violence against women to faith-based organisations (Begikhani et al. 2010 : 112). The idea that respecting religious identity will lead to less inequality and abuse takes at face-value the feminist apologist position on Islam (Ali 2003 : 164), and again, places womens affairs in the hands of community gatekeepers. It should be noted that the majority of imams in Britain are paid through subscriptions from the community (FAIR Muslim College 2002 : 21), and hence have divided interests in confronting entrenched attitudes within that community, particularly those of the wealthy elite; and that over 86% are foreign-born, with little experience of life in Britain (Husson 2007 : 21). BAMER womens group, Southall Black Sisters, claims knowledge of countless cases around the country where South Asian and minority religious institutions have been involved in, condoned or remained indifferent to domestic and sexual violence and child abuse. (Patel 2008 :
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18) Patel also notes numerous collaborations between state institutions and faith groups across the country (2008 : 31). Haringey Council, for instance, which has a high Kurdish population, features a child protection strategy which calls for interaction with faith groups (Haringey Council 2004); child protection procedures are frequently used in forced marriage cases - as noted above, two-thirds of people seeking FMPOs are under 18. In Patels (2008 : 28) most salient example, Greater London Domestic Violence Project held a discussion of family violence in July 2005 that entirely excluded secular voices in favour of faith leaders. Secular organisations have a neutral character that allows them to cater to women from religiously diverse backgrounds, from the devout to the agnostic, with no distinctions of sect or caste; they are also uniquely positioned to assist women who have been subjected to abuse justified in religious terms, who may fear that religiously identified institutions share the same values as their abuser. If such partnerships become the established method of dealing with abuse in minoritised families this places women in a religious ghetto, attributing religion to them, and then dealing with them on that assumed basis, regardless of their actual identities, interests and requirements. Patel claims that The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the Muslim Association enjoy an unprecedented influence on state policies (Patel 2008 : 15), despite their links with reactionary organisations in South Asia (Maher and Frampton 2009), and the fact that only 6% of British Muslims feel the MCB represents their interests (Mirza et al. 2007 : 6). According to Mirza et al. (2007) the Muslim Womens Network states that such community leaders have silenced womens voices and obstructed the criminal justice system from tackling crimes of violence in Muslim communities. Given that many Local Authorities and local police forces had developed relationships with such community leaders as supposedly representative voices of their communities (Mirza et al. 2007: 24-5), such gatekeepers posess a degree of influence which could be used to obscure abuse in minority communities.

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Islam as a master category Islam has gained status as a master category within the post-Rushdie era; with numerous faith-based organisations, secular, progressive, moderate and extreme competing for media attention and/or funding. Orientalist and Islamist viewpoints converge in insisting that Muslims are uniquely defined by their faith; that for Muslims faith is inextricable from politics, law and all aspects of social life. Algerian sociologist Hlie-Lucas counters the myth of a unified Muslim identity, insisting that one-fifth of the world cannot be treated as homogeneous: This diversity in itself is sufficient to counter the fundamentalist ideology of Muslimness as a belief, a way of life, a code of conduct, a culture that is supposed to characterize the life of so-called Muslims all over the world. Like all totalizations, it ignores differences of cultures, political regimes, classes and the like, and proposes the oppressive vision of an unchallengeable, unchangeable, and divinely defined homogeneity. However, by insistently suggesting its existence, fundamentalists have managed to convince many Muslims and non-Muslims of its virtual reality. (Hlie-Lucas 1999 : 23) Muslimness, like other essentialist constructs such as Western, Third World and so forth, has become a generalising category, reducing heterogenity to homogeneity (Narayan 2000 : 81-82). Ascribing Muslimness to a diverse population on the basis of their national heritage or the place of their birth may be presumptuous. The Survey of New Refugees, conducted for the Borders Authority in 2010, revealed that slightly under half of Iranian female refugees described themselves as Muslim, and that there were significant non-Muslim minorities within all refugee populations from the Middle East (Appendix : 70, Table 1). A minority of these respondents reported contact with faith-based institutions (Appendix : 71, Chart 1), undermining claims that the mosque is central to Muslim life (Rahman et al. 2010). One might observe that Muslim life in itself is an essentialising and reductive singularity. As many Iranian refugees have sought asylum due to activism against the IRI, it is perhaps unsurprising that many have also rejected Islam as the
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foundational ideological basis of the current repressive theocratic state. Despite the majority of Kurds in the UK being described as Muslim (Kurdish Human Rights Project 2006 : 6), Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh (2010) found that some Kurdish respondents who identified as Muslim held ambivalent, and even overtly hostile, views towards their expressed faith. Kurds have frequently been described as holding their Islam lightly (for example in Bainbridge 2009 : 49), and there is a strong trend of interest in pre-Islamic beliefs amongst Kurdish nationalist intellectuals (Izady 1992 : 138). Many Kurds, Iranians and Afghans have a syncretic aspect to their customs, celebrating Nourooz (the Zoroastrian New Year) with just as much interest as Eid. Such alternate identifications are obscured by the prevalance of intgriste interpretations of Islam within the media and in policy making. When the government seeks to engage with people through faith, they do not fully engage with the majority of Muslims for whom Muslimness is an aspect of their identity rather than the totality of it, and they cannot engage with those who are not, or no longer, Muslim but who nevertheless confront forms of violence which are more prevalent within the Middle East and South Asia than in the majority population. Through choosing religiously identified partner organisations they are seeking authenticity within an Orientalist/Islamist framing, and they thus play a part in increasing the influence of conservative and Islamist groups (Maher and Frampton 2009 : 47). Situating the plurality of womens issues of violence and oppression within a religious context is very much a synecdochic move, a strategy which Uma Narayan suggests feminists need to assess with great wariness (Narayan 2000 : 83). Religious reification is no improvement upon cultural reification as a plausible way of understanding the social world, and offers little potential for improvements in the inequalities within minority populations.

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SAFE BORDERS, NO HAVENS


Immigration issues impact on Middle Eastern women in three main ways: firstly, some women are seeking asylum based on the fear of gendered violence, such as HBV or FGM, secondly, women may be pressurised into marriage for the purposes of obtaining a spousal visa for their prospective partner, and thirdly and for the purposes of this study most crucially, women with no recourse to public funding (NRPF) who are victims of violence may suffer unduly from their inability to access any form of state support (Anitha 2010). Abusive men may often use their own greater knowledge of the immigration system to terrorise women with threats of deportation (Mama 1996 : 178). Since the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, those in the category of asylum seeker have occupied a legal limbo: unable to access employment or training, benefits or permanent housing, they are almost completely socially marginalised (Pearl and Zetter 2002 : 227). Migrants may be rendered invisible within institutions: of 32 London boroughs, only twelve mentioned refugees and migrants within their race equality schemes, and only five provided specific services to these groups (McCarvil 2011 : 4). Women making their own claims for asylum are often judged within a gender-blind system erected around mens experiences of political victimisation (Freedman 2010 : 177): despite the majority of the worlds refugees being women, most women do not have the social capital to travel far from their countries of origin, and the majority of asylum claims are still made by men, albeit a decreasing majority. A research report from Asylum Aid found that UK Borders Authority frequently misunderstood gender-based fears of persecution: for instance, not being aware of the distinction between a consensual arranged marriage, and the forced marriage of a child (Muggeridge and Maman 2011 : 6), and that a disproportionate amount of female asylum claim refusals are overturned upon appeal, suggesting poor initial decision-making (2011 : 13). Restrictions in legal aid affect women who are attempting to make asylum cases: in Wales, there are now only two immigration solicitors who provide services on legal aid (Perks et al. 2010 : 63). Two major charities assisting refugees and asylum seekers, Refugee and Migrant Justice and the Immigration Advisory Service, have gone into
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administration since the Coalition took power leaving asylum seekers with little support. In both cases, changes in legal aid payments were implicated in the charities inability to maintain solvency. Forced marriage has also typically been used to justify immigration control: the UK justified increasing the age for Marriage Visa Sponsorship on the basis that older women would have accrued more social capital to allow them to resist unwanted marriages; however this arguably infantilises minority women (Phillips and Dustin 2004 : 544), and produces its own problems; for example, where a girl may be sequestered abroad until she attains the age of 21; this not only prolongs the amount of time she must spend within a forced marriage, but may also render her ineligible for a legal annulment through time restrictions (Perks et al. 2010 : 86). Imported brides, foreign-born women married to men who are UK residents, may be particularly isolated: with their own family unable to provide assistance, they are unusually dependent upon their husband, particularly if they do not speak English. In some cases, husbands may deliberately impede their wives attempts to learn English in order to limit their abilities to build networks. Their vulnerability is exacerbated by British immigration policy, which can be exploited by their husbands and families. Women must live in the UK for two years before becoming eligible to remain in the country in their own right; during this time they are considered NRPF and have no access to public funds. If the relationship breaks down within two years they face deportation (Anitha 2010 : 463). It was established that this placed a near-impossible burden on women who arrived to join their husbands who then went on to abuse them, so they were confronted with an unenviable choice between abuse, destitution or deportation. Under paragraph 289A of the immigration rules, added in 2002, women can now apply for ILR due to violence. This has a particularly high standard of proof, requiring that the abuser was convicted or that injunctions be issued, thus obliging women to pursue their abuser through court in some form, even when this is culturally problematic for instance, certain families will

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perceive a wife who prosecutes her husband for spousal abuse as offending family honour, thereby increasing the risk of lethal violence. According to Dustin and Philips, this has had limited success in helping vulnerable women. Women applying under this concession still have no recourse to public funds until their immigration status is resolved, and they may well have no-one to turn to for help with temporary accommodation or financial or emotional support. (2004 : 541) Mothers may be accommodated by a local authority through its duty to care for their children, but equally a local authority may accommodate the child and leave the mother without support (Anitha 2010 : 466). Recognising these issues, the government instituted the stopgap Sojourner Project which made funding available through NGOs for women with NRPF under the two-year rule. However this funding is time limited and obliges the recipient to make a claim for ILR within a limited timeframe. The Sojourner Project will be extended until a permanent solution is put in place (UK Government 2011 : 30). While Theresa May, Coalition Minister for Women and Equalities, has promised to address the situation of women with NRPF, there are at the time of writing no indications of what the reformed policy will be. The feminist legal group Rights of Women argue that the current position on NRPF runs counter to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) and hold that a difference in treatment of women with an insecure immigration status will be unlawful unless it can be objectively justified and is reasonably proportionate. (Perks et al. 2010 : 125)

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CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY


Women studied were staff, volunteers or service users of the Iranian and Kurdish Womens Rights Organisation (IKWRO). IKWRO was founded by activist women of Iranian and Iraqi origin as a response to the murder of Heshu Younes in 2002, which they felt demonstrated the need for services directed at women of Middle Eastern origin within the United Kingdom, and to vocalise dissent from the perception that abuse of women was an integral part of Middle Eastern culture. I have been a volunteer for this organisation since 2005, responsible for writing certain articles and other documents, most notably Expert Witness Statements required in complex asylum cases. Three focus groups were conducted. One was in Kurdish (Soraani the dialect predominantly spoken in the IRI and Iraq), and one in Farsi/Dari4; both of these groups involved survivors of family violence with origins in the KRI, the IRI and Afghanistan. The third focus group, conducted in English, comprised of IKWROs staff, who also originate from the KRI, the IRI and Afghanistan, with a single participant from the British Isles. For anonymity, respondents within transcripts and field-notes have been denoted as F1, F2 and F3 (for Farsi speaking participants), K1, K2, K3, K4, K5, K6 and K7 (for Kurdish speaking participants) and S1, S2, S3, S4 and S5 (for staff participants), and identifying details have been stripped from the data. All were currently resident in London, although some of the minority language respondents had moved to the city to escape violent situations in other parts of the UK. I deliberately did not attempt to obtain data on their background or origins, as part of a strategy to allay concerns about confidentiality and to focus more tightly upon their experiences. The experiences of this group of women may be indicative of some of the experiences minoritised women encounter in attaining state assistance: however they cannot be generalised beyond this population, as their experiences as clients of the same NGO implies that they have the networking capacities to locate support, and have been supported throughout the period
Farsi and Dari are very similar languages and are mutually intelligible. Farsi is spoken in the IRI and Dari is the lingua franca of Afghanistan.
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where they ended a violent relationship, and indeed afterwards. Many women in similar situations would not have access to such support; on the other hand, other women may have had their expectations of assistance met by the state so completely that they did not feel it necessary to seek out an NGO. Rather than asking direct questions, I addressed all groups with a list of state provided services, and invited respondents to discuss their experiences with each in turn, starting with the police, as the agency most likely to have provided a first response: this was intended to make the encounters less formal, and to mimic the usual routine of the group as described to me by S1 (below, p 40). Responses were both notated extensively and recorded digitally. These notations proved to be especially valuable, as interactions within the focus groups were lively, and the interpreted speech in English is frequently overlaid with conversations in Kurdish or Farsi, leading to difficulties in transcription, particularly in the larger Kurdish group. For security reasons, digital recordings and transcripts were stored within an encrypted, password protected partition on an external storage device. This, along with all written materials, was stored in a padlocked filing cabinet. Ethics While research with staff was less complicated, domestic survivors from ethnic minorities were considered vulnerable persons where sensitivity was required in research. Ethical approval was sought, and a list of counselling services in Kurdish and Farsi available in London was prepared and translated into the relevant languages and distributed to participants, with effort being made to locate counselling services which were free, which were available to individuals with NRPF, given the poor financial status of participants. Consent forms and participant information sheets were translated into Kurdish and Farsi for distribution, but were also verbally explained by the interpreter/co-moderator as there was a possibility that some respondents would not be literate. Due to lack of funding for this research project I had sourced translators who were first-language speakers of Kurdish and Farsi through my own personal networks, which translations
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were then double-checked by IKWRO staff. The Kurdish translation was translated by a professional translator and was of extremely high quality, whereas the Farsi translation contained a single error, which misidentified the subject of research, demonstrating the need for caution in dealing with translated material. S2 clarified the point in her introductory statement so that the research aim was clear. I made sure to repeat assurances of confidentiality and anonymity over and above the commitments in the information sheet, being aware that this is an issue of great anxiety within the group. Participants were informed they could withdraw at any point, and there were empty rooms made available for any participant who wished leave the group for a period.

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EPISTEMOLOGICAL DILEMMAS
Subjugated knowledges can be key to social change, not because they are the whole truth but because they include information and ways of thinking which dominant groups have an interest in suppressing. (New 1998 : 360) Early second wave feminist research was navely realist in form: defined simply as research about women, conducted by women, intended to benefit women. Recognising that scientific discourse had historically been used to underwrite womens exclusion, many feminists were antagonistic to the implied superiority of knowledge derived from the institutional dominance of the academy (Smith 1999 : 19), where claims to generality and objectivity have an unacknowledged basis in gender partiality. There was thus a move towards a more experiential, qualitative methodology for exploring womens experiences (Maynard 1994 : 15). Realist claims to universalism were considered tainted by association with Western racism, essentialism and colonialism, and the intersectionality critique exposed the fact that mainstream feminist thought had inadvertently reproduced one of the key problematics of masculinist social science: relatively privileged women had preponderated over more marginal women. The unitary conception of the category of woman was multiply fractured through the recognition that [g]ender is only one axis of a complex, heterogeneous construct, (Bordo 1999 : 39), leading to the perception of the existence an unlimited number of intersectional feminisms rather than a globalised womans movement. In Mohantys (1991) analysis, she depicted a deficit model of feminism which had identified Western feminist aims and goals as normative, failing to account for the situated priorities of Othered women, and by so doing colluded in the pathologisation of non-Western culture. However, Mohanty herself protests the assumption of her ideas into the dissolution of a common conception of gender (Mohanty 2003). Womens activism, particularly cross-border activism, is highly invested in the idea that women as a group have commonalities (Zack 2005). Gender is grossly overdichotomised, but most people who are considered female are required to

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conform to the normative femininity or incur disadvantages of varying extremity. Feminist critics have argued that traditional social sciences began its analysis from male positions, answering questions which were pertinent from male points of view (Harding 1987 : 6), thus it was suggested that analysis could be begun elsewhere. Harding (1993 : 84), the most prominent advocate of feminist standpoint theory (FST) states that the activities of those at the bottom of social hierarchies can provide starting points for thought, and that these starting points have an essential validity in being rooted in the qualia of peoples lives. Hartsock (1987) casts FST in Marxist terms as a historical materialism for feminism. Initial versions of FST incorporated two Marxist principles: Hegels master/slave dialectic, which proposed that the marginal possessed epistemic privilege, and a version of false consciousness, which was in fact essential to redress the problem caused by the unchallenged continuation of epistemic privilege within FST. Through an inversion of the epistemic privilege which had been attached to privileged voices, marginal voices were considered less false than those within the mainstream. The shortcomings of this approach are easily discernible: It must surely be that insiders can claim a deeper understanding of their social meanings and social practices, but they may also be so thoroughly subordinated by their conditions that they are unable to recognize any injustice... Sexual oppression is not justified by the generations of women who have put up with it; nor is it justified by them saying that the silencing of women in public or the unequal division of domestic labour is natural and right. (Phillips 2001 : 11) The notion of epistemic privilege can thus be falsifying; but without epistemic privilege FST falls into perspectivism, even relativism, where it is difficult to make axiological distinctions. Within this research, such problems were made visible between the different collectives studied: women from the focus groups conducted in Farsi and Kurdish, were doubtless the most marginal respondents through legal, social and linguistic exclusion, but appeared less likely to criticise the practice of state bodies, whereas, in my view, many had been treated shoddily. EnglishPage | 36

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speaking staff was robustly critical of state services. In this case, I would venture that women with origins in countries where the treatment of family violence is less responsive had lower expectations and did not perceive discriminatory practice in the same way that I would, or as professionals who are aware of official policy did. Holgate, Pollert et al. note (2009 : 7) that Kurdish people facing discrimination in the workplace were reluctant to describe this as racism. For Kurds, they suggest, racism was the term used to describe the violent cultural repression of Kurds by the Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian states rather than the everyday, low-level racism of the glass ceiling and ethnoreligious stereotyping. Thus, both thresholds for identifying racism, and the expectations of levels of responsive service may well differ. Identifying interactions as discriminatory in cases where the respondent does not recognise them as such verges on abuse of authorial privilege; however, this is counterweighted by a principled belief that services should provide appropriate and equivalent responses to all victims of violence, regardless of their preconceptions. While it is clearly undesirable to ventriloquise, the alternative of requiring that the most marginal define their disadvantage places the responsibility for demanding political change on persons with the least capacity to articulate them. New (1998) contends that the continuance of epistemic privilege within FST is unsustainable, and proposes remedying this through instilling certain principles of critical realism (CR), a suggestion echoed by Clegg (2006). Dragiewicz (2010 : 200) identifies gender violence as one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary left realist inquiry, and realism as a suitable mode for discussing patriarchal power structures. There is no preclusion between CR and FST: Lawson (2003 : 133) states that standpoints are indispensible aids to the explanatory process, going beyond collectivising diverse standpoints and noting commonalities and discrepancies between them, by considering them as resources eligible for theorising, aimed at positing best-fit causal relationships. Under Roy Bhaskars formulation of CR the experiences we have in everyday life are formed by - but are semiindependent of - deep causal factors which exert strong forces on individuals

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and social groups. (Wright 2010 : 158) CR adopts a singular but deep ontology (Lawson 2003), wherein the real cannot be reduced to experience (Clegg 2006 : 316), locating power in structures without the flat empiricism or logocentricism of positivist science. Thus, in allowing for agency, CR is highly compatible with Giddens structuration theory in which structure and agency are viewed as mutually constitutive. The usefulness of structuration theory, which aims to carve a middle path between determinism and agency, making the interplay of the person and society the prime issue of social theory, was demonstrated through findings. In a case discussed by S4: One client went to a womens centre. She had two young children and had been beaten. The police did not attend for a whole night. Eventually the police took her to a place which was unfamiliar to her and abandoned her there, in a refuge with no appropriate facilities. The social services removed her children into foster care. (Field-notes) In fact, the police lied to the client and told her children would be returned within 24 hours, whereas in fact they were not returned until the case was closed. S4 took action by issuing a complaint against the police force in question, which in response reformed their policy. Thus, while one marginalised and vulnerable womans experiences were determined within the mechanisms of police policy, through collaboration between the victim (doubly victimised by abuse and poor police practice) and S4, with the backing of a collective, discriminatory structures and mechanisms were altered. This possibility for creating change is what motivates Cleggs (2006 : 323) embrace of CR: The emancipatory impulse of feminism, and all radical projects, depends on recognizing the possibility that as collective agents we can do something to change the conditions which continue to generate profound injustices and inequalities.

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RESEARCHING THE SOCIAL


Rigorous focus group methods produce information that is contextually correct, lends itself to accurate analysis, and has the potential for culturally sensitive interpretations.
(Esposito 2001)

I considered that respondents were likely to have participated in multiple one-to-one interviews with British authorities in interview settings, for instance with the Borders Authority, police and immigration courts, and that these interviews may well have been fraught and traumatic (Ghorashi 2008). The standard interview scenario thus had negative connotations in which the political relationships implied by white interviewer/minority interviewee would be inescapable. I determined upon using a collective method which would mitigate these problems. Mkandawire-Valhmu and Stevens suggest that Focus group discussions can fill a political need in providing women with opportunities for consciousness-raising dialogue, mutual support, and forums in which to use their own capacities to change their circumstances and better one anothers lives. (2010 : 693) Barbour suggests that focus groups are particularly useful for the exploration of problematic areas of professional practice (Barbour 2007 : 9). In fact, a great deal of the research that has informed this project also utilised focus groups as a methodology for reaching minoritised women, such as Kulwicki and Aswad (2010), and Gilbert, Gilbert et al. (2004). I was introduced in a dual capacity to the minority language groups: as both a student researcher at Cardiff University, and as a long-serving volunteer. This served to mitigate my outsider status and suggested that I would be an ally in expressing their concerns, and to reduce the perception of being another white professional woman, conceptually linked with their many encounters with British state authorities, which could have inhibited criticism, or raised issues. However, I was introduced differently within the two contexts: I was introduced to the Farsi group in my role as website manager, and to the Kurdish group as a writer of expert witness statements, due to the differential awareness of my role by the interpreters/co-moderators. While the first description placed me as a person with high-status technological
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skills, skills which were not largely relevant to these womens experiences, the second positioned me as a person with expertise in the lives of refugee women, suggesting a greater knowledge of Middle Eastern culture and womens predicaments, and as someone who has worked closely on behalf of individual women, although with the dubious status of being marked as an external expert in their own experiences. The minority language samples made use of existing groups as a convenience sample. These were described as friendship networks, designed to build friendships between survivors to reduce the isolation of minoritised women who had ended violent relationships. These groups were described in terms that held similarities to the consciousness raising groups of feminist tradition. S1, the usual moderator5 of the longest established (Farsispeaking) group said they were designed to empower women, and to let them know about their rights, that participants collectively chose a topic of conversation for the forthcoming session which had included subjects such as sex, violence and assertiveness, and that where possible, participants had been able to request training events provided in their native languages, including a recent Introduction to Counselling session. The Kurdish group was less well established, this meeting being their second encounter; notably participants in this group were more affective and more likely to focus upon personal aspects of their experiences. This may indicate different stages in the development of the group. For minoritised women of high-context cultures, a collective sharing of experiences may be more appropriate to the communal and collectivist experiences of their lives (Chui and Knight 1999; Wilkinson 1999; Madriz 2000). Women, says Esther Madriz, have historically used conversation with other women as a way to deal with their oppression. For African American, Latina, and Asian American women, for example, sharing with other women has been a way to confront and endure their marginality. (2000 : 370)

S1 was otherwise engaged for the actual Farsi focus group, and S2 moderated/interpreted in her place.
5

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While focus groups are most often seen as a technique imported from market research, they may also have similarities with feminist consciousness raising group meetings (Wilkinson 1998; Montell 1999). Certainly within both minority language groups there was a tendency for women to validate and sympathise with each others experiences, which created a supportive atmosphere for disclosure. In one instance, a particularly harrowing narrative of extremely violent abuse led to a collective and universal exhibition of sympathy from all participants. Through the emotional support of the other participants, the speakers composure was restored, and she was able to continue speaking upon other topics (see below, p 47). Domestic violence is a sensitive topic for any population, and for Middle Eastern women, disclosures of sexual abuse are particularly painful due to the high status of modesty in traditional societies. In both groups, the intent of the group-work was perceived as reformative rather than exploratory; the intention of performing research as an academic project was mentioned, and clear from the information sheets, but during the conversation this factor was rather less emphasised by participants than my intentions for the secondary use of the data to provide a report highlighting common problems encountered by minoritised users of state services for campaigning purposes. Thus respondents spoke of the research aim as to help women like us, and this conditioned their responses, which often took the form of stating their own experiences, and then hypothesising the potential experiences of women who may have had less support in dealing with problematic situations with state agencies. Participants in the minority groups appeared to welcome the experience of having their concerns attended to sympathetically and seriously, and expressed affection and gratitude at the conclusion. Research is a bilateral endeavour, and the generosity with which respondents contributed their experiences would hardly be reciprocated without making a concerted attempt to alter policies which had been identified as problematic. Montell suggests that focus groups have a more egalitarian and less exploitative dynamic (1999) than other forms of qualitative analysis
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reducing the influence of the researcher and allowing participants to direct the flow of events, as indeed they did: the Farsi group wished to discuss their feelings of being unjustly treated by sharia courts6 in the UK and to protest the necessity of using such courts to acquire legal documentation, which I plan to explore at a later date. While the issue of research into family violence across ethnic boundaries is a complicated issue Huisman (1997), for instance identifies many potential problematics in some cases it can be preferred, as a person who is clearly an outsider is considered more able to maintain confidentiality due to having no contact with the respondents community of origin. Within the staff focus group, I was already well-known and trusted by respondents, who themselves expressed a commitment and interest in providing data intended to improve services: they clearly felt there was a great need for critical attention to be paid to existing service provision. The staff group addressed the issues with so much enthusiasm that the meeting overran considerably without reaching the limit of the information they wished to share. Data from this group was extremely useful, with participants collaborating to provide a rounded picture, and there were high levels of agreement regarding the issues they faced as professionals. S2 and S3 both had the same first language and tended to collaborate in client advocacy work, and their contributions to the group were similarly collaborative, with both often being able to add details to a single example or case study.

Sharia courts purport to provide legal rulings in accordance with Islamic principles and are often sought by women seeking divorces; these divorces may be considered more legitimate by their community and country of origin than divorces issued by British courts.
6

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INTERPRETATIONS AND MODERATIONS


Marn and Marn (1991) suggest that even when participants speak English as a second language, it is still preferable to arrange focus groups within their first language where possible; lack of confidence in speaking with a second language can inhibit responses (Yelland and Gifford 1995). Esposito (2001 : 569) suggests respondents who think in their native languages and then serve as their own interpreters are forced to take on additional cognitive labour, leading to impoverished data, especially when dealing with sensitive subjects (Murray and Wynne 2001). Thus even when the Farsi group proved to have an adequate level of English to participate at some level without interpretation, I requested that the co-moderator interpreted where required - in this instance, one respondent chose to communicate in English for the majority of interactions, while the others passed their responses through the interpreter. Temple and Young (2004 : 163) identify that the majority of writings on ethnic minorities in the UK fail to discuss the translation and interpretation process, treating it as value-free. They identify the dilemmas of interpretation as epistemological: if one regards interpretation as a neutral process, in which any interpreter would interpret identically, then the choice of interpreter is unproblematic, as long as they have the required linguistic skills. This is a nave assumption: interpretation does not transmit, but recreates meaning: in fact it is essential that it does so, because literal wordfor-word translations do not convey the connotations crucial for the situated understanding of a unit of speech (Esposito 2001). Interpreters cannot be regarded as neutral conduits of data, but key informants (Temple et al. 2006). While backward-forward translations have become the gold standard of validity in multilingual research (Larkin et al. 2007 : 469), this appears to rest on the assumption that languages operate on a simplistic literal level, rather than addressing the idiomatic and symbolic levels which convey units of meaning in a complex, situated manner hence the numerous and variant translations of works of literature, each with their own flavour: such as the multiple translations of the Bible or Quran. Kurdish and Farsi do not have, as English does, gendered personal pronouns; thus to produce the
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sentence in English she says that he beat her depends upon contextualised knowledge, without which a more grammatically accurate, but considerably less meaningful translation would be she/ he says that she /he beat her/ him. Bearing in mind the contextual and mediated nature of translations, quotations which have been mediated through an interpreter will be rendered in a sans-serif oblique font, as a visual marker of their provenance. Thus, if the process of interpretation is not neutral, neither is the choice of interpreter. This choice is not merely one of expertise, calling for professionalism and sensitivity to language and connotations: it is also ethical. As the findings below demonstrate, respondents were often wary of external interpreters, particularly if they were male: many women reported poor experiences of professional interpreters who failed to adhere to confidentiality guidelines, who misinterpreted their utterances, and in some cases harassed vulnerable women. Thus the need to locate interpreters who did not cause anxiety to respondents was an overriding requirement, both for ethical reasons to reduce stress to a vulnerable group and for the research aims - to create an atmosphere in which sensitive information could safely be divulged. Interpreters were thus drawn from IKWROs staff members, who had existing relationships with the women within the groups, and who had provided advice or advocacy services to the women over the period when they were actively seeking help; while they were technically not qualified, they were all fluently multilingual, speaking their languages of origin and English at a sufficient level to carry out their roles as advocates. Minority language participants had the confidence of knowing that, since the intimate details they had disclosed hitherto had not been exploited or divulged the interpreters were proven trustworthy, and the number of interlopers to the group was reduced to just myself. While the value of professional interpreters has been stated (Esposito 2001) in order to guarantee accuracy, this may be less significant for generating data than trust, rapport and

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cultural proficiency, particularly when dealing with vulnerable groups and sensitive issues. Many respondents expressed positive sentiments about IKWRO as an organisation, and some praised the co-moderator/interpreter (one respondent described S4 as my only friend) indicating sentiments of trust and confidence, developed within the supportive relationships of advocacy. Fern (2001, p. 79 : 79) stresses throughout his book that cultural fit should be preferred to qualifications in the selection of focus group moderators: amateurs from the same cultural background may be preferred over professionals who lack experience with the relevant population. Certainly the respondents were very forthcoming and cooperative about their experiences, and all expressed satisfaction at the end of the focus groups. In some cases the relationship between the interpreter and the group had a directive quality: there were instances where the interpreter appeared to be reminding a participant of her experiences if the interpreter considered them relevant to the topic, and, when several were speaking simultaneously, preferentially choosing to interpret the narrative of a woman which she knew to provide information pertinent to the research question. Given that the staff focus group was held in advance of the Kurdish group, the comoderator/interpreter had knowledge of the research aims and was able to participate actively in generating data. The data generated then, was not raw, if data can ever be considered to be so, but was actively undergoing an ordering process cotemporaneous with its generation. Interpreters effectively took on the roles of co-researchers, collaborating in the generation of data. From my perspective, this was a boon rather than a problem: as colleagues, we had a shared understanding of the aims of the research, and as the interpreters were professionals with many years of experience and expertise in direct casework with vulnerable women, along with counselling training (S2 was BACP7 certified, while S4 was in the process of achieving certification), I trusted their ability to act appropriately, and valued their input. However, it is not difficult to imagine circumstances where the
7

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influence of an interpreter could be negative, and restrict, misinterpret and falsify rather than organise the data. If a respondent were to make comments critical about her treatment by IKWRO or another NGO, this would have placed the interpreters in a difficult position and if the interpreter was less committed, or even hostile, to the research aims, their ability to direct and structure information may have obscured as much as they, in this instance, revealed. It is likely that narratives that highlighted negative experiences with state bodies were preferentially interpreted over positive or neutral experiences, in order to detect problems in need of policy and practice recommendations, although narratives of good practice were not absent from the findings. Also, the sequencing of the focus groups may have influenced data generation, as S2 took part in the staff group after interpreting/moderating the Farsi group, and S4 took part in the staff group before performing the same services for the Kurdish group. S2 may have carried over concerns from the Farsi group to the English group, whereas S4 may have been looking to confirm findings from the staff group within the Kurdish group, as well as hoping to address topics which were omitted from the staff group due to time constraints. Ultimately, the existing relationships were largely positive in establishing an atmosphere in which women felt able to divulge their experiences. Interpretation introduces temporal disjuncture into the flow of conversation: not only does it inflict a rigid turn-taking formation into the polyvocality which is one of the benefits of group discussion, but it also delayed my ability to respond directly to utterances. This was made particularly clear at the juncture where one participant became distressed. My notes record that: At one point a young participant recounting a particularly harrowing encounter of abuse began weeping. All the other participants were crying too. Tissues were passed around to everyone one was given to me. I held it awkwardly as her narrative had not yet been interpreted I could not know what she had said and I felt isolated from the collective grieving of the group.

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To mask my embarrassment I busied myself in getting the participant some water and giving her a hug. By the time S4 had interpreted her speech for me, I was too self-conscious to have a spontaneous emotional reaction. (Reflexive diary) I had initially intended to enlist third parties with the appropriate language skills to assist with transcription in order to get the richest reading of the data. However participants did not feel sufficiently reassured about the level of confidentiality this would provide. Therefore the live interpretation was used for transcription purposes, even though this was a summary of respondents narratives more often than a literal translation. Notwithstanding these limitations, the data generated was plentiful and valuable and many substantive themes, some which have not been addressed in the existing literature, were forthcoming.

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CHAPTER FOUR: ANALYSIS


Both field-notes and transcriptions were coded thematically using the software package NVivo. A priori codings separated experiences of different state services, whereas in vivo codings were create to track emergent themes. While the intention of the client focus groups was not to examine the nature of the abuse women had suffered, as it was not directly relevant to the research aim and likely to cause distress, varied experiences were reported within the client groups. None were currently dealing with a forced marriage, although some described their marriages as having been forced or nonconsensual. At least two appeared to have a high potential risk of HBV; however, the majority of client respondents were survivors of IPV. Several of the women were suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress. All were isolated and lacking in social support, although those living with children had some limited networks through their childrens schooling. Many had health and psychological problems related to their abuse and their situation. Most were not currently working: some because they have no legal right to work through their immigration status, and others due to depression and other long-term illnesses resultant from abuse. Clients and staff reported a low awareness of rights within the population. One woman in the Kurdish group said we only know [our rights] from IKWRO. But not many women [are] aware of IKWRO. S3 felt that the police exploited womens lack of awareness of their rights to evade taking their claims seriously: My personal experience has been that if its a BME woman complaining, the police automatically think that they dont know their rights here, theyre not aware of the system, even if its simple things responding to their phone-call queries, they dont really do that. Whereas, if, as an organisation, we do it, because they know that we will follow up on this they will respond promptly. (S3) While on one hand, clients were frequently unaware of their rights, services were often equally unaware of the specific manifestations of violence within Middle Eastern families. Caseworkers mentioned having to educate other
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professionals on numerous occasions, and all commented on the poor levels of knowledge within the state sector, although S1 noted with satisfaction that IKWROs training sessions were oversubscribed and successful. She observed that within a fortnight of providing a training session for fifty social workers, IKWRO was subsequently referred 13 high risk cases which had previously gone undetected. Cultural relativism was identified as a problem by caseworkers, including S1 who identified negative assumptions that victims were OK with the situation when it could be attributed to culture, and that there was too much respect for culture and religion. The other overriding concern was sensitivity. Police in particular, but all services were recorded in behaving insensitively in dealing with minoritised women, revealing racist and patronising attitudes, and very little empathy for their condition, or awareness of the particularities of Middle Eastern families and the traumata of translocation and abuse. One client said: They need to have more understanding of what we are going through. They need to have some empathy. Everything is very new to us, and we are living with the psychological effects of violence. (Kurdish group) Another client related the insensitivity as being an aspect of a generalised dehumanisation of, and hostility towards immigrants: Instead of looking at [refugees and asylum seekers] as though they are dirty, [and] unwanted, [they should understand] that we didnt choose to come here and we hope for understanding as a human being, and that [if] they understand that and that they help us then there wouldnt be a problem. (Farsi group) While these factors were displayed across all state sectors, particular issues were raised with regard to policing, health services, interpretation, housing, and social services which will be addressed and discussed separately. These will be discussed in the contexts of findings of other research to attempt to indicate the verisimilitude of the data within the context of academic

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discussion. Particular attention has been paid to perspectives that were widely shared within and between groups.

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POLICE
The findings included many negative interactions with police. In one case, a woman was sent home to an abusive environment because an officer said she was lying to get on the housing list, playing off a racist trope that minoritised populations are diverting public resources which are held to rightfully belong to the majority population. Police officers were often described as dismissive, rude and overbearing, and having little awareness of womens situations. In common with many survivors of domestic violence, of all ethnicities, clients and staff felt that experiences of psychological abuse were paid less attention and were less understood than physical battering. Women suffering from psychological abuse were told to go home, and that nothing could be done for them on numerous occasions, despite policies identifying psychological and emotional abuse as a form of domestic violence, and research suggesting that these forms of abuse are similar in outcomes to violent abuse (Yoshihama et al. 2009). S1 identified that clients had little trust in the police given their experiences and knowledge of policing gender issues in their countries of origin: People who come from Middle East, they dont trust policeour idea of police is totally different. S1 suggested that this apprehension not only leads women to avoid police, but that women may not tell the whole story out of embarrassment, reluctance and lack of confidence in the police, causing miscommunications and the police failing to treat cases with the seriousness they merit. Respondents who had contacted the police were often disappointed: fallible bureaucracy, long waiting times and poor follow-up undermined their confidence in the effectiveness of protection measures. Adelman, Erez and Shalhoub-Kevorkian argue that gendered racism and racialized sexism shape victims' and police responses to domestic violence resulting in the culturalization and underpolicing of violence against women in minority communities (Adelman et al. 2003 : 105) Racism within the British police has been a topic of interest since the MacPherson report (1999). Jyoti Belur, who spent 12 weeks in participant observation with a domestic violence outreach team suggests that minority women are at a
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double disadvantage: firstly because the police provide inadequate responses to all victims of domestic violence, and secondly because they are unable to cater to the specific needs of minority women (2008 : 427). Minoritised women may find the police, and particularly male police, intimidating; also for an economically dependent woman, pressing charges may not be in her immediate best interests, as this can leave her destitute and disgraced. (Mama 1996 : 180). Women in general give a higher priority to protection than to seeking prosecution of their abusers (Perks et al. 2010 : 54) which may be a frustrating experience for police officers. Belur (2008 : 433) suggests that the rate of attrition is higher within high-context families due to the family and communal pressures exerted upon women to withdraw cases, this leads police to deprioritise cases within these communities due to the inability to get results, and their lack of awareness of these pressures leads to a lack of sympathy. Chantler identifies a discourse across the whole domestic violence sector that relates ending a relationship with agency, and remaining within it as victimisation: that there is an imperative to leave your man, supplemented where the victim is minoritised with a secondary imperative to leave your oppressive culture (2006 : 30), which conditions police response to victims who do not seek immediate exit from an abusive relationship. Interplaying with the culturalisation of abuse this may lead to a stereotype that women who do not choose to end violent relationships thereby accept abuse. All staff respondents agreed that there was a double standard in operation in the polices dealings with forms of violence that have become culturalised: S5 recounted that a young woman whose relationship with an English man had been detected by her father, who threatened to kill her for this offence to honour. She fled the household immediately, but was unhappy and lonely in refuge accommodation and returned home. Her father told police that this was because she had now accepted that it was her duty to give up her boyfriend and accept a partner of his choosing. The police considered this adequate, despite the overtones of coercion, and closed the case. Its as though because the girl is from an ethnic minority, they assume

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that she is alright with this, observed S5, a sentiment which the whole group shared. S4 spoke about a client who had been sent back to her parents twice despite attempting to flee a forced marriage; this tended to discourage young women from trusting the police in future cases, she suggested. Where this represents a well-meaning but misguided (S5) form of cultural sensitivity, there is less sensitivity in the reporting of sexual abuse. All caseworkers agreed that within Middle Eastern culture there was a poor understanding of marital rape as a form of abuse, and S3 identified that victims of sexual assault found it very difficult to make a statement relating to sexualised abuse: The statement is so dreadful, and so scary. They get the poor woman; she has she has to say word by word what happened, and for some cultures its very difficult. To say what he has done, how he has done it, what she was wearing, how did he do it it put[s] such a stress on the client. (S3) S3 said that women had dropped their cases due to the difficulty of discussing sexual abuse. Staff identified that police were reluctant to take an active role in gathering evidence for a prosecution where this was wished for by the victim, with multiple cases being dropped for lack of evidence where there had been no attempt to even record a witness statement from the victim, nor any other attempts to gather data. S3 discussed a woman who was beaten and threatened within the line of a CCTV camera and the police did not make any attempt to gain the footage: despite the woman having current injuries when in the police station, S3 reported that the police officer had said These things happen, its one persons word against another person. In another, a victim had photographic evidence of her injuries which was unknown to the police as they had not questioned her. S3, echoing S1s position that women do not tell the whole story suggested that police need to take a more proactive line in helping women to build their case, that they needed to investigate and clarify womens experiences, factoring in womens reluctance to give information rather than acquiescing in it.
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S2 said the front guy on the desk, reception, they are the ones who need the training, and S3 discussed a case where the desk officer tried to take a statement from a woman at high risk of HBV at the front desk in public view, rather than in an interview room: despite the well-known cases of honour killings in Middle Eastern families in London, he had no awareness of HBV and treated it like a joke. This echoes findings from Begikhani, Gill et al. (2010: 130) that knowledge about the permutations of violence within Middle Eastern families were concentrated at the higher ranks, with the officers most likely to have first contact with women being the least prepared. Another problematic area was the retrieval of effects in the aftermath of a womans flight from an abusive relationship: My passport is with my husband. I didnt take it at all I told [the police], and they said oh, we will go and they couldnt take my passport. You know, because he said, she already took her passport. (Farsi group) After the above participant fled her abusive husband, he retained her legal documents including her passport and marriage certificate, leaving her unable to work, study, or obtain divorce. Despite asking the police to retrieve it, they did not make a serious attempt, taking her husbands statement that she already had it as truthful and making no further attempt to get them back. This clients experience was common, with S2, S3 and S4 all having examples of this issue, including the retention of gold jewellery, which within the Middle Eastern context represents a womans inheritance from her natal family and her financial security. Other client participants reported dealing with social exclusion and legal difficulties due to being deprived of their documentation. Police attitudes can impact upon the treatment provided by other professionals. One woman who had been admitted to hospital found the first attending doctor to be unsympathetic:

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The first doctor said, oh the police said she doesnt have a problem. Why dont you go home? Pushing [me] like go to go home constantly. (Farsi group)

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GPS AND THE NHS


Abu-Ras identifies medical health services as being particularly useful in helping Middle Eastern women suffering from domestic violence as these have neither the stigma nor the negative associations of seeking help from the police (2007 : 1021). However, their ability to assist is limited in many ways: firstly, many women with NRPF may be unable to register with a GP, and secondly, womens inability to speak English makes sensitive interactions problematic. GP practice was identified as particularly poor by the staff group, although hospitals were held to be somewhat better, particularly with relation to helping women find solutions to accessing healthcare while having NRPF. Use of informal interpreters Respondents reported a wide use of informal interpreters by GPs, with S3 stating that throughout her entire professional experience she had never encountered a GP using an external interpreter. Respondents recounted that their children were used as informal interpreters, with one saying she had to wait for long periods for an appointment due to the inability of her son to attend. Placing the responsibility for interpretation upon children has been identified as very poor practice: children may well lack the specific knowledge of medical terminology to be able to transmit information accurately, and the use of children compromises confidentiality and can place them in emotionally difficult situations (Spencer-Oatey and Xing 2010), particularly within an atmosphere of family conflict. The British Medical Associations guidelines on asylum seeking and refugee women specify that: they should be offered a choice as to the gender of the healthcare professional and interpreterit is important to speak with them directly, using an independent interpreter rather than a family member (2002 : 8) However, there are strong indications of widespread use of informal interpreters drawn from within the family in use by NHS doctors, especially in general practice (MacFarlane et al. 2008; Bezuidenhout and Borry 2009; MacFarlane et al. 2009), with a majority of Irish GPs using informal
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interpreters to deal with refugees and asylum seekers. Within an abusive context, information mediated through a husband or relative is unlikely to be reliable. Constant use, for instance, of an abusive husband as an interpreter would mean that a doctor has neither the opportunities to screen for domestic violence nor provide advice or referral; medical interference has also been recorded as playing a little recognised part in abusive relationships (McCloskey et al. 2007) and using informal translators allows medical interference to take place within the surgery as well as within the home. S4 identified a 16 year old married girl, who constantly attended her GP with injuries as a result of abuse always in the presence of her husband. The GP took no action to discover the source of the victims injuries or provide support to this vulnerable girl. GPs seemed to be very ready to diagnose and medicate depression and other psychological conditions in abuse victims upon the word of the perpetrator of abuse: this does not just raise the possibility of misdiagnosis and inappropriate prescription, but implies that abused women who cannot speak English may have medical records that have effectively been written by their abusers, which can subsequently be exploited in custody disputes to display mental instability on the part of the victim. Mamas research (1996 : 172) uncovered doctors collaborating with abusive men, and encouraging women to take tranquilisers rather than helping, and one who told a patient women should not leave their husbands when asked for help. While the GPs we discuss here are collaborating with abusers by default rather than by design, the end result is similar. Respondents did not indicate that they were given the option of speaking to a female interpreter, and given that certain among them had the need to discuss sexual forms of abuse, this is very problematic, particularly given the influences of a culture in which open discussion of sex between the genders is taboo. A Kurdish-speaking participant said they should ask you some people dont mind, but they should ask you if you are happy with [a] male interpreter.

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Difficulties in registering As in other contexts, women with NRPF have difficulty in accessing GP services. This is not merely problematic because they have no access to healthcare, but also because without a GP available to document abuse they have less chance of pursuing a successful prosecution or making a domestic violence based claim for ILR, which is mandatory if they are to receive Sojourner Project funding for their subsistence and to evade deportation. While potentially this can be done through casualty wards or by solicitors, this does not have the same weight in court as evidence from a GP. And a lot of the cases for [the] Home Office, if we dont have the doctors report they really do not consider it in that serious way; If you had that problem you should have gone to the GP. They dont understand that this person never went to GP alone; it was always with the perpetrator. And when they did get the courage to leave, obviously that becomes then dangerous to them, so that they do not go back, and when they require medical history, obviously it will all be according to what the husband has said. (S3) As immigrant women, and survivors of family violence are disproportionately troubled by psychological illnesses such as depression and PTSD, inability to access a GP means they are unable to seek referral to counselling services or other forms of psychological support which they may desperately need. The experience of domestic violence has been related to a wide range of negative psychological aspects such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociation and somatization (Jordan et al. 2010 : 613).

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INTERPRETERS
While the above section suggests that the use of professional interpreters may be preferred in dealing with minoritised women, particularly where family violence is suspected, the use of professional interpreters also has negative aspects. Women report a lack of trust in professional interpreters, and cited numerous cases of unprofessional behaviour on their part, with one particularly vulnerable woman reporting receiving unwanted sexual advances from an interpreter. S3 identified a case where the interpreter used in a case of domestic violence was a personal friend of the abuser. The abuser phoned the victim to confront her on points she had raised in her statement, which he could not have known unless the interpreter had breached confidentiality. Despite this being brought to the polices attention, they took over two months to address this issue. S3 further claimed that every interpreter has introduced inaccuracies into the case and that she has had to redress this with the agencies concerned; she highlighted one case where an interpreter was passing off translations written by his school-age daughter as being his own work, despite the breaches of confidentiality that this implies. Many interpreters are sourced through small local agencies, using competent speakers of English as a second language. These interpreters may have ties to the community and may be in a position to pass on information. While guidelines to police recommend sourcing through the National Register of Public Service Interpreters which has a prominent code of conduct and complaints procedure, LAs and NHS bodies may also use small local agencies which are less clear in their procedures. Hammersmith and Fulham LAs (Standing Together 2008) provide specific training in domestic violence for interpreters, but this is a very rare practice. The Magistrate Courts Service Inspectorate (MCSI) inspection of interpretation within magistrates courts has only one instance of the word confidentiality within 70 pages of text, which refers only to sign language interpretation for the deaf (MCSI 2001). Even in codes of conduct where confidentiality is mentioned, the concept is not elaborated, and there is an emphasis on confidentiality breaches for
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profit rather than the gossip-mongering and poor practice which marks negative interactions with interpreters revealed in these findings. In the absence of stronger policies to professionalise interpretative services, and create and enforce codes of conduct that take womens concern seriously, professional interpreters will remain a point of anxiety for minoritised women.

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HOUSING
All respondents identified housing as their most pressing need, particularly those where non-resident children remained domiciled with their abuser. For mothers, separation from children was extremely painful with negative health effects of depression, migraines and insomnia. Secure housing away from an abuser has been identified as womens most salient and immediate need. (Mama 1996 : 92) However, BAMER women are often housed in marginal areas undergoing urban decline (Gill 2002). The most common reason for homelessness amongst minoritised women is family violence, accounting for one third of Pakistani and Indian homeless women; Bowes, Dar and Sim (1998 : 117) found that single and lone parent Pakistani womens needs were not being met in three cities surveyed, and that some survivors of domestic violence continued to be harassed by former partners and relatives due to lack of housing options (118). The levels of minority women currently experiencing homelessness are very likely underestimates, due to many women sleeping with friends or relatives rather than in the streets (Gill 2002 : 167). Women make up a majority of social housing tenants due to their financial disadvantage, and rarely have other housing options (Mama 1996 : 198). Mama (1996 : 199) claims that, those in the best quality council accommodation are members of the favoured family type: wives and mothers in nuclear families of the Northern European type. In 1996, the Asylum and Immigration Act removed all state responsibility for asylum seekers leaving many individuals destitute. This Act was rapidly challenged, and responsibility was passed from central to local government. This placed London and South Eastern boroughs under strain. From 1998 a policy of dispersal was initiated to mitigate this: asylum seekers were sent to some of the most deprived areas in the United Kingdom through this scheme. Dispersal policy had the effect of splitting extended families across various urban areas: for women in violent relationships, this isolated them from potentially supportive relationships within the family; for communities placed in deprived areas, and areas where racist violence has been recorded, this led to increased tension and fear. Living with community disadvantage
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has been shown to increase the risk of family violence (Hetling and Zhang 2010). From the findings, it appears that the worst examples of insensitivity and poor practice have occurred in dispersal zones, suggesting less training and awareness of the manifestations of abuse within minoritised families outside metropolitan areas. For those who have left marital or familial relationships and face harassment and violence from family members, or those at risk of HBV, dispersal decreased the number of areas they could safely inhabit, through the dispersion of extended families across Britain. Hence, some organisations tasked with providing protection measures to high-risk clients identified a need to source protection in rural areas with low ethnic populations. However, women dispersed in such a manner are prone to isolation and alienation through lacking the capacity to build friendship and linguistic networks. Refuges Cultural attitudes to refuges can be extremely unfavourable. S4 discussed the reaction of families to women entering refuge accommodation: You dishonour us. You shame us. Youre [a] prostitute You go to a refuge? There will be men! They have an idea over there that when [women] are single [they] will have sex with all men. (S4) While one respondent was pleased with refuge accommodation, due to the provision of a range of extra-curricular and training activities which helped her to create networks and build social capital, others found refuge life depressing and isolating. Mixed refuges expose women with very different cultural backgrounds to other women, some of whom may have chaotic lifestyles. One particularly vulnerable respondent reported theft and harassment which had led her to confine herself and her infant to her room, effectively under self-imprisonment. While refuge accommodation is intended to be a short-term measure it is notable that one respondent reported being in a refuge for over three years due to the inability to source housing. Some respondents in refuge accommodation were emotionally affected through the inability to spend time with their teenage sons,
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describing extreme sadness and depression. The prolonged wait for housing stock means that this desolation could be prolonged. Mama observes that minoritised women may be subjected to racism within refuges (1996 : 131). She found that while few staff working within refuges expressed racist attitudes themselves, they were reluctant to challenge racism on the part of other refuge-users (1996 : 286). The Swedish experience of providing support for women and girls at risk of HBV suggests that the high levels of protection required, involving complete separation from the family, are perceived as distressing and that women and girls frequently seek to make contact with family members notwithstanding the inherent risks; also that providers of sheltered accommodation to high risk cases underestimate the complex emotional states of these women and associate attempts to contact family with a lack of need for protection (Wikstrom and Ghazinour 2010).

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SOCIAL SERVICES
Responses to social services were perhaps the most positive of all services: they were praised by caseworkers for having a high respect for the principle of confidentiality, for taking part in multiagency work, and for seeking external information and advice when they encountered particularly tasking issues. Many staff suggested that social services had greatly improved their treatment of violence in minoritised families over recent years. However, there were concerns expressed as to the readiness with which social services were prepared to split up minoritised families. Clients have been told that their children will be taken into care due to NRPF. [Social services] were telling her because she has no recourse to public fund they will take the child and put him on the care but the mum can go do whatever. (S2) I have many experience [of social services] telling them that its literally, go back to your country, or go back to your husband, because we cant help you, you have no recourse to public fund, and we dont have duty of care towards you. (S4) While the Sojourner Project funding is intended as a stop-gap until permanent policy can be designed, it appears that knowledge of this is low within the social services and that women are being misinformed, causing distress. This echoes Anithas research in Manchester found that where women had NRPF, social workers were not knowledgeable about the domestic violence route for achieving ILR and frequently encouraged women to return to their countries of origin (2010 : 471). Mamas findings suggest that social services can be more coercive than is appropriate in dealing with minoritised women, and more likely to remove children from their mothers than within the general population (Mama 1996 : 96). In a case reported by S3, a girl reported a risk of HBV within her family. Social Services placed all her siblings, including two brothers into care, despite the absence of imminent risk to them and the very low likelihood of HBV against the boys, causing one daughter to miss her GSCE examinations. S4 reported a case of HBV where a newly assigned social worker identified a problem in
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multi-agency working: the former social worker had arranged meetings between social services and the school which involved the charming and well-spoken perpetrator as a translator and interpreter. S1 notes that it is standard for social workers to involve parents and attempt mediation in cases of child protection cases even where this is inappropriate, such as in cases of forced marriage.

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CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION


Phillips and Dustin (2008) discuss several methods for the reduction of violence and coercion within minoritised families: legislative, discursive and exit strategies. While the provision of exit strategies (providing support for women and girls who seek to leave dangerous or coercive situations) present the most vivid need, the least contested debate, they do not affect many perhaps the majority of minoritised women who are prepared to accept certain levels of abuse and repression in the interest of maintaining family/community solidarity. The provision of exit strategies does not attempt to initiate cultural change across communities, and associates leaving an abusive partner with leaving a community. The adoption of unrepresentative community gatekeepers, often conservative males, has limited the capacity of discursive approaches, and the framing of the debate within cultural/religious discourse has limited the potential of advancing arguments that define abuse in terms of human rights offences, which constitute honour as a patriarchal, rather than an ethnoreligious, method of reducing womens autonomy. Legislative attempts to reduce abuse amongst minoritised women have been hampered through linkages with immigration control policies, a lack of clarity, and a concern to limit welfare spending, although the adoption of FMPOs has provided some useful protection measures to victims of forced marriage. As Jock Young observes, combatting the reactionary aspects of communitarianism - the tendency to build restrictive authentic identities within isolated, oppositional communities, requires both concerted action against economic exclusion, and a resistance to binary thinking about minority/majority culture (2003 : 459). Dualistic thinking, whether about gender, class, or ethnicity, is, according to bell hooks, the central ideological component of all systems of domination in Western society. (hooks 1984 : 29) It is concerning that, despite the demise of multiculturalism, the terms of the debate remain dualistic, even if the new dualisms are rooted in faith rather than ethnonational identity: attention needs to be paid to the

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interactions of majority and minority cultures that underwrite existing hierarchies, within and between groups. Methodologically, research dealing with non-English speakers needs to attend to the processes of translation and interpretation with extreme sensitivity; there are many factors within the process that can affect the research, for good or for ill, and these need to be attended to in research design, evaluated honestly, acknowledged and accounted for. The process of translation and interpretation cannot be treated as neutral or merely technical but as a recreation of data. When dealing with vulnerable populations, the ethical dimension of interpreter choice may outweigh the requirements for external standards of accuracy: sensitivity to the concerns of the respondents is more crucial to disclosure than qualifications. NonEnglish speakers have valuable perspectives and where possible should be included in research rather than ignored for reasons of cost or convenience. Focus groups prove to be a powerful means of gathering data from minoritised women of collectivist cultures, providing a supportive environment for disclosure and a means to minimise the inequalities of the researcher/researched relationship, particularly useful in reducing stereotypes of alterity. Future research can attend more closely to the experiences of minoritised women, with particular foci on the barriers and socioeconomic factors which may influence their vulnerability to abuse, and their capacities to seek help. Women facing violence in the family, regardless of ethnicity or citizenship, remain caught up in a complex and alienating web of state bureaucracies (Mama 1996 : 91), which are particularly complicated where a womans status is as an asylum seeker or a refugee. Practice within many state organisations is uninformed, discriminatory and unsympathetic, whereas some display rather better practice, these are rare. Where certain organisations (such as Brent Borough Police) and sectors (such as Social Services) have been praised, this indicates that the issue of violence in minoritised families can be addressed effectively and sensitively if

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appropriate policy and practice is instigated and adequate training is provided. Particular problems which have not hitherto been identified are the issues of lack of use of independent interpreters by GPs, and reluctance by police to retrieve documents after a relationship has ended, and the ethics and professionalism of interpreters used in interactions with victims of family violence. Training and an improved awareness of these issues would positively affect their abilities to provide help to vulnerable women. In terms of the retention of documents which lead to the inability to access education, employment and other forms of social inclusion, this needs to be clearly defined as a criminal act, so that police able to gain warrants to search for the property; also, the immigration courts need to accept that if the police have issued a crime number and attempted a search, it must be accepted that the documents are irretrievable despite the best efforts, and that the unavailability of documentation should not be allowed to impact upon their decision-making. NRPF legislation, as it affects survivors of domestic violence, is problematic and counter to international human rights legislation: rather than fill this gap with short-term projects it is suggested that domestic violence victims be entirely exempted from NRPF regulations. Current policy and practice on domestic violence is riven with paradoxes: while rhetoric addresses domestic violence as a serious social problem, and successive policies of both the Labour and Coalition governments appear to move towards mainstreaming a service provision, simultaneously the number of women able to access these services has been limited and funding for organisations that help women has come under threat. The withdrawal of funding for ESOL (Hubble and Kennedy 2011; Skills Strategy Skills Funding Agency 2011) is a particular concern, given that linguistic disadvantage forms a very real barrier to services and increases minoritised womens social exclusion. The Coalitions redefinition of violence against women extends the conception of domestic violence from a criminal justice issue to a broader

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framework of human rights, which calls for all bodies to become actively involved in prevention and detection of violence, and in providing support to victims. While the 2011 Equality Duty insists that services do not need to be homogeneous, this directive would be improved if it were to be reframed as a positive requirement for tailored services. Given that women within this research, consultations with the Government in 2009, and the organisation Rights of Women (Perks et al. 2010) identify specialist NGO support as being supportive, the current funding crisis affecting NGOs working against gendered violence is concerning, with sustainable and core funding proving particularly hard to access (Perks et al. 2010 : 140). Paradoxically, within a context of extending responsibility to all public sector bodies, this brings domestic violence within the purview of the state at the expense of independent organisations. Given that historically, it has been a strong womens movement that has provided the impetus for change in dealing with domestic violence, the input of independent organisations may still be key to developing strategies that reduce violence and provide the best support to victims.

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APPENDIX
The Survey of New Refugees is a postal questionnaire based survey which was commissioned by Analysis, Research and Knowledge Management (ARK), a division within the UK Border Agency (Analysis Research and Knowledge Management 2010). Respondents originating from the Middle Eastern region were isolated for the purposes of the following analyses. Table 1: Religious identification of Middle Eastern refugees
Responses to the question What is your religion? grouped by country of origin and sex Country of origin What is your religion? Total grouped None Christian Buddhist Jewish Muslim Other Iran Male n 63 64 1 1 192 13 334 % 18.9 19.2 .3 .3 57.5 3.9 100.0 Female n 19 40 0 0 70 12 141 % 13.5 28.4 .0 .0 49.6 8.5 100.0 Total n 82 104 1 1 262 25 475 % 17.3 21.9 .2 .2 55.2 5.3 100.0 Iraq Male n 26 23 1 0 375 3 428 % 6.1 5.4 .2 .0 87.6 .7 100.0 Female n 4 17 0 1 48 0 70 % 5.7 24.3 .0 1.4 68.6 .0 100.0 Total n 30 40 1 1 423 3 498 % 6.0 8.0 .2 .2 84.9 .6 100.0 Other Male n 10 12 1 188 4 215 ME % 4.7 5.6 .5 87.4 1.9 100.0 Female n 1 4 1 41 1 48 % 2.1 8.3 2.1 85.4 2.1 100.0 Total n 11 16 2 229 5 263 % 4.2 6.1 .8 87.1 1.9 100.0

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Graph 1: Participation in religious life

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