Victims-survivors with insecure immigration status in the UK are subject to complexities that limit their access to safety, support, and justice. While campaigners have been advocating for more equitable pathways for provision and support over the years (DAC, Safety before status: Improving pathways to support for migrant victims of domestic abuse. Office of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, 2021), migrant women continue to navigate hostile environments characterised by dehumanising language and anti-migrant bureaucratic systems. This chapter reports on how a feminist dialogic approach was used to centre the often ‘silent voices’ of migrant women affected by domestic abuse. Dialogical feminism has been influenced by Habermas’ (The theory of communicative action: Jurgen Habermas (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Heinemann, 1984) egalitarian dialogue concept. This feminist perspective is concerned with bringing together academic and non-academic voices and assigning equal weights to both, not privileging one over the other. Feminist dialogical approach acknowledges the complexities that characterise the migrant victim’s journey through the system—the relationship between the self-other, in a peculiar hostile environment which views the other as a ‘threat’. Migrant women continue to endure this othering within agencies as they seek safety and support. For example, some professionals conflating ‘foreignness’ with ‘insecure immigration statuses’, when confronted with difference. This theorisation of self and other lends itself to a social justice-oriented practice. Using Bakhtin’s concept of otherness and Levinas’ “infinite” other, this feminist dialogic space provided a site for foregrounding the ethics of responsibility in our face-to-face encounters with migrant women. Using different art forms (co-produced with migrant women) and dialogic conversations, attendees were able to encounter migrant women as not a distant ‘other’ whom ‘we’ observe and theorise but as equal partners in the creating and reshaping on knowledge systems on safety, support, and justice. This chapter then questions the particularity and singularity of viewing the migrant other, in relation to insecure immigration status within policy and advocacy circles. Drawing on Rossiter’s (Unsettled social work: The challenge of Levinas’ ethics. British Journal of Social Work, 41(5), 980–995, 2011) critique of Levinas’ ethics, this paper considers aspects about the other that may be elusive, but nonetheless important as a protective element of a safety net.

Centring Otherness with Migrant Women Affected by Domestic Abuse

章节
发表日期：

2025年

查看全文

Olumide Adisa

摘要

Victims-survivors with insecure immigration status in the UK are subject to complexities that limit their access to safety, support, and justice. While campaigners have been advocating for more equitable pathways for provision and support over the years (DAC, Safety before status: Improving pathways to support for migrant victims of domestic abuse. Office of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, 2021), migrant women continue to navigate hostile environments characterised by dehumanising language and anti-migrant bureaucratic systems. This chapter reports on how a feminist dialogic approach was used to centre the often ‘silent voices’ of migrant women affected by domestic abuse. Dialogical feminism has been influenced by Habermas’ (The theory of communicative action: Jurgen Habermas (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Heinemann, 1984) egalitarian dialogue concept. This feminist perspective is concerned with bringing together academic and non-academic voices and assigning equal weights to both, not privileging one over the other. Feminist dialogical approach acknowledges the complexities that characterise the migrant victim’s journey through the system—the relationship between the self-other, in a peculiar hostile environment which views the other as a ‘threat’. Migrant women continue to endure this othering within agencies as they seek safety and support. For example, some professionals conflating ‘foreignness’ with ‘insecure immigration statuses’, when confronted with difference. This theorisation of self and other lends itself to a social justice-oriented practice. Using Bakhtin’s concept of otherness and Levinas’ “infinite” other, this feminist dialogic space provided a site for foregrounding the ethics of responsibility in our face-to-face encounters with migrant women. Using different art forms (co-produced with migrant women) and dialogic conversations, attendees were able to encounter migrant women as not a distant ‘other’ whom ‘we’ observe and theorise but as equal partners in the creating and reshaping on knowledge systems on safety, support, and justice. This chapter then questions the particularity and singularity of viewing the migrant other, in relation to insecure immigration status within policy and advocacy circles. Drawing on Rossiter’s (Unsettled social work: The challenge of Levinas’ ethics. British Journal of Social Work, 41(5), 980–995, 2011) critique of Levinas’ ethics, this paper considers aspects about the other that may be elusive, but nonetheless important as a protective element of a safety net.