‘Family Disruption’ as ‘Family Violence’: Immigrant Sikh Families in the United States

In the context of dominant patriarchal gender rolesGender roles, the discourse on domestic violenceDomestic violence in (heterosexualHeterosexual) familiesFamily directs attention to women’sWomen experience of abuse from their male partners. Introducing international migrationInternational migration in this equation, however, complicates the discourse. Focusing on immigrants who live with a degree of precarity (undocumented immigrant familiesFamily, dependentsDependents, and immigrant familiesFamily on temporary legal statuses), I argue that a more expansive and nuanced meaning of violenceViolence should be applied to immigrant domesticDomestic strife because the contexts in which international migrationInternational migration occurs has the potential to inflict harm on all members of the familyFamily, including men. The central argument is supported with ethnographic material and semi-structured interviews conducted with immigrant Sikh familiesFamily in the United StatesUnited States and Punjab, India, analysis of news reports on abandoned Sikh husbands and wives as well as secondary literatureLiterature. An integral part of the analysis involves reflection on the meaning of familyFamily violenceViolence in the context of international migrationInternational migration.