Polish women’s experiences of domestic violence: intersecting roles of migration and socio-cultural, religious and policy contexts in Poland and in the UK

Scholarship on domestic violence and abuse has sought to understand how women's experiences are influenced by gender and its intersections with other social relations of power. We draw upon life history interviews with Polish women and interviews with practitioners to contribute to this intersectional and transnational feminist scholarship by examining how intersections between the migration process, immigration status and socio-cultural, religious and institutional contexts of Poland and the UK shape Polish women’s experiences of domestic violence and abuse. In doing so, we seek to redress the invisibilisation of Polish migrant women in the scholarship on domestic violence and abuse in the UK and beyond, in a context where they are invisibilised as ‘white’ and the particularities of their experiences neglected. Beyond a focus on the specificity of Polish women’s experiences through utilising an intersectional lens to understand the difference that difference makes, we also draw attention to similarities in migrant women’s structural location within exclusionary immigration/welfare bordering regimes in the UK, which creates conducive contexts for such violence. In doing so, we widen the lens used to understand domestic violence beyond family and interpersonal dynamics to the opportunities and constraints posed by intersecting social relations and gendered geographies of power.