No experience of domestic abuse is the same. Violence against women is universal, but what abuse looks like and the impact it has is unique to the person living through it.
Race and class add different contours to abuse that can impede an individual's ability to get help. Domestic abuse affects women from all ethnic groups, and there is no evidence to suggest that women from some ethnic or cultural communities are any more at risk than others.
However, the form the abuse takes may vary; in some communities, for example, domestic abuse may be perpetrated by extended family members, or it may include forced marriage, or female genital mutilation (FGM).
Domestic abuse is woven together with common threads – isolation, gaslighting, control, dominance, erosion of selfhood – but people of colour experience it in different ways to their white counterparts.
Domestic abuse has to be examined within the context of problems that disproportionately impact BAME people: low income, insecure housing, institutional racism, limited life opportunities and the COVID pandemic. Each of these factors can make life even more difficult for a person of colour to flee an abusive environment.
Domestic abuse isn't just physical. It can happen in many ways.
The Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 began on 1 April 2019. Abuse now includes violent, physical, sexual, psychological and financial abuse.
Domestic abuse can include:
Telling someone you’re being abused by an intimate partner or family member is an incredibly tough step to take. The more I deal with cases the more I realise how much this is compounded for BAME women.
The problems most of my clients face: “Being from a migrant BAME background means that the majority don’t have secure legal status in this country and are dependent on others, particularly the perpetrator, for their stay in the UK.”
It can also mean they lack knowledge about UK systems and laws. “This adds to the abusers’ control over them."
Victims are often enslaved in their homes, as a result of an inability to voice their experiences. They don’t always speak English and are not allowed to learn or make friends.
Specialist services and centres, which are led and delivered by BAME women, are essential for advocating on behalf of abused women.
Understanding the unique challenges these women face is essential if we’re ever to increase the number of getting help – and this is something we all have a responsibility for, particularly as specialist services have been drastically reduced in the past 10 years.
Let’s work together to help women victims of domestic violence to a survivor and build their lives.
“There is chaos around the women...the women are not chaotic. No one will face up to the fact that the systems we have to protect BAME women are not fit for purpose.”