Violence against Women and Ethnicity: Commonalities and Differences across Europe

Front matter

iolence against Women and Ethnicity: Commonalities and Differences across Europe

Ravi K. Thiara, Stephanie A. Condon, Monika Schröttle (eds.)

Violence against Women and Ethnicity: Commonalities and Differences across Europe

Dedication

Thaibaran, for the ongoing love and support and for being there (RT).

As well as to ‘my three’, a special dedication and thanks for their guidance to two ‘great feminists’: Maryse J and my mum (SC).

For my courageous mother and for all mothers who teach their daughters self-respect, justice and pride (MS).

Part 1: Building and Sharing Knowledge about Violence Against Women in Europe

Violence Against Women: Still A Political Problem Throughout Europe Rosa LOGO nr nr nel Bent ee re rest ete bis Paes dde

What Do We Know About Gendered Violence and Ethnicity Across Europe From Surveys?

Stephanie Condon, Maud Lesné and Monika Schrôttle „o.s.

Part 2: Making the Links Particularly Violent? The Construction of Muslim Culture as a Risk

Factor for Domestic Violence Renée Römkens with Esmah Lahlah o.oo

10 Contents

Immigrant Women and Domestic Violence: Intersectional Perspectives in a Biographical Context Nadja Lehman 2.2 SE obs hese th shoe E Seve ents

From the Racialization of Sexism to Sexism as an Identity Marker Christelle HAMEL 28m net teen Deeks

Part 3: Forms and Effects of Violence Against Women

Male Violence Against Migrant Women: Denying Rights in a Racist Gender System Sabine Masson and Patricia ROUX su

Violence Against Migrant Women, Health and Sexuality: Trajectories of Women from Sub-Saharan Africa Living with HIV/AIDS in France Doölöres:Poürelte sine neneanens nette nent tte

Violence Against Women and the Social, Ethnic and Sexual Division of Labour: Continuity and Disparity Between Community Care Workers’ Experiences

Emmanuelle Lada and Ghislaine Doniol-Shaw „n.se

Ethnicities in the Aftermaths of Sexualised Coercion: Common Issues and Diverse Personal Meanings

Correlates of Partner Violence and Health among Migrant Women in Germany: Results of Comparable Analyses of Quantitative Survey Data

Monika Schröttle and Nadia Khelaifat „oaos

Racism, Violence and Health: The Living Experience of Immigrant Women in an Italian City

Patrizia Romito, Giuditta Creazzo, Daniela Paci and

Emanuela Pipitone mono ee N BO satin Noses eens

‘Hard, Feisty Women’ — ‘Coping on Your Own’: African-Caribbean Women and Domestic Violence Ravi K; Thidrä nn... en ee en ne enone:

Contents

Forced Marriages: Between Social Construction and Experience of Family Enforcement Beate Collet and Emmanuelle Santelli ossos

Part 4: Responses to Violence againsts Minority Ethnic Women

Standing in the Same Dream: Black and Minority Women’s Struggles Against Gender-Based Violence and for Equality in the UK

The Thin Line Between Protection, Care and Control: Violence Against Ethnic Minority Women in Denmark

In the Name of ‘Rights’ - BAMER Women, Terrorism and Violence Against Women Amrit Wilson and Sumanta Roy woeccccccsccssecssecsseesseesceescenseeusecseeeeeeseesneens

How Violence Against Women is Addressed in Social and Public Action for ‘Women in Immigrant Communities’: Mixed Standards and a Logic of Suspicion

Marion: Manier nues less. sailed in hein

Intimate Partner Violence and the Process of Seeking Help: Im/migrant Women Who Approached Anti-Violence Centres in Emilia-Romagna (Italy)

Giuditta Creazzo, Emanuela Pipitone and

Ana Maria Vega Alexandersson ss

Part 5: Is It a Question of (Their) Culture and (Our) Honour?

‘They’ Rape ‘Our’ Women: When Racism and Sexism Intermingle Alice: PCDAUCNE coe ssh tement etes teen

Violence Against Women in Minoritised Communities: Cultural Norm or Cultural Anomaly?

12 Contents

Women’s Rights, Welfare State Nationalism and Violence in Migrant Families SUVERESKINEN foo ices fie. Sa Ale odes sean ee er RU 367

Culture-Based Violence Against Immigrant Women in German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) Decisions Erol Rudolf Pohlreich ss 383

Culture and Ethnnicity in (Re-)constructing Domestic Homicides Daniela Gloor and Hanna Meier nn 399

Author Biographies 4... 38 en Tr rer Rene 414

Preface

Renate Klein

In the early 1990s, I moved from Germany to the United States. One consequence of this move was a change in my perspective on European research on Violence Against Women (VAW). As long as I had been in Germany differences between European countries had stood out but viewed from the U.S. they receded into the background. Instead, now the whole of Europe came into clearer relief as a large, complex, and diverse entity. I became increasingly interested in a European voice on VAW and began to organize a network of like-minded scholars and practitioners. It was during meetings of this European Network on Conflict, Gender, and Violence that I met the editors of this book and many of its contributors. They bring to this volume knowledge, awareness, and integrity.

The 1990s were a period of intense international and European networking related to VAW, by researchers and practitioners alike; it was infused with energy by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unprecedented opening and subsequent integration of Europe, punctuated by the large women-focused UN conferences — 1993 in Vienna, 1995 in Beijing — and reflected in the VAW-related initiatives over the past two decades by the Council of Europe and the European Union.

Networking thrives on the discovery of shared interests and concerns and the ability to join forces in the pursuit of a common goal. In terms of practice this was perhaps most obvious in the development of Europe-wide standards for intervention in VAW, led by the WAVE network out of Vienna. In terms of research, the Co-ordination Action on Human Rights Violations out of the University Osnabrück pushed the integration of European prevalence and evaluation research to a new level. Networking also reveals topics that have received less attention than they deserve. The role of ethnicity in VAW is one of these areas. It is to the great credit of the editors of this book to present, to an international readership, the first comprehensive Reader on VAW and ethnicity in Europe. They are exceptionally well-suited to do this.

Established scholars in their respective disciplines, the editors have assembled an excellent group of authors. Working in different European countries, the contributors approach ethnicity and VAW in Europe within a broad

14 Renate Klein and comprehensive framework. Ethnicity and VAW is not a homogenous phenomenon. Women from ethnic and racial minorities face different legal, cultural, and economic circumstances depending on which European country they live in. Public debates about women, gender, ethnicity and violence are shaped by national discourses about citizenship. For instance, while the notion (in Britain) of multi-culturalism emphasizes the presence of multiple cultural identities within a British nation state, the emphasis in France is on the integration within a French nation of individual citizens sharing French citizenship and identity.

Public and scholarly debates also reflect different histories. In the U.S. the category of race is predominantly and inextricably linked to the system of slavery and the civil rights movement, whereas ethnicity appears more often in relation to immigration, and Native Americans tend to be ignored in either discourse. In Europe, categories of ethnicity and race are linked to different histories again. They include the legacies of colonialism and the Nazi dictatorship. They also include the contemporary immigration and migration of people across Europe and the treatment of Roma, Sinti, and other traditionally nomadic groups.

A thoughtful analysis of VAW within these complex contexts presents a major challenge, which the editors and their authors have taken up with gusto. Empirical accounts of diverse experiences of VAW are balanced with analyses of similar structural problems. Underlying this balancing act is recognition that VAW reflects compound vulnerabilities in terms of how women suffer and how they seek help and redress. This is also a matter of how societies construct this suffering and help-seeking and how researchers can move to intellectually honest accounts of the diversity of VAW. The book offers a much needed broadening of intersectional approaches from the early focus on race, class, and gender to accounts that incorporate the challenges of cultural relativism and national security discourses.

These analyses have been lacking until now. The book is essential reading for anybody interested in a fuller story of VAW, one that neither excludes ethnic minority women nor simplifies or exoticizes their stories. The book’s unique contribution is that it addresses issues of ethnicity and VAW within and across national contexts, and thus makes visible how ethnicity and VAW are at once situated and discursively constructed in these. In doing so, the book also breaks through the habit of framing VAW as something that can happen to any woman. While this may be true in theory, in practice some women are more vulnerable than others, some have more money, political and social clout than others, and some live in precarious circumstances at the margin of society.

Preface 15

As I am writing this, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund and potential contender for the French presidency in 2012, is under house arrest in New York City for alleged sex crimes against a hotel maid. Strauss-Kahn is a wealthy white male and, until his resignation a couple of days ago, held one of the world economy’s most influential posts. The maid is a low-paid black immigrant from West Africa holding one of the world’s countless dead-end jobs. Regardless of the outcomes of the case, the press coverage about it already is a case study of how VAW reporting is entwined with sexist discourses about women, men, and national character. In order to move beyond simplistic accounts, we need careful and accessible scholarship. Within the cacophony of blogs and tweets this book sounds a reasoned voice for the thinking person.

Newburgh, Maine, May 2011

Professor in Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University Associate Professor in Human Development & Family Studies, University of Maine

This Reader, the first ever to bring together research and writing on issues of violence against women (VAW) and ethnicity across Europe, was born out of conversations that began between the editors during the pan-European project entitled Co-ordination Action on Human Rights and Violence (CAHRV) in 2005. At this time, academic and policy work on VAW and ethnicity in many European countries was still in its infancy or marginal to wider discussions on gendered violence. Hence, this volume was motivated by a concern about the lack of visibility of VAW and minority ethnic and migrant (MEM) women’s issues and the absence of MEM women articulating these issues within European conferences and events on VAW.

As has been established by extensive research and policy development, VAW is extremely widespread, and costs health, welfare and criminal justice services billions each year. More pronounced than even the economic costs are the human costs of the problem, which range from chronic physical health issues, severe injury, mental and emotional distress, and death. The recognition of VAW as an enduring problem, its costs to society, concerted activism by women’s movements, as well as international developments, within the United Nations (UN) in particular, began to shape responses to the issue across Europe. The recognition of VAW as a human rights concern within the UN, in the early 1990s, following after CEDAW, and the adoption of the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women culminated in the creation of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women (UNSRVAW) to monitor VAW worldwide (UN SRVAW 2009). Not without its challenges, the Special Rapporteur mandate established in 1994 has provided the necessary push and a momentum in the requirement of national governments to address VAW, the definition and scope of which has evolved over the years. In addition to these developments, the Council of Europe, since the Ministerial Conference in Rome in 1993, has explicitly recognized that the elimination of VAW is central to ensuring democracy and human rights. In general, although VAW is now no longer regarded as a private family affair, it remains an intractable problem, despite important developments and progress in addressing it across many countries, including in Europe.

While ethnicity and gender are not reducible to either minority ethnic groups or women, in this Reader our concern with ethnicity and VAW is focused on issues for MEM women experiencing gendered violence. Since the Reader is the first of its kind, bringing together much of the existing work on this issue, it presents a challenge to the hitherto absence and marginality and the fragmentary knowledge base about MEM women within academic, policy, and practice debates across much of Europe.

Migration and ethnicity

Migration of people from MEM communities is common across much of Europe where the presence of a younger generation of minority ethnic groups who are European citizens, along with more recent migrations, are now an established fact. There are, of course, important differences in terms of periods of migration and the range of minority ethnic groups that have migrated and settled in each national context. This trajectory of migration is influenced, among other factors, by historical links between colonial powers and the colonized, which saw the movement of people from ex-colonies to colonial centres. Women’s role within these migration processes has not always received extensive academic and research attention even though the feminization of migration to many countries in Europe has been highlighted since the early 1980s (Morokvasic 1984; Phizaclea 1983; 2003; Andall 2003).

Just as the migration and settlement of minority ethnic groups across Europe has differed, so have policy and political discourses about their incorporation into the host society, frequently dominated by the assimilation/integration versus multi-culturalism argument, and the reception given to them by the majority community (Favell 1998). The structural location of MEM groups has in turn shaped their own responses in terms of self organization and activism to challenge their marginality. For instance, in the UK, drawing on their experiences of anti-colonial struggles, black migrants began very early on to self organize and set up political organizations that provided a challenge to their discriminatory treatment. Within this movement, black feminists also began to forge their own autonomous organizations from the 1970s onwards, a few of which continue to exist even today and have been a crucial part of the challenge to VAW within MEM communities. Across many European countries, however, organization by MEM has not been as strong as in the UK and issues have remained rather marginalized. Despite such important differences, many similarities can also be seen in the construction of the immigrant as ‘other’ and related discourses.

Gender, ethnicity and violence against women

With few exceptions, theoretical and empirical separation in the study of gender and ethnicity across Europe has been noted by numerous researchers’. There has been some important work on gender and ethnicity, influenced by theoretical developments in ‘race’ and ethnic studies and post colonial feminism, which has sought to challenge the negative and homogenous construction of MEM women (see Lutz 1997). Within the wider scholarship on ethnicity and on gender across much of Europe, despite extensive literature on immigration and ethnicity, the links between gender, ethnicity and VAW has been a particularly marked absence (Condon 2005).

VAW, not always so termed, has been at the forefront of feminist struggles across Europe since the 1970s. However, the form this has taken has varied, shaped as it was by local and international impetus, as has the content and goals of VAW and women’s movements. Developments, including legislation, legal and support measures, to address VAW also vary across European countries where the main focus has been on domestic violence (see Martinez and Schrôttle et al., CAHRV Reports 2006-2007). Interventions to support victims of VAW vary across countries. For instance, in Austria and Germany intervention centres for survivors of domestic violence are run by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) but are funded by the Federal Ministries of the Interior, Social and Family Affairs. In the Netherlands, victims are supported through general Victim Support Centres within which specialist domestic violence support is provided. In the UK, Women’s Aid, a federation of local independent refuge and other domestic violence support services, along with Refuge, a national organization with local services, remain the largest providers of support (Humphreys and Carter et al. 2006, CAHRV Reports: 11). Rather than being concerned with the details of VAW and immigration responses across Europe, however, this Reader is concerned with the impact of these at both symbolic and material levels on MEM women experiencing VAW in all its forms.

1 See Lloyd, 2000; and Andall’s book on gender, ethnicity and migration provided an important early contribution to linking these issues by giving recognition to minority ethnic women’s social, cultural and political experiences in Europe.

There are numerous studies across Europe that focus on issues of VAW in different European national contexts and provide an important insight (see Martinez and Schrôttle et al., CAHRV Reports 2006-2007). Much of these, with few exceptions (see chapter by Condon, Lesne and Schrôttle in this Reader), do not substantively address the location of MEM women within these debates and developments. The Daphne Programme, which has funded numerous research initiatives on domestic violence and VAW, also provides some useful information (European Commission 2009). Overall, in much of the debates about ethnicity and immigration as well as gender and VAW, MEM women have either been absent and marginal or more recently constructed and represented in particular ways. It is only recently that some researchers have begun to focus on the particular issues encountered by MEM women facing gendered violence, work that has resulted in publications that have begun to foreground these linkages and intersections (Hovarth and Kelly 2007; Sokoloff and Pratt 2005; Thiara and Gill 2010). Indeed, it is true to say that, with the exception of those in this Reader, there is extremely limited research and information available across Europe, making the knowledge base across different contexts very uneven. What is available often focuses on women’s experiences of culturally specific forms of harm or constructs VAW as an issue of culture rather than gender. The UK, where the history of settlement and activism is longer for MEM women, perhaps provides a richer source of information and knowledge.

In addressing VAW across different groups and national contexts, the SRVAW has been significant in expanding and nuancing the debate about the causes and consequences of VAW and the accountability of states to address its wide ranging effects on different groups of women. For instance, in challenging the public/private divide and ‘expanding state accountability” beyond private actors for private acts of violence’, the SRVAW has asked states to address the external pressures that exacerbate domestic violence for particular groups, including racism, socio-economic marginalization and restrictive immigration policies (UNSRVAW 2009: 12). This has led to a call for countries such as Sweden, with established gender-equality policies, to address the remaining gaps in terms of gender inequality as well as protection gaps for particular groups of women, including immigrant, refugee or

2 The due diligence standard has been central to developing state responsibility for violence perpetrated by private actors in public and private arenas. It imposes on the state the responsibility for illegal acts that are not directly committed by the state or its agents but by private actors on account of state failure to take sufficient steps to prevent the illegal acts from occurring. Equally, once an illegal act has occurred, the state’s inaction and failure to investigate, prosecute or punish the act perpetrated by a private actor amounts to neglect of the state obligation to be duly diligent (UNSRVAW 2009: 25).

asylum seeking. In the Netherlands, attention has been drawn not only to gender-neutral state responses (as part of gender mainstreaming) but the ‘cultural essentialist responses’ (p.13) to violence in migrant communities. In general, it is underlined that effective responses to VAW require ‘multifaceted strategies’ to tackle multiple violence forms, including addressing laws that exclude women from accessing support and protection because of their immigration status (UNSRVAW 2009; Roy 2008; Thiara and Gill 2010).

The Reader integrates parallel discourses on VAW and ethnicity in Europe to examine the particular issue for MEM women. Although some countries have a stronger evidence base than others, in selecting contributions attempts were made to give voice to all countries, though some disparity may still remain. Consequently, debates differ and in some countries the experiences of MEM are only starting to be highlighted whilst in others debate is inextricably linked with wider critiques of politics, policy and practice — both mainstream and within the VAW sector. Although research evidence is extremely limited on MEM women’s experiences of VAW and their access to legal and other support, research shows that they experience greater exclusion and vastly reduced access to legal solutions for violence when compared with women who have secure immigration status. An Austrian study shows that immigrant women are often unable to contact the police because they do not speak the language or are afraid of involving authorities (see Humphreys and Carter et al. 2006). Consequently, many MEM seek assistance from refuges or women’s shelters, where they are often over-represented (see chapter by Creazzo et al. in this Reader). This has led some to argue that this overrepresentation means that MEM women face few barriers to accessing help. However, such arguments ignore that majority (white) European women have often more recourse to other actions and measures when compared with MEM women, who are socially and economically marginalized, with greater dependency on men and families, and whose options are likely to be reduced. Thus, immigration status, or lack of citizenship, continues to be a major cause of unequal access to protection for women experiencing VAW across Europe. Different laws and legislations exist across the countries to shape this. For instance, the CAHRV study viewed immigration as a fourth planet in determining women’s access to justice and protection (Humphreys and Carter et al. 2006). Indeed, immigration status breaches human rights and fails to offer women protection against violence. Moreover, in the name of protecting women from actual or potential violence, including forced marriage, government responses have been to restrict immigration (Bredal 2005).

However, there is still no European wide study documenting the range and nature of responses to MEM women. Without this, it is hard to say, with any certainty, if the support and protection needs of such women are being met adequately. Even in those countries that provide some insight into effective responses to some MEM groups, recent developments suggest that these are being eroded rather than being strengthened. The aim of this Reader is to provide a more cohesive knowledge base about the intersection of ethnicity, gender and VAW whilst aiming to give primacy to MEM women’s specificity within VAW discourses. It further seeks to foreground the complexity and interconnections between different categories of VAW. The contributions to this Reader also highlight the current absence of MEM women themselves writing about these issues across many countries in Europe. Whilst gaps remain and there is much more research to be done to explore the specificity of MEM women’s experiences of VAW, along with the responses to this, this Reader provides some insight into the particular aspects of a number of European contexts in constructing discourses around VAW and ethnicity. Discourses have taken distinct forms across Europe, though there is also some commonality, and more recently the intersectional discrimination which compounds risks for women from marginalized or racialised communities has increasingly been emphasized, albeit in essentialist ways.

Violence against women and ethnicity

The intersection of VAW and ethnicity has generated interesting debate in recent years. VAW within MEM communities and especially violence experienced by MEM women and their descendents has become a significant issue in politics, policy, and media debates. Much of this has been critiqued for essentialising minority/migrant cultures and communities and for seeing them as inherently violent (see chapter by Manier in this volume). Indeed, the SRVAW has problematised this approach arguing that

The particularization of domestic violence among non-Western immigrants as a cultural problem...[is] problematic, as it discounted the relationship of socioeconomic disadvantage and restrictive immigrant policies to domestic violence. (UNSRVAW 2009: 13).

The growth of religious fundamentalism and ‘Muslim terrorism’ with its accompanying security agenda since 9/11 and the conservative political trends fuelled by this has added a particular angle to debates about violence against MEM women. The greater polarization between countries and communities created after 9/11 has provided fertile ground for cultural discourses, which pose a serious challenge to gender equality and MEM women’s rights, both from within their communities and from external nationalist discourses (see Patel and Siddiqui in this volume). Thus, discourses on ‘harmful traditional practices’, such as forced marriage, honour-based violence, and female genital mutilation, have at times become parallel discourses to that of VAW in some national contexts, despite the attempts by many MEM and other feminists to resist this and conceptualise these practices as gendered violence where the intersection of culture and gender are given primacy (Bredal 2005; 2011; Gill and Anitha 2011).

Two trends within cultural discourses can be discerned and have been problematised (see Chantler and Gangoli in this volume; Welchmann and Hossain 2005). On the one hand are arguments, underpinned by cultural relativism, which reject universal human rights and undermine women’s equality (articulated from within cultural communities). On the other hand are cultural essentialist approaches which, in the process of ‘othering’, view some cultures, communities and countries as inherently and uniformly toxic for women, a view that has taken a stranglehold in the popular imagination across much of Europe. It also serves to view violence in majority societies as individualized aberrations (see Chantler and Gangoli in this volume). Both place MEM women, subjectively and structurally, in extremely difficult and contradictory positions. Moreover, such responses have failed to improve the situation for MEM women, who frequently find themselves having to negate the valued aspects of their traditions and cultures to be constructed as victims of traditional and patriarchal violence. This leaves women with restricted options as many want to be protected against male violence without making the choice of ‘exit’ from their communities (see Gill and Mitra-Khan 2010). Together, both perspectives fail to address the underlying causes of VAW. To make connections within and between different women and VAW, the importance of exposing patterns of domination within rather than differences between cultures, interrogating hegemonic interpretations of culture, and addressing the patriarchal socio-economic and political interests within and outside that benefit from such interpretations has been emphasised. In some countries, MEM have carved out a third space for their voices and indeed were the first critics of the increasing move towards religious fundamentalism (as in the UK through the Women Against Fundamentalism group).

Thus, cultural discourses (cultural relativists and cultural essentialists) resist women’s rights and uphold patriarchal order, on the one hand, and ‘fix’, through homogenizing constructions, cultural communities, on the other. This is further explored in ‘their’ culture, ‘our’ honour section of the Reader. Indeed, as can be seen from a number of countries in Europe, cultural essentialism serves to justify state action or inaction on VAW against MEM women. By highlighting discourses that reinforce a view of MEM as experiencing greater levels of VAW, some European state responses to addressing violence against MEM women have involved the tightening of immigration controls which have been couched as protecting MEM women and outlining requirements for social and cultural integration, but which fail to address their socio-economic and political marginality (see Hester et al. 2008).

Culture versus gender

As noted above, the utilisation of ‘culture’ by particular religious-cultural political projects, where cultural justifications are used to limit women’s rights, has been increasingly documented and critiqued. Of particular concern to feminist writers has been the acceptance by government and political players, and sometimes feminists, of not only the dominant patriarchal voices within communities which marginalize women’s (dissenting) voices but a viewpoint which privileges culture in justifying violence against MEM women (as in the UK for instance; see Patel and Siddiqui in this volume). Indeed, the importance and value of foregrounding women’s voices as a counter narrative, which highlight the contestation within communities and disrupt homogenizing explanations of culture, to hegemonic interpretations of culture and identity and which serve to limit secular spaces, has been urged (Patel and Siddiqui 2010). Such competing narratives from women highlight the fact that: the threat to women’s human rights comes from the monopoly over the interpretation and representation of culture by the powerful few rather than from culture per se’. (UNSRVAW 2009: 29)

Writers have for some time now pointed to the role that women play as cultural entrepreneurs in their constant negotiation and renegotiation of cultural norms and values which leads, in migration settings, to hybrid or syncretic cultural forms. This has highlighted the importance of seeing culture not as a static but as a constantly evolving, contested and re/negotiated terrain. To only see MEM women as ‘victims’ of their cultures, a view widely challenged, then is to do a disservice to the positive role that culture also plays in many MEM women’s lives. Moreover, the simplistic view of women as victims of their cultures from which they need protection, a logical outcome of the acceptance of the ‘harmful traditional practices’ argument, has been widely challenged, as essentialising MEM communities as backward and uncivilised. For these reasons, for instance, the SRVAW rejected the term ‘harmful traditional practices’ in favour of ‘harmful practices’ in relation to cultural practices that erode women’s rights (see UNSRVAW 2009).

To only see VAW as a facet of cultural communities is also to separate VAW from structural inequalities underpinning ‘race’, class, and gender systems and results in inadequate conceptual explanations. At an international level, the emphasis placed on addressing the causes and consequences of VAW through the UN has enabled emphasis to be placed on gender inequality and an interrogation of approaches that de-link VAW from the overall subordination of women. Thus, when VAW is viewed as an outcome of gender discrimination it becomes an inevitable outcome of unequal socioeconomic, cultural and political structures. This perspective enables us to see women not simply as vulnerable victims in need of protection but VAW as an outcome of a gendered order, frequently challenged at individual and collective levels, that privileges male violence, individual and collective, which is used to ensure women’s compliance. This is further compounded for MEM women who are located at the intersection of multiple axes of oppression and discrimination. However, discourses on honour-based violence and forced marriage, as highlighted by a number of contributions to this volume, have tended to privilege culture rather than gender in explanations which draw on essentialized notions of culture and tradition and serve to stigmatise MEM women and their communities. Such discourses have created a binary of the emancipated white woman and the oppressed MEM woman, both of which serve to normalize the violence and discrimination of white women and to marginalize MEM women (UNSRVAW 2009: 36).