ABSTRACT
This chapter is focused on an important but relatively overlooked component of family violence: temporary migration status. Drawing on research with a family violence service provider that services the immigrant community in Victoria, Australia, the chapter maps the ways in which temporary migration status at once creates specific vulnerabilities to family violence and broader forms of exploitation (including, in some cases, human trafficking) and sustains these forms of violence. This chapter explores how gendered violence enacted by abusive partners can be sustained and enabled via migration regimes that seek to delimit women’s access to support based on their migration status. The chapter argues that the consequence is that there is a failure to recognise how migration status specifically enables abuse and can even empower perpetrators. Moreover, the experience of family violence in this context can extend across borders, and this experience is not just interpersonal, but reflects a further component of the gendered violence of borders. This lays the ground for the main theme of the chapter: that the study and understanding of coercive control must be considered beyond the interpersonal to include the role of the state, and that our intersectional analysis of gendered violence must include citizenship and non-citizenship.
