ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the unique factors that impact on refugee women's experiences of domestic violence. The chapter is informed by two small qualitative studies involving refugee women and human service workers. The first of these was carried out as part of a larger project involving a South Australian domestic violence service in partnership with the Liberian community in South Australia. The second study was focused on the impact of encampment on domestic violence in refugee communities. This study involved individual interviews with refugee women who had spent time in camps overseas and in Australian detention centres. The refugee culture that is developed in response to such horrors offers women very restricted subject positions such as weak, passive, obedient and subservient to husbands and men. These gendered subject positions, which are reinforced by refugee discourses that construct asylum seekers as both victims passive and grateful and outsiders other and suspect silence women in contexts of domestic violence.
