Migration status and violence against women: four legal responses evaluated

Violence against women (VAW) is constitutive of patriarchal dominance and a distinctive human rights violation. This thesis explores VAW in the context of migration, focussing on the main laws governing migration to the UK and within the EU. To do so, it develops a conceptual account of VAW, one that is grounded in international law and which establishes what is at the core of this wrong: interpersonal, discriminatory violence. Part 1 of this thesis demonstrates that British immigration law disadvantages women, granting them migration statuses which make them dependent on others and which bestow few rights. Some of the rules that create this disadvantage are properly characterised as involving unlawful discrimination. This State-created disadvantage interacts with the extant risks and consequences of VAW in particular ways, including by granting its perpetrators access to the coercive power of the State. Not only does the State increase migrant women’s vulnerability to VAW, it compounds their experience of it. States and others, including the EU, have recognised that some migrant women’s experience of VAW warrants an immigration law response. This has, however, been achieved in a piecemeal fashion, by establishing what this thesis characterises as ‘regimes of exception’. Part 2 evaluates four of these regimes. Chapter 4 examines two sets of rules which determine the migration status of some domestic violence victims. Chapter 5 analyses the European trafficking regime, whilst Chapter 6 focuses on the Istanbul Convention. Contrary to the obligations identified in Part 1, Part 2 demonstrates that the domestic violence and trafficking regimes provide a migration status which is reparative of the compounded disadvantage migrant women experience in only a minority of cases. Accordingly, this thesis argues for States’ and the EU’s full ratification of the Istanbul Convention, and for comprehensive migration status reform, including the abolition of dependent migration statuses.