Bodies as territories of exception: the coloniality and gendered necropolitics of state and intimate border violence against migrant women in England

ABSTRACT

Based on research with Latin American women in England, this paper explores how coloniality and gendered necropower is structurally embedded into the UK immigration regime, enabling multi-scalar (re)configurations of border violence. I build on the everyday bordering literature to uncover the under-theorised intimate and embodied dimensions of border violence. Intimate border violence is coined to refer to specific forms of state-sponsored interpersonal violence stemming from immigration policies and practices. Abusive men exploit the hostile environment's logic of deputisation to perform bordering against their migrant partners through threats of deportation, destitution, criminalization and homelessness. The embodied politics of coloniality reproduces hierarchies of (in)humanity and informs the state's necropolitical management of its territory. From within the national space, border violence re-territorializes migrant women's bodies as annexed territories of exception reduced to bare-life. Legal abandonment enables sovereign power to be exerted not only by the state but also by abusive partners.

KEYWORDS:

• Intimate violence
• migration
• women
• territory
• coloniality
• necropolitics

1. Introduction

The moment I returned [from Mexico], the moment I returned with my spouse visa, he started to constantly threaten me, “if you don’t behave well, I’m going to put you in a plane and send you back to your country” […], and I’d say, “How can you tell me that? I can’t believe you are telling me that, I’m not a dog!”

(Diana, Mexican, mixed-race white and indigenous, 23 years)

Through his statements, Diana’s husband effectively embodied the territorial powers of immigration law, performing bordering as a means of controlling and disciplining her. The boundaries between state violence and intimate partner violence become blurred as national borders are not only controlled by state officials but also by abusers at the intimate and embodied scales. Having a British spouse visa meant that Diana qualified to use one of the only legal routes for migrant survivors to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) – the Domestic Violence Rule (DVR).¹ However, like many other women in her situation, Diana was not aware of this route or any other form of support. Socially and spatially isolated in a small English town, she felt she had to endure abuse until the end of the probationary period of her visa. It was not until her husband physically attacked her and tried to strangle her that Diana called the police. Upon seeing physical evidence of abuse, the police temporarily took her husband into custody, who claimed they were already separating and that Diana was inventing the story to be able to regularize her immigration status. Diana eventually applied for and was granted an ILR under the DVR. However, the criminal court acquitted her husband’s charges – with his lawyers claiming that Diana provoked him to create evidence of violence to secure permanent status. The trial was highly re-traumatising for Diana as border violence was explicitly weaponised against her in a continuum (Kelly 1988) of state and intimate abuse.

The experiences of Diana and other Latin American survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) participating in my research reveal how abusive men reassert their border authority by projecting national sovereign power onto women’s Cuerpo-Territorios/body-territories (Cabnal 2010; Zaragocin 2018) – territorialized as annexed extensions of the national territory though under a state of emergency (Agamben 1998). Whilst this more evidently occurs when women’s immigration status is insecure or tied to their marriage, border violence may also be directed at migrant women with a permanent or regularized status independent of the perpetrator. The material and discursive production of “illegality” is a powerful strategy of intimate border violence that can be weaponised against Latin American migrant women regardless of their status.

State violence against racialised migrant women are identified in the literature regarding institutionalized racism, immigration control, reduced rights and uneven access to resources and services (Anitha 2010; Critical Resistance and Incite! 2003; Lopes Heimer 2019; McIlwaine, Granada, and Valenzuela-Oblitas 2019). Authors highlight the importance of accounting for intersectional structural factors relating to the migration experience, such as immigration status, language abilities, economic precarity and social isolation (Anitha 2011; McIlwaine and Evans 2020; Menjívar and Salcido 2002). They tend to emphasize these as “stressors’ or “risk factors’ that increase migrant women’s vulnerability to violence (McIlwaine and Evans 2020; Menjívar and Salcido 2002). I conceive the coloniality materially embedded in the UK border regime not only as a stressor but as the source of a particular form of state and (state-sponsored) intimate violence. This regime wields state border violence deployed against migrant women across multiple scales. In particular, state border violence manifests itself in intimate and embodied scales in what I conceptualize as intimate border violence.

By intimate border violence, I mean a form of state-sponsored intimate violence directly stemming from the state border violence linked to the UK immigration system and its necropolitical operating logic. Although extensive literature explores the interconnections between violence and borders, border violence is widely conceptualized in relation to the state (Chubin and Ramirez 2020; Esposito and Kellezi 2020; Pellander and Horsti 2018; Schindel 2019; Tofighian 2020; Topak 2019), whilst its intimate manifestations are under-theorised. Intimate border violence is enacted by abusive men through intimate bordering practices to exert power and control against their migrant partners not only at and through the national and global scales but also at and through the intimate scales of the body and home. Building and expanding work on everyday bordering (Cassidy 2019; Griffiths and Yeo 2021; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018, 2019), I show how the UK immigration policies are designed to extend border policing into intimate spaces and onto women’s bodies. They enable violent men to control women and their mobility across multiple scales: the body-territory, the home, the national and global.

In this paper, I explore the relationship between the state and intimate violence against Latin American migrant women through a multi-scalar focus on border violence. My analysis points towards forms of violence that may speak to the experiences of other groups of gendered “colonial migrants’ (Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015). As a result of the geo-historical experience of colonialism, Latin American women are highly heterogeneous regarding skin colour, culture, religion, language, race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The gendered colonial gaze through which they are constructed in England differs according to their specific intersectional positionings, informing their experiences of intimate and state abuse in intricate ways (something which I am developing in more detail elsewhere). However, this paper primarily focuses on how bordering practices are structured to operate under a necropolitical logic that is racist and gendered (Mbembe 2003; Wright 2011), exacerbating racialised migrant women’s exposure to state and intimate border violence across nationality groups. It is worth noting that white Latin American women are not subjected to skin colour racism. Yet, other aspects of their geo-territorial identities may mark them as inferior to white Europeans and possible targets of border violence. As Gutiérrez-Rodríguez (2014, 197) rightly suggests, migration regimes work as contemporary “technologies of colonial othering”, which disproportionally, but not exclusively, impact racialised populations and maintain them within inferior legal/economic statuses. I also recognize that many Latin Americans who migrate to England hold EU passports or EU-family visas, having been intersectionally affected by Brexit (Turcatti and Vargas-Silva 2022). Nonetheless, this paper draws on data collected before the UK effectively withdrew from the European Union (EU). Although outside the scope of my analysis, Brexit is likely to have opened up further avenues for intimate border violence and should be the focus of future research.

My analysis traces the multi-scalar workings of border violence against migrant women, from state to state-sponsored intimate manifestations. It employs multi-scalar lenses (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Hyndman 2001, 2012), adopting a decolonial feminist conceptualization of coloniality (Lugones 2008; Quijano 2000), necropolitics (Mbembe 2003; Wright 2011) and an embodied re-scaling of the state of exception (Agamben 1998; Pratt 2005) – through which race, gender and class are understood to be mutually co-constitutive. I reveal racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya 2018; Robinson 2000) and gendered underpinnings and implications of the UK border regime.

Through a myriad of border-making practices, I explore how territorial power relations produce migrant women as embodied territories of exception (Agamben 1998; Pratt 2005), as targets for surveillance and disciplining, as “illegal”, deportable and disposable (De Genova 2002). The enactment of territoriality produces territory, here intrinsically tied to a multi-scalar reconfiguration of UK borders to control migrants from within the territorial space (Balibar 2003; Hyndman 2012; Jones and Johnson 2014). I expand on literature analysing neoliberal globalization processes of de-territorialization/re-territorialization and practices of de-bordering/re-bordering, moving away from national boundaries (Wastl-Walter and Staeheli 2004; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019). I build on these to investigate how (re)bordering penetrates the intimate and embodied scales to control and re-territorialize migrant women’s bodies. Through the proliferation of bordering practices, border violence is not only exerted at the state level, but extends to intimate and embodied scales as sovereign power is outsourced to ordinary citizens, including migrant women’s abusive partners.

I set out the theoretical framework for approaching the UK immigration regime in the following. I then discuss the context of Latin American migration to the UK, the PhD project informing the analysis contained in this paper and the methodology used. The second half of the article is dedicated to analysing the empirical material, exploring how border violence is embodied and enacted through the intimate relationships and the geopolitics of home.

2. Coloniality and necropolitics in the UK immigration regime

The UK immigration law sustains colonial power by protecting not only territory but also colonially derived wealth and infrastructures from global racialised populations impoverished by colonialism (El-Enany 2020). Nadine El-Enany (2020, 27) re-frames it as a “racial regime of power”, which maintains the global racial power introduced by colonialism through (b)ordering and classifying people into hierarchical legal categories that effectively regulate humanity along racial lines. Similarly to other Global North contexts, immigration regimes and border politics work to produce and sustain racial categorization and colonial othering (Gilmartin 2018; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2014).

This understanding of the UK immigration system suggests that coloniality (Quijano 2000) is structurally manifested in modern “Britain”² through immigration policies and practices. However, I go further to argue that gender, like race and class, is structurally embedded into this system, as these markers are intersectionally produced and co-constituted by coloniality (Lugones 2008). The hierarchies of humanity created by the UK immigration regime disproportionally impact former colonized, racialised poor populations in capitalist and gendered ways.

Immigration legal categories and everyday bordering are instrumental in perpetuating ongoing colonial dispossession through controlling territory, people and resources (El-Enany 2020). Geopolitics scholars have pointed to how the geopolitical management of the territory and the biopolitical management of populations influence one another, mainly through border control practices (Gilmartin and Kofman 2004; Hyndman 2012).

In this sense, the geopolitical management of territory is intimately connected to necropolitics (Mbembe 2003), for it draws on the threat of violence and death as a technique of territorial governance. Through its immigration system design, the UK state reaffirms its multi-scalar sovereign necropower “to dictate who may live and who must die” (Mbembe 2003, 11). Certain bodies are legally abandoned as bare-life (Agamben 1998; Pratt 2005), exposed to harm and left to die. Creating differentiated access to conditions of life and death, immigration policies and discourses effectively produce migrant bodies as deportable and disposable (Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017; Mayblin, Wake, and Kazemi 2020; Mbembe 2003). Necropower is the operating logic of coloniality – institutionally embedded in immigration law, whereby exposure to and acceptability of death for some are justified by the state as a means of protecting the lives of others. Although Mbembe (2003) conceptualizes necropolitics as a politics of death primarily organized around race, my analysis concurs with scholars who suggest the centrality of gender (and class) to necropower (Brickell 2020; Threadcraft 2017; Wright 2011). Connected to this is the recognition that the state sovereign power’s creation of spaces of exception is informed by coloniality as a matrix of power, therefore producing gendered racialised migrant bodies as bare-life (Agamben 1998; Mountz 2013; Pratt 2005). Racialised, gendered and class-based hierarchical notions of (in)humanity reproduced by the immigration system inform how the necropolitical state determines who dies and who lives. The embodied politics of coloniality is intrinsically connected to necropolitics, the politics of death (Lugones 2008; Mbembe 2003; Quijano 2000). In England, the exposure of racialised migrant women’s bodies to conditions of death is an ongoing reality enacted through external borders and, as I aim to theoretically and empirically evidence here, ever more internal, intimate and embodied ones. From within the state territory, border violence territorializes migrant women’s bodies as annexed spaces of exception upon which legal abandonment (Agamben 1998) enables sovereign power to be exerted not only by the state but also by abusive partners.

The proliferation of everyday/internal borders (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019) emerges as a necropolitical technique of government(ality) of territory/migration with clear racial and gendered implications. This marks a progressive shift in the UK immigration policy from external borders — at the edges of the territory — to internal ones, whereby borders and their practices permeate everyday life, moving through to the centre of the political space (Balibar 2003; Jones and Johnson 2014; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018). This re-territorialization of borders is accompanied by a scalar shift in bordering responsibilities from state immigration officers to a range of professionals, and ordinary citizens called on to adopt the role of border guards through everyday bordering practices (Griffiths and Yeo 2021; Mckee et al. 2021; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018).

The No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) condition is a major internal bordering technology of legal abandonment with explicit racialised and gendered necropolitical effects. Legally introduced within Section 115 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, the NRPF restricts access to colonial wealth by barring those subjected to immigration control from accessing life-saving welfare support and public services. The necropolitical consequences of NRPF on migrant families and their children are well documented, having been conceptualized as a “statutory neglect” (Jolly 2018) and a “necropolitical exception” (Farmer 2020). The gendered necropolitical implications of this policy are particularly salient for migrant women survivors of IPV. Regardless of their imminent risk of death at the hands of their partners, NRPF prevents most migrant women from accessing women’s refuges, housing support and welfare benefits (Anitha 2008, 2010, 2011; Lopes Heimer 2019; McIlwaine, Granada, and Valenzuela-Oblitas 2019).

By instructing state officials and state-funded services to deny support to migrant women experiencing violence, immigration policy effectively produce them as internal embodied territories of exception. Stripped of basic means of survival, they are exposed to conditions of violence and death, caught at the crossfire of state border violence in the form of statutory destitution and intimate violence at their partners’ hands. Whilst this is true for all women subjected to NRPF, those who are undocumented are further exposed to a proliferation of everyday borders that create insecurity, precarity and “illegality” (Griffiths and Yeo 2021; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018, 2019). Under the threat of criminalization, detention and deportation, migrant women become further trapped in violent relationships as they may fear seeking support and justice.

Technologies of everyday bordering have begun to be introduced in the UK immigration legislation since the 1970s, with the 1971 Immigration Act requiring aircraft and ship agents to carry out immigration checks on passengers (Griffiths and Yeo 2021; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018). Subsequent acts increased fines for non-compliance and widened the reach of everyday borders to the realms of employment and marriage. Formally enshrined in the 2014 Immigration Act (later extended and fortified in the 2016 Immigration Act), “hostile environment” policies sought to make undocumented migrants’ lives hostile enough that they would prefer to return to their countries voluntarily. Recognizing the inefficacy of national borders in deterring irregular migration, these policies diffuse border controls into the everyday, demanding that citizens become border guards under the threat of being fined and/or criminalized (Griffiths and Yeo 2021). Griffiths and Yeo (2021, 3) argue that the “hostile environment” marks a more openly punitive policy approach to migration that firmly introduces a logic of “deputisation”, that is, “the co-opting of organizations and people as de facto immigration officers’. It requires landlords, banks, healthcare professionals, social workers, police officers, marriage registrants, schools and homeless services to routinely carry out immigration checks on people and regularly share data with the Home Office. Indeed, the hostile environment mobilizes an unprecedented range of sectors, agencies, professionals and citizens to the task of border policing (Griffiths and Yeo 2021).

Hostile environment bordering practices inevitably operate under a racially profiling logic creating suspicion and insecurity among racialised populations who become a target regardless of their citizenship status, as illustrated by the Windrush scandal (El-Enany 2020; Griffiths and Yeo 2021; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018). They create death worlds (Mbembe 2003), whereby undocumented migrants’ precarity, marginalization, criminalization, deportability and premature death are not only produced but ideologically legitimated by the state. Although the draconian everyday effects of hostile environment policies have been documented, little attention is paid to how “deputisation” extends into the intimate and embodied scales, amounting to a contemporary intimate form of colonial (border) violence which points toward the re-scaling of sovereign territorial power.

I argue that the expansion and diffusion of everyday borders through “deputisation” performs a specific pedagogic work that normalizes and expands this operating logic to intimate and embodied realms. By making citizens responsible for border policing, immigration law and discourses suggest that monitoring and controlling migrants is not only acceptable but a duty. The message is that immigration enforcement is truly everyone’s responsibility. This creates a conducive context for abusers to deploy intimate and embodied bordering practices against their migrant partners to exert sovereign power and control. Whilst abusers are not explicitly required by immigration legislation to act as de facto immigration officers, they are empowered and provided with a rationale.

Abusers create a “hostile environment” for migrant women at home, vis-à-vis a national backdrop of hostility against migrants produced by the state and sustained through everyday bordering practices entangled in the civil society. Although the hostile environment impacts undocumented migrants more severely, its capacity to create an atmosphere of generalized fear, insecurity and distrust among all racialised migrants is capitalized on by abusers (Flynn 2015; Griffiths and Yeo 2021).

3. Context and methodology

Despite the absence of direct colonial links, Latin Americans are a growing non-EU migrant population in England, having arrived in significant numbers first in the 1970s as political exiles, through to the 1990s and 2000s as students, economic migrants, and via onward migration from Southern Europe (McIlwaine, Cock, and Linneker 2011; McIlwaine and Bunge 2016, 2019). In 2013, it was estimated that the UK was home to at least 250,000 Latin Americans, 145,000 of which were based in London (McIlwaine and Bunge 2016). We are a racially diverse community comprising multiple nationalities, but Brazilians (38%) and Colombians (23%) are the largest groups (McIlwaine and Bunge 2016).

Despite half being qualified at the tertiary level and employment rates at 70%, Latin American migrants tend to be economically deprived and occupy precarious jobs (e.g. cleaning and service) (McIlwaine and Bunge 2016). Immigration barriers and limited English ability contribute to that, with 1 in 5 struggling to communicate in English and an estimate of 19% being irregular or undocumented (McIlwaine, Cock, and Linneker 2011; McIlwaine and Bunge 2016). Nonetheless, many hold a British (31%) or European passport (22%). Structural barriers affecting the general Latin American community in England intersect with gender to further disadvantage Latin American women, who represent over half of Latin Americans in London (53%).

As a racialised Brazilian woman living in London for over a decade, I witnessed some of these disadvantages first-hand. In 2015, I volunteered at the Latin American Women’s Rights Service (LAWRS) and from 2016–2020 I worked at Latin American Women’s Aid (LAWA). LAWA is a by-and-for Latin American women’s organization specializing in gender-based violence. They run the only three refuges for Latin American women fleeing violence and receive referrals from across the country. My analysis of LAWA’s internal datasets (2019) revealed that among 194 users³ who experienced at least one type of IPV, over half (58%) were not comfortable speaking English, and 40% were undocumented or were in a temporary or dependent visa.⁴ Out of those, only 8% held a British spouse visa, and 16% held an EU/EEA family visa, whilst the remaining 16% had temporary visas (e.g. tourism, work or student visas) or were undocumented. Abusive partners commonly used immigration status to exert control, with 69% of undocumented women and 76% of women with precarious or dependent visas reporting this abuse.

Motivated by my work at LAWA, in 2018, I started a PhD study investigating Latin American migrant women’s experiences of intimate and state violence and resistance in England. This paper is part of this research. In addition to receiving the KCL research ethics committee’s approval, my fieldwork was guided by the principles of embodied relational accountability (Daigle 2018; Daigle and Sundberg 2017; Ramírez 2018) and refusal (Simpson 2007; Tuck and Yang 2014) to address the potential of individual and collective harm. My methodology was developed and implemented in consultation with front-line workers from LAWA to ensure an ethical and sensitive process. This included 3-months of participant observation, through which I was able to support one front-line worker with cases of survivors who consented to my involvement. I also interviewed ten Latin American women who work in the front-line supporting survivors. They helped me recruit participants by disseminating information about the study among women they supported who were no longer experiencing violence and were considered relatively stable, emotionally and materially. Only when women showed interest in the project, I was advised to contact them directly to provide further information.

I conducted twenty life-story interviews with Latin American migrant women survivors of IPV. After being interviewed, ten took part in a Body-Territory mapping activity as part of the Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios methodology (see Lopes Heimer 2022). This builds on Cuerpo-Territorio as a concept and method that understands bodies and territories as part of a continuum (Cabnal 2010; Zaragocin and Caretta 2020). Conducted remotely in their own homes, women drew their silhouettes on a body-size piece of paper. Responding to specific questions, they mapped their feelings, emotions, sensations and memories through drawing and writing. Participants discussed and analysed the finalized maps during five debrief video conference sessions with two women each.

The twenty survivors participating in my research were all cis women from nine countries in Latin America.⁵ Most migrated to England with or to join their partners, whilst others were fleeing abuse or looking for better economic opportunities. Some were onward migrants, moving here after a period in another European country. Most participants held a regularized immigration status at the time of their interview. However, many were previously undocumented or had a precarious or dependent status when they experienced abuse. Some were of Indigenous descent, Black or white, whilst the majority were racially mixed. Most women identified as heterosexual and were working in precarious, low-paid jobs (e.g. cleaning, housekeeping, cooking).⁶

I conducted, recorded, transcribed and analysed all interviews and discussions in the participants’ native languages, Spanish or Portuguese (except when participants switched between English and their languages). I only translated to English specific quotes included in the findings. Data were analysed thematically as part of an iterative and circular process (Kitchin and Tate 2014), which occurred during and after fieldwork.

4. Embodied territorialization of border violence

Expanding on feminist geopolitics and geographers’ interest in the scale of the body and its relationship with territorial struggles and bordering practices, I explore how territory becomes reinscribed on Latin American women’s bodies in this section. The gendered and racialised necropolitical effects of state and intimate border violence territorialize migrant women’s bodies (Mbembe 2003; Wright 2011). They are experienced in embodied ways—physically, psychologically, emotionally and spatially—in a relational continuum (Kelly 1988). Latin American migrant women’s bodies are included through exclusion as territories of exception where sovereign power and violence are exerted (Agamben 1998). With migration they are marked by the violence of borders at the state and intimate territorial scales (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004; Hyndman 2007, 2012; Pain and Staeheli 2014; Smith, Swanson, and Gökarıksel 2016). Bridging feminist and decolonial feminist geographers’ perspectives, I unveil the particular embodiments of border violence, that is, how women’s lived experiences of violence associated with immigration regulations and the territorial context are manifested in bodily sensations, emotions, feelings and embodied memories (Longhurst 1995; Moss and Dyck 2003; Pile 2010; Zaragocin and Caretta 2020).

Body-territory maps drawn by research participants expressed how their bodies were simultaneously affected and territorialized by state and (state-sponsored) intimate border violence. As migrant women, they felt neglected and/or intimidated by a system that was outright hostile and indifferent to their suffering, used against them by their partners, sometimes even when they had regularized status. The migration context (e.g. immigration status, limited English and supportive networks, and unfamiliarity with the system and city) was used by abusers to literally “suffocate” their dreams and goals and heighten feelings of impotence linked to difficulties of navigating a foreign and hostile system. Findings from other studies with migrant and minoritised women in this country echo the experiences of my research participants, here explored in an embodied manner (Anitha 2010; Lopes Heimer 2019; McIlwaine and Evans 2018; McIlwaine, Granada, and Valenzuela-Oblitas 2019).

Lorena, a Brazilian woman of indigenous descent who was fluent in English and had a British spouse visa, described how the weaponisation of her nationality and immigration status made her throat feel suffocated (see Figure 1 – “sufocada” in Portuguese). As she explained, her dreams were suppressed by an intersection of state and intimate border violence arising from the territorial power granted to her mixed-race British husband to abuse her over a “piece of paper” and the anxiety-inducing limbo she was left in by the Home Office after separation.

This is what happened to my dreams when I came here […] because of my nationality and my immigration situation, someone was able to suffocate everything. […] And you know it is not you because you are capable and intelligent, but you don’t have the stability, and you need a piece of paper, and that piece of paper is given to you by that person.

(Lorena, Brazilian, indigenous descent, 30 years)

Quite interestingly, Jaqueline promptly agreed with Lorena, albeit from the position of a single mother who spent over ten years undocumented in this country. During that time, she felt her “feet and hands were tied” as a direct consequence of both state border violence and intimate partner violence. She was depressed, destitute and impoverished whilst still being abused and harassed by the father of her daughter, who was also undocumented and from Brazil.

Figure 1. Lorena's Body-Territory Map.

It is like they try to kill your dream. We don’t know what is waiting for us when we leave our country, we live with so many dreams, and we are faced with so many laws, rules and difficult situations. I saw myself with my feet and hands tied […] because I waited for a piece of paper for ten years.

(Jaqueline, Brazilian, mixed-race white and Indigenous descent, 45 years)

Jaqueline also described how the combination of intimate violence and state border violence led to bodily pain. The stress, humiliation and sadness arising from these became embodied in her muscles and as tension in her neck (see Figure 2 where she indicates her neck with the number three), as she explains below:

I used to have a lot of pain in my neck. I think it was the stress. It’s like you retract the muscles. Because I was humiliated when I went to court, but also with the visa, it made me very sad. They denied it so many times. I was so stressed. As if it was not enough what I was going through emotionally and financially because my daughter and I practically starved, we didn’t have the right to anything.

As Jaqueline indicates, the embodied effects of violence on her body are not only linked to abuse from her ex-partner but are directly associated with specific state institutions. For example, the humiliation experienced at the Family Court and the psychological distress of having her visa application denied time and time again by the Home Office. Similarly, Lorena placed the Home Office right at the centre of her belly in her body-territory map. After separation, she struggled with anxiety, felt viscerally in her stomach every day, for months. She associated these with the Home Office, its silent treatment and sovereign power to decide whether she would be allowed to remain in this country.

Do you know when you feel butterflies in your stomach? From anxiety? The Home Office made me take medication for anxiety. Every time I think in the Home Office, I feel something weird, anxious, from waiting, waiting and not knowing what will happen. An uncertain future, not being able to make any plans, that thing of, when is this paper going to come? […] I felt anxious every day, here in my stomach.

(Lorena, Brazilian, indigenous descent, 30 years)

The embodied territoriality of violence was also prevalent in discussions amongst participants who reflected on how they might have been able to act differently in their home country. The territoriality of violence, specifically associated with being a migrant woman in England, led to feelings of impotence, helplessness, and fear. Tainara spent nearly five years undocumented, homeless and destitute with her young daughter whilst being harassed by her ex-husband. She located her embodied feelings relating to border violence on her left foot, where she wrote the word “England” (see Figure 3), explaining that:

It is on the foot because the foot is what carries us. It is where I was stepping. If I were walking on Brazilian soil, I would not feel this because I would be able to seek help from authorities and I would be able to speak up.

(Tainara, Brazilian, white, 41 years)

As Tainara explains, in her home country she would at least be able to confidently speak in her language, differently than in England, where the police and social services misinterpreted and disbelieved her. In her map, she wrote feelings linked to this country’s border violence: disregard, fragility, distrust, small, shame, frustration, poverty, helplessness and nostalgia (“saudade” in Portuguese). These directly relate to her lived embodied experiences as an undocumented migrant woman fleeing violence. Even though she was white, as a Brazilian working-class woman who was undocumented and unable to speak English, she was met with suspicion and disregard by the authorities she sought help from. Ultimately, she was left unprotected and exposed to conditions of premature death (Gilmore 2007).

It was that type of disregard like, “So, do you have any marks?” […] I had some bruises, but then it was, “Ahh, we need more evidence”. They don’t believe much in us. If you don’t know how to speak [English], they look at you differently. I felt very small because many times I asked for help and was denied. […] I had a list of more than 300 organisations, some responded and others didn’t, “Ahh, you are illegal”. If you are illegal, nobody helps you.

(Tainara, Brazilian, white, 41 years)

The racial capitalist gendered necropolitics of border violence produces bare-life (Agamben 1998; Mbembe 2003; Wright 2011). The intersection of gender, class and geopolitical identity/status worked together under a racialising logic against Tainara, dehumanizing her otherwise white body. Organizations meant to support survivors of violence denied her help due to her undocumented status, whilst the police disbelieved her and dismissed her bodily evidence of abuse. As Tainara later rightly affirmed: “My impression is that the police only acts when you’re already dead, when someone calls to say a guy managed to kill his wife”.

Interpersonal and state violence intersect and meet on the body. Their shared systemic roots and mutually reinforcing nature are visible in participants’ body-territory maps, showing how their bodies were territorialized as states of exception, reduced to bare-life.

Figure 2. Jaqueline's Body-Territory Map.

Figure 3. Tainara's Body-Territory Map.

5. Connecting state to intimate border violence

The UK immigration system’s design has gendered effects on migrant women experiencing IPV. It widens hierarchical power relations and enables the weaponisation of the threat of state border violence (e.g. forced destitution, separation from children, detention, deportation) in the form of (state-sponsored) intimate border violence. Threats of deportation are the most explicit and widespread manifestation of intimate border violence. A study by Imkaan (2010) found that 92% of 183 migrant survivors experienced threats of deportation from their partners, a trend confirmed more recently by McIlwaine, Granada, and Valenzuela-Oblitas (2019)

Nearly all survivors with an insecure immigration status who participated in my research were directly and indirectly threatened with deportation as a tool of control. Their partners also regularly stated that they “brought” their wives to this country and that they “depended” on them. For women on spouse visas, “dependency” is produced and maintained by immigration law, with legislation extending the probationary period under a British spouse visa making this worse (Dudley 2017). Differences in citizenship and immigration status enable Anglo-European men to inflict intimate border violence against Latin American women more easily. The violent, necropolitical operating logic of the UK border regime can, however, also be used by and against those with more and less insecure statuses.

Attempts at controlling women through border violence occur even when women have independent and settled residency status in the form of ILR, a British or EEAA passport – through the discursive and material production to “illegality”. A woman’s racialised social perception as a “colonial immigrant” (Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015) may be used by white Anglo-European men to exert intimate border violence. Assumptions of “illegality” regarding immigration regulations may sometimes discursively produce it. For example, Safira, from Colombia, suggested how whenever her English boyfriend felt he was losing control, he became aggressive and insidiously tried to weaponise border violence against her. Even though she had a regular resident status as a naturalized Spanish citizen, he would call her “illegal”, implying that he could deport her if she tried to leave him. Coloniality and the immigration system work together to produce “undocumented” status as a racialising/racialised legal category that can be strategically projected onto colonial migrant women regardless of their actual status.

Sometimes he would say that I was here without papers […] I had already told him, but he never saw my passport. He thought that I was lying. He used to try to find things to manipulate me so that I’d stay with him. […] It was like he was threatening to report me to immigration. He wouldn’t say like that, but he would use this as a threat, like, “Don’t you think you’re going to go far, cause you’re illegal”.

(Safira, Colombian, mixed-race white and indigenous descent, 49 years)

These felt like empty threats since Safira was not undocumented and was aware of it. However, in many cases where abusive partners are migrant women’s only source of information, they may fear deportation even when they have a regularized immigration status. Even when women already have ILR, perpetrators may deceive them, making them believe that they are undocumented and can be deported at their word. Although “illegality” is only discursively produced, it leads to material consequences. Front-line workers interviewed for this research recalled cases where the effects of the psychological abuse linked to border violence were severe and long-lasting, trapping women in abusive relationships for years as they feared deportation even when they had ILR.

Perpetrators always threaten women, “I’m going to deport you” as if they have that power. The way that they get to your mind doesn’t matter if you are irregular or not. I remember this Colombian woman I supported in the refuge […] I had to bring her to four different immigration lawyers because she could not believe she could not be deported by her partner […] It is a big issue with the system because what happens when a woman needs to deal with a mainstream organisation or the police and statutory services, and they ask, “What is your immigration status?”. She is going to say, “I’m illegal”. And later she is going to show her passport, they will see that she has ILR and she will be suspicious […] many times I had to go to places and say, “She is not illegal”, and they, “No, she told me, she is hiding something”. She is not hiding anything, this is a result of years and years of violence, of using her immigration status as a weapon […]

(Olivia, Venezuelan front-line worker)

As the Venezuelan front-line worker Olivia points out, long after women flee their abusers, some may continue to think they are “illegal”, a belief that creates fear and anxiety, severely restricting their mobility. This discursive production of “illegality” through intimate border violence may work to undermine a woman’s immigration status before public authorities and even mainstream services. The public system is not designed to identify this form of interpersonal abuse but rather to reinforce it along a continuum (Kelly 1988) of intimate and state border violence. Under the hostile environment, public authorities are expected to act as de facto border guards (Griffiths and Yeo 2021; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019), trained to be vigilant and presume migrant women’s intent to deceive them, therefore working in tandem with perpetrators’ attempts to misinform and criminalize survivors. The racialised nature of immigration categories means that a lack of whiteness may increase a Latin American woman’s vulnerability to state suspicion, reinforcing abusers’ attempts to manipulate their status.

Another common manifestation of intimate border violence is the material (re)production of “illegality”, purposefully maintaining a woman’s undocumented status by refusing to sponsor her visa. This is a well-documented practice among abusive men with citizenship or settled status (Dudley 2017; McIlwaine, Granada, and Valenzuela-Oblitas 2019)—Anglo-European men in particular, but also Latin Americans with dual citizenship or ILR. Intimate border violence may, however, be used as a tool of control against undocumented women, even by abusers who are (or have been) undocumented.

Tainara’s experiences illustrate this form of intimate border violence whereby women are literally pushed into “illegality” by abusive partners. She migrated from Brazil to the UK with savings and all necessary documentation to apply for her Italian citizenship, which she would then extend to her daughter and use to sponsor her husband’s visa. However, sometime after they moved to London, her husband stole all her money, preventing her from regularizing their status. She ended up living undocumented and in precarity for years to come.

He stole all the money I brought to go to Italy, when I was ready to go to Italy he simply said, “You’re not going”. […] and I was like, “But this money will also benefit you because once I get my passport, I’m going to apply for your spouse visa, we will be able to work, everyone will become legal” […]

(Tainara, Brazilian, white, 41 years)

Tainara not only had to endure severe and ongoing psychological, emotional, financial, sexual and physical violence from her husband, including murder attempts but also bear the consequences of state border violence. Unable to access benefits or find stable work as an undocumented person, after leaving her abuser, she continued to live in poverty in an overcrowded and precarious accommodation under the threat of criminalization, detention, deportation, and separation from her child.

Survivors who are literally or discursively brought into “illegality” often live under the constant threat of suddenly having their lives fragmented. Abusive men instigate and capitalize on women’s fear of authorities, since women with insecure immigration status tend to be hesitant to report abuse to the police (McIlwaine, Granada, and Valenzuela-Oblitas 2019). Their mistrust is well-founded since evidence suggests that the police prioritize immigration enforcement over victims’ safeguarding, treating migrant survivors as potential immigrant offenders first (HMICFRS 2020; Day and Gill 2020). The UK immigration regime empowers men to abuse migrant women, regardless of their status, but in particular when they are undocumented or are made to believe so.

6. Border violence at the scale of the home

Border violence against migrant women is intimately connected to the geopolitics of home (Brickell 2012a, 2012b). The home is not only a physical space where most forms of IPV take place but also strategically deployed to perpetrate violence and control women’s mobility. Homelessness and the threat of homelessness is a pervasive reality in the lives of migrant survivors in England (Banga and Gill 2008; Lopes Heimer 2019), which is structurally produced in housing legislation through hostile environment policies and the NRPF condition (Griffiths and Yeo 2021; Mckee et al. 2021).

Threats of eviction are used to instigate fear and discipline migrant women, often intertwining with threats of deportation to their “home countries”. This dynamic was present in Lorena’s relationship. Every time she started a conversation about separation, her British husband threatened her with immediate eviction and with calling the Home Office to report that they were no longer together.

When I used to tell him that I wanted to leave, he would get really nervous and aggressive, and we would start arguing again. And then he would say, “Ok, you should leave then, but I want you to leave this house now”. […] He used to say to my face: “The moment you cross that door, I’m going to call the Home Office”. […] The word Home Office was always in his mouth.

(Lorena, Brazilian, indigenous descent, 30 years)

Abusers embody immigration law to regulate women’s bodies across scales and in a continuum. Border control at the national-territory scale was used as a threat to trap Lorena in the home-territory, where her husband continued to abuse her. Whenever Lorena’s husband realized he could lose her, he reasserted his border power over her body and his ability to withdraw her right to remain within various territory-scales, from the home to the national territory.

In the absence of visa dependency, abusive men may materially produce “illegality” to discipline women’s “unruly” mobility. It is common for Anglo-European abusive men to threaten, attempt or even destroy women’s residency documents and passports as a form of punishment and measure to regain control. This happened to Azucena, a Latin American woman who acquired Greek nationality in a previous marriage. Her British partner destroyed her documents to punish her for enjoying a social life outside the home. She recalls that her European ID disappeared the day after she went to visit some friends and left her British partner by himself at her place. Luckily, she still had her Greek passport to prove her status. However, her partner later destroyed this when she arrived home late after an evening out with a friend. Azucena was made undocumented; she had no proof of her status and lacked the means to apply for a new passport.

State border violence arising from the interconnectedness of immigration and welfare systems aids abusive men in prolonging their abuse and trapping women in the home. After leaving their partners’ abuse, migrant women may be pushed back, by homelessness and poverty, into the same or other violent relationships. This is a pressing reality for women with insecure status, particularly undocumented and single mothers, whose priority is providing a roof for their children.

Homelessness and destitution, produced by state border violence, can be strategically deployed by abusive men to manipulate women into returning home. For example, when Tainara left her abuser, she had a small daughter and was undocumented, unable to access any form of welfare support. She had difficulties finding informal work as a cleaner and struggled to make ends meet. She managed to rent a small room for her and her daughter, but its ceiling suddenly fell in, leaving them with nowhere to go. Her husband used this as an opportunity to manipulate her into moving to a room he promised to vacate. Still, he kept a copy of the key to continue entering and harassing her regularly.

Intimate and state border violence overlap at the scale of the home. Perpetrators use threats of homelessness, destitution and deportation to exert power and control over women’s bodies, restrict their mobility and trap them in the home where abuse may continue with impunity. Even after women leave their abusers, violence persists in its structural forms, feeding a cycle of abuse that spatially subordinates migrant women to a position of homelessness that may be exploited to exert interpersonal abuse.

7 Conclusion

Territorial sovereignty is symbolically and materially manifested and reasserted through power and control over migrant women’s bodies by state and non-state actors. This paper has explored how coloniality and gendered necropower is structurally embedded in the UK immigration regime, underpinning and enabling specific (re)configurations of border violence against migrant women (Mbembe 2003; Quijano 2000; Wright 2011). Tracing the works of border violence has revealed the violent process of re-territorialization of national borders across multi-scalar spatialities and how they reinscribe migrant women’s bodies as annexed territories of exception (Agamben 1998).

Border violence connects state and intimate partner violence in a relational continuum; they cross and meet on the scale of women’s bodies whilst enabling power and control across global, national, and intimate scales (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Hyndman 2012; Kelly 1988; Pain and Staeheli 2014). My research participants’ body-territory maps shed light on the shared roots and mutually reinforcing nature of state and intimate border violence. They show how border violence(s) by intimate partners and state structures lead to similar territorializing effects on migrant women’s bodies, dehumanizing and reducing them to bare-life. This is illustrated by survivors feeling literally and metaphorically suffocated, having their dreams destroyed and their hands and feet tied, leading to various visceral effects. The embodiments of border violence reveal how migrant women are reduced to bare-life to protect colonial wealth, territory, and infrastructures (El-Enany 2020; Mbembe 2003; Wright 2011).

The UK border regime produces intimate border violence by creating threats of state violence that can be exploited within abusive relationships. My empirical material reveal how intimate border violence manifests through threats of deportation, deployed directly and indirectly against women with insecure, dependent and undocumented statuses but also against migrant women with secure and permanent status. Working as a racialised/racialising notion, “illegality” is discursively and materially produced by abusers to exert power, working in tandem with the operating logics of the hostile environment. In particular, the home is a privileged site through which border violence operates, with individual abusers’ threats of eviction and deportation working to maintain migrant women trapped in abusive homes. This abuse is structurally sustained by immigration, housing and welfare policies that create “illegality”, poverty and homelessness. Severely exposed to violence and premature death conditions, migrant women embody the figure of the living dead, kept alive but in a state of injury (Mbembe 2003), included through exclusion as body-territories of exception.

Research ethics

The King’s College Research Ethics Committee granted ethics approval to conduct this research under the reference number: HR-19/20-14553. Written informed consent was obtained from participants, including permission to use and disseminate the body-territory maps they produced.

Acknowledgements

I thank the Latin American women, survivors and front-line workers who generously agreed to participate in this research and the Latin American Women’s Aid, for their institutional support. I thank both of my supervisors, Prof Cathy McIlwaine and Dr Majed Akhter, for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this work. I am also thankful to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions to improve my work. All remaining errors are my own. CAPES Brazil has funded this PhD research, and I am grateful to have benefited from it, especially at a time when the right to publicly funded education has been under attack in my country.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Research data are not shared due to privacy and ethical restrictions.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Brazilian Federal Agency for the Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education – CAPES under Grant 88881.175461/2018-01.

Notes

1 Only survivors who have a British Spouse Visa or are dependant of a settled person are eligible to apply to the Domestic Violence Rule and the Destitute Domestic Violence Concession (DDVC). Under this rule they can apply for ILR if they can prove that their relationship broke out due to domestic abuse. If they are destitute they can also apply for the DDVC to become eligible to access public funds for a maximum period of 3 months whilst they wait for a response on their ILR application (although this may often take longer).

2 El-Enany refers to “Britain” to image the UK without its colonies. My analysis focuses on England (where my participants were base), however, since immigration powers are not devolved in the UK, I refer to a UK border regime.

3 This selected based on data availability, with the only criteria being that those included had experienced at least one form of IPV.

4 Whilst the majority were EU/EEA citizens (32%), British citizens (13%), or held ILR (6%), some may have acquired these in the aftermath of their experiences of violence. The database does not capture how users’ immigration status changed over time.

5 Brazil, Colombia, México, Venezuela, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Argentina.

6 Tables A1–A3 in the appendix presents a breakdown of participants’ profiles.

Appendix

Table A1. Details of Latin American Women Survivors Participating in the Research (20).

Nationality
Argentina	1
Brazil	9
Chile	1
Colombia	2
Costa Rica	1
Dominican Republic	1
Mexico	2
Paraguay	1
Venezuela	2
Race/Ethnicity
Mixed: Indigenous, Black and White (“parda” in Portuguese)	1
Mixed: Black / “parda”	1
Mixed: Black and White	1
White mixed with Black and Indigenous heritage	1
Mixed: Indigenous and White (one of them being a Guarani native speaker)	8
Indigenous descendant	2
White Hispanic	2
White	4
Class
Working-class in the country of origin and England	15
Middle-class in the country of origin and working-class in England	2
Upper-middle-class in the country of origin and working-class in England	2
Upper-middle-class in the country of origin and middle class in England	1
English Level
Beginner	5
Intermediate	8
Fluent	7
Educational Level
Primary school	3
High school	5
Higher Education	10
Postgraduate	2
Sexuality
Heterosexual	16
Bisexual	2
Pansexual	1
Hetero-curious	1
Age
23 years	1
30 - 34 years	7
38 - 45 years	7
49 - 55 yrs	4
63 years	1
Occupation
Cleaner	6
Cooking & Catering	4
Housekeeper	3
Nanny	2
NGO worker	2
Bartender	1
Student	1
Office job	1
Religion
Christian (catholic or protestant)	16
No religion (but one of them considered herself spiritual)	2
Jewish-evangelical	1
Agnostic	1
Children
Did not have children(one became pregnant with her abuser’s child but lost it due to abuse)	6
Had children with the recent perpetrator	12
Had children but not with the recent perpetrator	2

Table A2. Immigration details of Latin American Women Survivors Participating in the Research (20).

Immigration Status
British family visa (2)	2 were undocumented for many years and could only regularize their situation through their child’s status.
EU family visa (3)	1 was undocumented for many years and could only apply for this visa through her daughter’s status; 2 had this visa as a spouse of an EU citizen (their abusive exes).
EU citizen (no visa required pre-Brexit) (7)	4 had EU citizenship by descent. However, one of them was undocumented for five years before she was able to apply for Italian citizenship. 3 had EU citizenship by naturalization (due to adoption, marriage or length of residency in another EU country).
Indefinite Leave to Remain (7)	4 acquired ILR via the Domestic Violence Rule; 3 acquired ILR through the length of residency in the country.
British Spouse Visa (1)	Separated due to DV but unable to apply for ILR via DVR rule due to a lack of sufficient evidence of abuse.

Table A3. Details of Perpetrators of Latin American survivors participating in this Research.^a

Nationality and immigration status	Class	Race/Ethnicity
British citizen	Middle Class	White
British citizen	Middle Class	White
British citizen	Upper-middle-class family /working-class job	White
British citizen	Working-class	White
British citizen	Working-class	White
British citizen with Jamaican heritage	Working-class	Mixed race: Black and White
Colombian – British citizen by naturalization	Working-class	White Colombian
Greek national / EU citizen British citizen with Algerian heritage	Middle class Working-class	White Mixed race
Portuguese national / EU citizen Portuguese national / EU citizen	Working-class Working-class	White White
Portuguese national / EU citizen	Working-class	White
Brazilian with EU/Italian citizenship	Working-class	White
Brazilian with EU/Italian citizenship	Working-class (middle class in Brazil)	White
Brazilian with EU/Portuguese citizenship	Working-class	White
Brazilian with EU/Portuguese citizenship	Working-class	White
Venezuelan with EU/Portuguese citizenship	Working-class (middle class in Venezuela)	White
Republican Dominican with EU family visa	Working-class	White
Brazilian with undocumented status	Working-class	Mixed race / brown
Venezuelan with undocumented status Colombian with undocumented status	Working-class Working-class	Black White
Brazilian with undocumented status	Working-class	White
Costa Rican / NA – abuse occurred in Costa Rica	Middle-class	White

^a In some cases, participants referred to two recent abusers, therefore, their profiles were included in the same row. This is, however, not an exhaustive list of women’s abusers.