In Issue 42:2, we publish a collection of articles on issues encountered by women who are migrants. Authors discuss changes in identity that occurring in consequence of migration. Oluwatoyin Olukotun et al. use the terminology of marginalized identity, common in the literature, to discuss the problems women migrants from Africa have upon relocating to the United States. When such migrants are legally “undocumented,” barriers to access healthcare abound. The authors explain that practitioner need to create an atmosphere of safety so women will choose to seek help.
Francesca Tessitore and Giorgia Margherita prefer the concept “identity fracture.” They note that women lose the only lives they envision as possible and the identities that go along with these lives as identity is fractured when women are forced to leave their country of origin. The researchers interviewed Nigerian refuges who sought asylum in Italy. The authors present a process in which women lived in hell before leaving Nigeria and on their journeys to their host country, followed by a time of surviving in Italy as foreigners with unpredictable futures. Throughout the process, their identity as mothers motivated them to move forward. While the data for this theoretical contribution are from only five Nigerian refugees, the themes described resonate with what we hear about women who are refugees from other places where life is horrible for women and children.
Hazel R. Barrett et al. note that migrants who leave countries in the Arab League Region face the same problems as outsiders with the need for integration in their new countries. Added to this marginalization are the health problems these women face resulting from female genital surgery performed for reasons other than health. I purposely am not labeling all such surgeries mutilation as the women who participated in the study to not necessarily see their situations as such. The authors explain that genital surgeries continue in host countries because the surgery is an identity marker that migrants are reluctant to relinquish.
According to the research of Federico Ghirimoldi and Gabriela Sanchez-Soto scholars have long recognized that migration tends to have a negative association with healthcare access that is to some extent related to assimilation. They note that various theories of assimilation (classical and segmented) predict different rates of health screening behaviors for native born women and immigrant women. In their article they employ Latent Class Analysis, providing evidence that both classical and segmented assimilation theories are useful, but that each of the theories is predicts more accurately than the other the health seeking behaviors of varying groups of immigrants. Reading this article will provide readers with a good example of how to use a particular method of analysis to make a theoretical contribution to global women’s health literature.
Literature Contributions of Manuscripts Published in Volume 42:2 of Health Care for Women International.
The last article in this issue by Dilay Necipoglu et al. provides a global contribution through a randomized controlled study determining the positive effect of nursing interventions to encourage breastfeeding among an immigrant population of women immigrants in Cyprus. Their study, conducted during home visits, was based on Dennis’s Breastfeeding Self-Efficacy Theory and Pender’s Health Promotion Model. The article is nice example of how to contribute to best-practice literature as the methods are sufficiently described for replication in other countries.
As always, read and learn and consult the Table have provided to highlight our authors’ contributions to global women’s health literature.
Editor-in-Chief
March 12, 2021
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