‘We Are Stuck in Our Own Heads’: Immigrant Women and Institutional Practices in Iceland

ABSTRACT

Immigrant women in Iceland have reported experiencing discrimination and marginalization in society and when interacting with institutions. However, this topic remains under-researched in the Icelandic context. The present article explores how institutional representatives construct immigrant women who experience intimate partner violence (IPV), their needs and their barriers to support-seeking through ideas of Icelandic exceptionalism and Whiteness. The analysis is based on two data sets: 16 interviews with institutional representatives who provide services for immigrants and/or women who experience IPV and 16 #metoo stories published by immigrant women in 2018. The analysis reveals that institutional representatives focus on immigrant women lacking trust in institutions and knowledge about their rights and procedures because of misconceptions in the immigrant community and lies told by violent partners. This individualistic perspective leads them to emphasize their responsibility in teaching immigrant women about their rights and to trust institutions. The institutional representatives fail to acknowledge structural marginalization and institutional discrimination intersecting with immigrant women’s experiences of IPV and support-seeking. As the institutional culture is rooted in the believe that equality is the basis of the welfare state and that Icelandic culture is free from discriminatory practices, institutional representatives rarely incorporate intersectional perspectives into institutional practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigrant women
• intimate partner violence
• institutional practices
• Whiteness
• exceptionalism

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. We conducted these interviews in the frame of the IWEV project: Immigrant Women‘s Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence and Employment Based Violence: A Baseline Study. I would like to thank Telma Velez, the master‘s student who conducted five of the interviews for her good work and collaboration.

2. Atlas.ti was not used to do any automatic coding.

3. No interviewee or #metoo story explicitly mentioned female or nonbinary violent partners; many of them called them ‚Icelandic men’ or ‚Icelandic husband’ and used male pronouns. This emphasizes the fact that IPV perpetration is gendered, understood in a patriarchal context and often perpetrated by men. This does not preclude that female or nonbinary partners perpetrate violence but that it did not explicitly appear in the data.

4. The majority of the interviewees were licenced social workers or university educated in fields related to their work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Rannís: the Icelandic Center for Research under Grant [196251-051] and Jafnréttissjóður: The Icelandic Equality Fund under Grant [230669-5501].

Notes on contributors

Flora Tietgen

Flora Tietgen is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty for Education and Diversity at the School of Education, University of Iceland. Her research interests include gender-based violence, immigrant experiences, structural violence, intersectionality and critical theory. Flora completed an MA degree in political science and sociology from the University of Würzburg, Germany, in 2017.