Having the lower hand

Research has documented the considerable hardships immigrant women
often face if they want to leave abusive relationships, but the cumulative
impacts of such experiences have received insufficient scholarly attention.
In response, this study investigates women’s difficulties leaving abusive
relationships based on life story interviews with 35 immigrant women
who experienced partner abuse. Almost all the women originated from
“patriarchal belt” countries in, for example, the Middle East and all arrived
in Denmark as adults. Using a model of gendered geographies of power, this
study examines key interview passages in which the women use dramatized
speech to tell about their younger selves’ interactions with significant
others. These dramatized episodes of interactions emerge as crucial for the
interviewees to communicate why they remained in abusive relationships
for years and how most finally managed to leave their husbands. The
narrated episodes reveal how the women’s frequent lack of success in
various interactional situations can be attributed to women “having the lower hand”—holding disadvantaged positions in the familial, social, and
national hierarchies of power. These hierarchies reinforce each other, for
example, when insecure residency status limits immigrant women’s options
to solicit help from Danish society. The analysis demonstrates that—in
contrast to the stereotype of the abused immigrant woman as a passive
victim—micro- and macro-level processes may work together to undermine
immigrant women’s possibilities to act independently at important junctures
in their lives. The results also stress the importance that frontline workers
have sufficient understanding of immigrant women’s predicament and the
ability to extend qualified and timely support. Such support can be crucial for
abused immigrant women to become able to move away from their violent
home environments.