Transnational barriers to national support

This article explores the pressing issue of how to provide abused ethnic minority women with suitable support. Set in Denmark, the study combines interviews with 18 women who have experienced interpersonal violence and 32 frontline workers who provide such women with support. Utilising Mahler and Pessar's model of gendered geographies of power, the article conceptualises barriers to support as stemming from the discrepant embedding of women and frontline workers: While frontline workers operate in the public space of the nation state, ethnic minority women are commonly embedded in transnational social fields with ties to their countries of origin. Consequently, at the intimate scale of private space, gendered expectations and family power dynamics anchored in the Global South may restrain women from accessing support. Furthermore, both vulnerability in the women's relationship with the nation state and embodied cross-border mobility in contexts of family discord can decrease women's possibilities for benefitting from nation-state support provisions that are in fact available. Similarly, individualised welfare state support measures may not be well-suited for meeting women's needs. An awareness of these complications and power dynamics, operating at different intertwined scales, could potentially improve the quality of social work for a particularly vulnerable group.