Barriers and Supports to Divorce for Victimised British-Indian Mothers and Consequences of Divorce: Narratives of British-Indian Adult Children of Divorce

Abstract

Divorce or separation is one route towards addressing high conflict in marriages and may be a key route out of situations of significant domestic violence for women and children. However, divorce has been associated with feminisation of poverty and other negative outcomes which can be further exacerbated for victimised women. While there has been research as to what prevents women from leaving violent marriages, there is little research on what prompts women to leave and separate or divorce. This literature is particularly limited for minority ethnic women, for whom both the contexts of domestic violence and divorce may be additionally complex due to the superimposition of several oppressive structures such as race, patriarchy, gender and immigration that render them particularly vulnerable and limit their help-seeking approaches. However, victimised minority ethnic women do make strategic choices to seek help in domestic violence situations and even to divorce. This paper address this gap in literature by presenting a study that explores the narratives of British-Indian adult children who experienced and witnessed parental domestic violence and parental divorce. The paper presents the perspectives of these children to highlight the context, barriers and supports that participants believed their mothers had to address domestic violence and to divorce, the decisions their mothers made and the consequences of these decisions. The analysis suggests that barriers and supports towards help-seeking for domestic violence and to divorce and the consequences of divorce are embedded in the community contexts for British-Indian women. The implications towards informing appropriate support to victimised and divorced women within their communities are discussed.