Interpersonal Violence in Immigrant Women in Portugal: An Intersectional Approach

Abstract

The vast majority of studies concerning the victimization of immigrant women focus only on intimate violence, disregarding other types of interpersonal violence, other contexts of occurrence, and the potential cumulative experience of victimization. The main objectives of this study were to establish the frequency of multiple victimization in a community sample of 107 immigrant women living in Portugal and to evaluate, using an intersectional approach, how individual (e.g., early victimization) and structural (social, cultural, ethnic) factors interacted to shape the experience of victimization in the host country. The results show that 78.5% of women have experienced at least one type of victimization throughout life; 48% were victims for the first time during the post-migration period; and they had experienced a wide spectrum of cumulative interpersonal victimization, which co-occur in diverse contexts of their lives. More than the addictive effect of ethnicity, socioeconomic level and previous experience of victimization in origin country, the results showed the multiple effect of the interaction of those factors: black immigrant women from low socioeconomic status who had experienced victimization in their origin country reported a higher number of victimization experiences in Portugal.