Transnational Regimes of Family Violence: When Violence Against Women Crosses Borders

Abstract

This chapter explores how gender-based family violence is not always limited to the nation state but can also be perpetrated, endured and facilitated transnationally. In research to date only some aspects of what is conceptualised here as transnational regimes of violence have been explored. This study takes a broader approach, outlining 1) transnational elements in regimes of violence, 2) how abuse and control cross national borders, and 3) transnationality as a conducive context for regimes of violence. The analysis focusses on violence against women from male partners and in-laws and on violence against adolescent daughters from their parents and other kin. The empirical basis is interviews with women of immigrant background living in Norway and judgements from Norwegian Criminal Courts. Building on established theories of domestic violence as regime and continuum, the concept transnational regime of family violence is offered as a contribution to ongoing attempts at theorising the spatiality of gender-based violence. The concept captures how the involved actors’ attachment to several nation states produces specific opportunity structures for abusers and specific vulnerabilities for the abused.