‘I Will Not Leave Without My Passport’: Hostile Environment, Intimate Partner Violence and Resilience Among Migrant Nigerian Women in the UK.

This thesis provides an intersectional analysis of the gendered impact of the UK migration policy on the experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV) among migrant women from sub-Saharan Africa living in Britain. With a focus on migrant women from Nigeria with spouse visas, it highlights the specificities of their experiences of IPV and examines how their individual positions and interactions, framed through different sociocultural contexts, overlap in complex ways with migrant-specific institutional, legal and social exclusions created by the policy. Qualitative semi-structured interviews revealed that the precarity of their migrant status and the macro-structural barriers that restricted their ability to access welfare services created a multifaceted system of marginalisation that shaped their experiences and responses to IPV. Furthermore, the interaction between the women’s perception of the law and legality and the structural inequalities they faced within the social environment in Britain also shaped their legal consciousness and impacted their experiences. Through the women’s narratives, this thesis then explored processes of gendered resistance and resilience identified in the data by way of intentional acts of opposition against IPV in severely subordinated contexts. Findings revealed that co-existing with the violence and structural oppression the women faced were constructions of resistance and their sense of resilience against the disadvantaged spaces they occupied. This study pushes for a more nuanced and gender-sensitive approach by the UK government to cater to the welfare of migrant women without rendering the individual and structural variables that shape their experiences and responses to violence invisible.