Violence, Abuse and Exploitation in Relation to Women’s Domestic Labour in Diverse Contexts

This presentation brings together my recent research on domestic violence and labour exploitation to draw upon and extend prevailing conceptualisations of economic abuse through a focus on the abuse and exploitation of women’s reproductive labour – their gendered domestic work. It draws upon two previous studies on domestic violence experienced by South Asian women and by Polish women in the UK and a recent study on trafficking and labour exploitation experienced by migrant domestic workers in the UK. The narratives of the victim-survivors enable us to understand the continuums in the nature and contours of violence, abuse and exploitation across different contexts in the paid and unpaid working lives of these women. Some of the themes I will explore include the ways in which violence, control and coercion are deployed by perpetrators to impose an intensified labour regime, to erode working conditions, to dehumanise the women, to deny them health and social protections and to withhold the reward for their labour - whether in the form of pay or their entitlement to the family’s resources. I take stock of the limitations of prevailing characterisation of this problem – where the focus is on coercion and control in women’s performance of feminine roles through domestic work of caring/mothering, cooking and housework with little attention to how violence and abuse is deployed to exploit the economic resource that their labour represents, and scant analysis of the commonalities between such abuse and exploitation in relation to women's paid and unpaid work and it's impact. I also explore how intersecting social relations of power based on gender, migration status, bordering regimes and race shape the nature and forms of abuse and exploitation across diverse contexts. I argue that more expansive understanding of economic abuse can help academic scholarship reflect the lived experiences of victim-survivors.