Domestic Labour, Violence and Exploitation: Global Gendered Perspectives

Thursday, 10 July 2025: 13:00-14:45
Location: FSE014 (Faculty of Education Sciences (FSE))
WG11 Violence and Society (host committee)

Language: English

Much of the broader focus on domestic labour tends to differentiate the exploitation experienced by waged domestic workers, as a problem of employment and migration conditions, which sits apart from the abuse of unwaged women's labour in the context of intimate partner and familial relationships. This poses significant challenges in recognising that the domestic setting remains a place of significant gendered violence that is largely unaccounted for by states globally: as a form of interpersonal violence and as a form of labour exploitation. In this regular session, we are seeking to bring together new and established scholars who have interrogated domestic work from a variety of perspectives, with a view to challenge understandings of gendered labour and gendered violence, and to consider the failings and failures of local, national and international responses to the violence that women differentially experience in this setting. We specifically seek to encourage critical work that have explored how notions of violence, safety and exploitation in domestic labour are sustained, challenged and interrogated in different societies and temporal contexts.
Session Organizers:
Shih Joo TAN, University of Melbourne, Australia and Sundari ANITHA, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Oral Presentations
Countering Systemic and Hidden Forms of Violence Against Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore
Theodora LAM, National University of Singapore, Singapore; Brenda YEOH, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Interrogating protection systems for women migrant domestic workers
Shih Joo TAN, University of Melbourne, Australia
Distributed Papers
See more of: WG11 Violence and Society
See more of: Working Groups