Combatting coercive control in Covid-19: Perspectives from British Pakistani NGO workers in East London

This proposed research will be an ethnographic study of legal protections around coercive control, the most prevalent form of domestic violence in the UK and a criminal offence under the Serious Crime Act 2015. By focusing on the experiences of women working at domestic abuse NGOs in East London, this research will generate perspectives on how coercion and control unfold in multiply contested domestic settings. This project builds on scholarship on the politics of narration and storytelling (Cruikshank 1992; Jackson 2004; Das 2007), as well as biographical disruptions and reintegration (Day 2007) to investigate the lived realities of coercion and control in the context of a) Covid-19 related forced enclosure and b) the criminalisation of coercive control under the Serious Crimes Act 2015.

Access to justice for non-English speaking migrant women is obstructed by structural inequalities such as lack of economic means, knowledge about support services, and language skills, both English and bureaucratic language required by state authorities (Merry 2006; Fassin 2013; Fuchs 2020). Through close attention to their words, actions, and silences (Das 2007), this research examines the intimate lives of NGO workers who act as brokers between the state and community (Webb 2012), navigate access to rights alongside notions of 'honour' and shame, traverse boundaries between public and private (Day and Goddard 2010), and contest normative demands on integrated biographies (Day 2007).

It asks: how does this law affect the day-to-day lives of women in situations of coercion and control? What are the ways in which experiences of domestic abuse are communicated through words and silences? What does this reveal about the risks involved with trying to understand suffering in one's own terms (Jackson 2004) or the potential for violence in spoken words (Das 2007)? How do NGO workers then navigate the ethics of intervening in situations of domestic abuse?

Anthropologists have examined the ways in which people come to understand themselves as ethical or political by a) addressing the suffering of others, b) recognising the suffering of their own groups, and c) in dialogue with others in similar situations (Day and Goddard 2010; Webb 2012). This projects aims to build on this literature by generating perspectives from women providing Urdu language support at NGOs in the East London boroughs of Waltham Forest and Redbridge. South Asian experiences have only recently been included in social science research on domestic abuse (Ahmed et al 2004; Dasgupta 2007; Kallovayalil 2010) with few studies examining inequalities that lie at its core (Puwar and Raghuram 2003; Gill and Brah 2014; Bi 2020). This research takes inspiration from abolitionist approaches in grassroots activism and critical race theory (Du Bois 1935; Lorde 1979; Taylor 2016; Vitale 2017) that emphasise the need for a) restorative justice and b) resource re-allocation away from the prison industrial complex to welfare for women and children affected by domestic violence.

Through participant observation, life history interviews, and discourse analysis, this research will explore how in their simultaneous roles as NGO workers, relatives, neighbours, and activists, these women relate to legal processes, resist or reproduce hierarchies, and envisage solutions. Arguing against western feminist analyses of women's agency that accord it a normative status by simplistically centring desires to be free from subordination, this project builds on anthropological scholarship on Muslim women's worlds that demonstrate the multiple ways in which women create and steer their destinies in home, public and political settings (Mahmood 2004; Abu Lughod 2015; Elliot 2021).