If they are subject to immigration controls, women who experience domestic abuse in the United Kingdom face particular barriers in finding safety and support. This research explores the impact of the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) rule, which means that women who are subject to immigration controls on a variety of visa statuses cannot access benefits and cannot therefore access refuge accommodation or support. The thesis critically evaluates these impact within a human rights framework to consider whether law and practice falls short of international obligations the UK government has undertaken. It argues that women who experience domestic violence face even greater risks and more human rights abuses if they have NRPF. It concludes that the state should change law and practice to uphold the right to life and the prohibition of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment. The research draws from desk-based investigation and 51 interviews in cities across the UK with service providers in contact with women experiencing domestic abuse. The data suggests that the law is implemented inconsistently; even women and children who may be eligible for support are not reaching it. Women who are turned away from support return to abusers or face increasing vulnerability, exploitation and danger. These experiences include different forms of violence against women and girls, including forced marriage, domestic and sexual violence, systematic sexual exploitation in the commercial sex trades, trafficking, harassment, stalking, and homicide. These women may experience violence in the family, in the community, when they interact with agents of the state, and when they cross borders. These forms of violence are underpinned by the use of immigration status to maintain

This thesis critically evaluates the charting of ‘home’ and ‘exile’ in regards to four Diasporic female artists from the Middle East, specifically, Iraq and Palestine. The study employs a dual approach in the examination of Diaspora; a theoretical one that engages in the literature on Diaspora and a practical one founded on the author’s interviews with the artists. Thus a comparative analysis of their biographical narratives with the existing literature underpins the discussion of the various realities of home and exile. Moreover, the study links three broad themes in its analysis and is thereby divided thematically into six chapters, excluding the study’s introduction and conclusion. Providing a sociopolitical perspective, Chapters One and Two examine the modern histories of Iraq and Palestine, depicting the political climate of both countries in general but more specifically in regards to the personal and individual experiences of the artists in their homelands. This, essentially, is set up in a way to illustrate the physical locality from which their uprooting and Diasporic journeys were initiated. Chapters Three and Four offer a theoretical outlook in their analysis of the issues pertaining to Diaspora; Chapter Three examines the Diasporic memories of the artists and their sense of distance from, or attachment to, the homeland from their positions in exile. Through examining the artists’ relationship with the homeland this chapter sheds light on the relationality of place and thus conceptualizes their Diasporic consciousness. Subsequently, Chapter Four demonstrates how the Diasporic consciousness of the artists grounds their ascriptions of ‘home’ and ‘exile’ and the construction of their Diasporic identity. The concluding chapters, Five and Six, grant the artists’ Diasporic trajectories visual narratives through an exploration of their artwork. The chapters uncover personal links between their artwork and their Diasporic context, and therefore highlight their work’s Diasporic iconography and biographical significance. The imagery in these chapters thus offers unique insights into the turmoil of war, exile, and loss, and the complexities of the Diasporic experience. Overall, the study rethinks the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘exile’ as grounded in fixed geographical foundations, and upholds that fundamental to the complex mapping of such notions is its location within the geographies of the mind.

Literature Review: There is a common assumption that histories of disadvantage repeat across generations, especially among high risk populations such as adolescent mothers. The first section of this thesis synthesises evidence on the impact of a maternal history of maltreatment on relationship outcomes between adolescent mothers and their children. The review reveals mixed findings, both supporting and challenging intergenerational continuities of negative relationship outcomes among this target group. It indicates the value of moving beyond linear causal explanations to use bolder methodological designs that attend to mediating and moderating processes in the lives of these young women, including the meanings they give to social support. It also highlights the need to shed more light on adolescent mothers’ individual experiences, strengths and resilience within the context of adversity. Research Report: Stigmatising discourses on homelessness and young parenthood, and the predominance of quantitative research studies assessing negative outcomes in these areas present a bleak picture of the fate of homeless young mothers and their children. The current qualitative paper is the first of its kind in the UK to use Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore in depth the lived experiences and meanings homeless young mothers give to their relationship with their children. Four overarching time-related themes emerged: ‘no end to losses in the past and the present’, ‘distancing the past to make things right in the present and the future’, ‘living in the challenges of the present’ and ‘facing the future with resilience’. Implications for practice and future research are also discussed. Critical Appraisal: This third section of the thesis is a reflective account of the challenges, decision-making processes and learning opportunities as experienced by the author throughout this research journey.

My research explores Somali refugee women’s reported experiences of access to public services in the UK. Since the majority of women in the Somali community are illiterate, I conducted qualitative research involving 50 interviews, (some repeat), between May and July 2010, with 26 Somali refugee women who came to Britain between 1990 and 2009. In this thesis, my analysis roughly follows the chronology of refugee women’s entry into the UK. Therefore I start with access to immigration services. My key finding here is that people who have little experience of the public sphere due to their gender, find themselves in difficult situations when dealing with officials when they arrive in their new environment. The women‘s access to services was strongly impaired, partly due to discrepancies between regulations around immigration and the lived experiences the women had. This was also evident in the context of education services, the topic of my second chapter. Here two key issues emerged. One was the importance of language skills. The other was the contradictory demand of learning about the culture into which the women had moved and being required to hunt for jobs at the same time. Ultimately, only very few women participated in education and employment. However, these are resources that facilitate effective integration, and lacking them had a detrimental effect on my participants. My analysis of the women’s access to housing, the third area I researched, revealed that their preferred social model of congregation had consequences for their settlement. They defied government policies on housing and abandoned their given accommodation to move near relatives and community members. As a result they lost access to services such as education and support towards employment. My discussion of the women’s access to health services demonstrated that cross-cultural issues impacted on that access. Not having previously engaged with first-world style infrastructures, the women had difficulty understanding the UK’s public service system and how it operates. This was complicated by the policy demand of eligibility, which can create confusion and this affected their ability to take advantage of services. Throughout their years in the UK most of the women struggled in their use of services and in their everyday routines and relied heavily on mediation. Such dependency continued to subjugate them and situated them as vulnerable to subordination. In this thesis I argue that lack of education and communication skills create a situation of unequal access to public service utilisation, and this functions to exclude certain minority women in our society.

This thesis explores gendered violence in ‘post war’ Guatemala and critically examines the responses to this phenomenon. I argue that the discourses that respond to, and attempt to account for, the paradox of ‘peacetime’ violence, and, more specifically, for the bodies of that violence, represent key sites through which ideological struggles get articulated. One such expression of this ‘post war’ violence in Guatemala is femicide. Starting from the position that femicide is a discursivelyconstituted object, in the Foucauldian and Butlerian sense, this thesis approaches violence at the level of representation. The empirical chapters examine the political terrain of gendered violence during the Patriot Party administration (2012 – 2015). Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Guatemala, and which included interviews and analysis of speeches, policy documents, and visual and textual materials from mainstream media sources, I identify three frameworks; through an examination of the performative staging of femicide cases that emerge across a range of contextual (temporal, spatial, and subjectivity) ‘coordinates’, I consider how those frameworks help to regulate the terms of femicide’s contemporary visibility and recognition. The first framework pertains to the ostensibly ‘private’ forms of ‘domestic’ and ‘family violence’, while the second pertains to so-called new forms of ‘public insecurity’. Within these frameworks, femicide (and at times specific victims) mobilises political and societal responses, but these responses, I argue, constitute misrecognised and instrumentalised approaches to gendered violence. The final empirical chapter considers recent trials pertaining to state-sponsored genocide and sexual violence. Here, the significance of the framework that I identify lies in the practices of denial and occlusion that disarticulate historical gendered violence from the discursive economy of contemporary femicidal visibility and recognition. This thesis thus offers a ‘rereading’ of the discursive economy of gendered violence— highlighting the racialised, classed, and gendered boundaries that stratify life and death in ‘post war’ Guatemala.

During the period 2007-2015 the United Kingdom experienced economic crisis, troubles and insecurity in the labour market, radical welfare reforms, service cuts, declining real income levels and a diminished standard of living for many. Research has consistently shown that the most vulnerable groups in society, such as lone mothers, have been disproportionately adversely affected by these changes. Given that someday there will be another recession, or some other serious socio-economic transformations, there is the need to think seriously about how policy makers might offer meaningful protection and resilience to those who will be affected. One policy maker, for example, has recently commented that: “in this period of austerity, we need to support families, and use the power of their relationships and the networks they create to help strengthen people’s capacity for resilience” (Jon Cruddas, March 2014). However, until now, this rhetoric seems to be operating only at the level of political ideals. There is a distinct lack of both theoretical and empirical substance. This thesis offers a redress. It offers a theoretical framework, grounded in an analysis of social networks, for understanding people’s resilience in face of adverse circumstances. It then applies this framework in an empirical investigation into the social support networks of lone mothers, and examines the role that these networks play in times of recession and austerity. The evidence shows that lone mothers vary in their capacity to cope with and adapt to wider socio-economic change. The findings suggest that this variability is linked to the capacity of the lone mother to create, sustain and mobilise a social support network. Those individuals with strong support networks of family and friends are more likely to be able to obtain resources necessary for daily family life and are more resilient in face of the uncertainties associated with new social environments. Given this, the thesis suggests that one way in which social policy might strengthen the resilience of people and families vulnerable to economic crises is through facilitating their support networks, and proposes ways in which this might be done.

The thesis is a study of social assistance policies and practices towards separated wives and divorced and never-married women with children between 1948 and 1966 in Britain. It uses historical analysis of archival documents to address questions regarding gender and welfare state change. In doing so, the thesis builds on and critically examines existing social policy discourse concerned with the historical shift away from assumptions that women would be wives and/or mothers towards an assumption that all adults are, or should be, workers that has been linked to restructuring, the rise of neo-liberalism and social-economic change. The research focuses on policies towards this group of women because they have long been identified as a kind of ‘litmus test’ of women’s more general position within the welfare state. Policy towards this group of women offers a window into the relationship between ideas about gender, class, race, political economy and the state. The research makes three distinct contributions to different areas of scholarly debate. First, it further develops the conceptual analysis of gender and welfare state change. In contrast to much of the existing literature that has emphasized the significance of recent changes in the structural context and principles that shape policies, this research draws attention to important continuities in the interaction between social-economic shifts, political ideas and the position of women in relation to the state. Second, the research brings to light a great deal of previously unexplored archival material that provide new perspectives on the 1950s. While they support and build on recent revisionist histories of the decade, they challenge the conventional wisdom about the postwar welfare state and the idea of postwar ‘consensus’ that social policy scholarship tends to rely on. Finally, the research provides an empirical study of the role of institutions and bureaucratic agents in policy development, and demonstrates the important insights gained from multilayered historical analysis in understanding the complex interactions between actors, ideas and structures that underpin the policy process.

In the last decade there has been a growth in the number of women seeking asylum in the United Kingdom (UK), yet research remains extremely limited. Negative and disempowering narratives have come to dominate contemporary understandings of women seeking asylum. Taking a relational narrative approach and drawing on feminist perspectives, the main aim of this research was to explore the stories told by women seeking asylum. Placing the stories of women at the heart of this study, I conducted interviews with seventeen women who had made a claim for asylum in the UK. Their interviews were recorded, transcribed and then analysed using the Listening Guide. A further analytical step was developed called ‘letting stories breathe’. Hearing women’s stories of persecution and sexual violence, I present four recurring, inter-linked and, at times, contradictory narratives. These I have called the narrative of resistance, the narrative of reworking, the narrative of resilience and the narrative of ruination. I suggest that women, despite limited opportunities and restricted choices, do not necessarily accept the concepts and notions which have formed a basis for contemporary understandings about women seeking asylum in the UK. Furthering our knowledge of the relationship between stories and the narratives which frame them, I have demonstrated the active role women play in the construction of their own stories. Inspired by the stories told by women, this thesis contributes to creating a space where women seeking asylum can tell their own stories about their lives.