SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The effects of religious beliefs in the domestic violence experience of migrant communities has been increasingly documented in recent years. The current chapter aims to delineate the nuanced relationship between domestic violence, faith and migration by discussing the available evidence and extracting key implications on appropriate faith-sensitive interventions. It proceeds with a decolonial reflexivity, recognising that most research on domestic violence and religion emanated historically from western societies, specifically the US and Canada, and has been guided primarily by Anglo-American definitions and theorisations of religion and domestic violence, which can be limiting or inappropriate in non-western tradition-oriented religious societies and their international diaspora and migrant communities. The need to embed religious belief systems in the cultural contexts of their historical development multi-dimensionally and to move towards more transboundary, culturally-embedded, multilingually aware and theologically informed approaches is stressed as a means to researching domestic violence and designing faith-sensitive interventions cross-culturally.