Mapping the Social Protection System(s) for Migrant Women experiencing Gender-Based Violence (GBV): EU multi-countries construction of data, actors and tools.

The aim of the Ph.D. project is to unfold the subject of Gender-based Violence (GBV) and how it is conceptualized by academic and professional discursive practices in the specific situations concerning migrant women having a precarious legal status, and their access to social rights/entitlements in Sweden and Italy.

First, the project analyses how the problem (GBV) is named and framed. Indeed, within the gender and migration epistemic community, scholars codify and make sense of the problem of violence experienced by migrant women and, consequently, their knowledge production influences the types of social responses that are identified as appropriate once.
Secondly, the multi-site approach and the empirical fieldwork seek to unpack the role of the European protection systems in negotiating, contesting, and reproducing state power over borders and citizenship. In relation to that, the Ph.D. project builds on the role of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in response to immigration detention practices in the EU. In particular, the attention is addressed to service provisions in the field of violence against women having a precarious immigrant status. In this regard, efforts will be made to analyze the role of professionals in de-bordering the social protection system in response to immigration laws (e.g. do not ask women about their immigrant status in order to access the services). Italy and Sweden have been chosen for the multi-method analysis because representatives of the different EU Welfare Systems.

Methods: A systematic literature review will be carried out to gather evidence in the field of GBV and to identify mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion created within the protection system operating at the intersection of migration and gender regimes in the EU. This will be followed by first contacts with experts working in the field. Semi-structured interviews using vignette methods will be carried out with professionals, working in diverse organizational settings, such as NGOs and CSO with the aim to understand their role and agency within the migration/gender welfare regimes in Sweden and Italy. The vignette methods will allow data to be comparable.