“Because I Was the One to Blame, Right?”: Secondary Victimisation of Migrant Women

Introduction

Understood as a cultural construction of the appropriate roles for men and women in society (Scott, 1995), gender is a central and organising category of migration and adaptation processes in the host country. Women and men can experience the migratory journey differently due to gender, with women being significantly impacted by violence and discrimination in this process, which does not end with the immediate arrival in a new country (Boyd & Grieco, 2003; Jerónimo, 2019).

According to the literature, various factors or conditions of people may make them more at risk of becoming victims of certain types of crime. Gender and migration status are often included in the list of acknowledged vulnerabilities, as well as economic status, race and nationality. Any analysis of vulnerabilities must consist of an observation of the broader social conditions that affect potentially vulnerable individuals or social groups (Green, 2012). In this sense, analysing from a single angle can hide other spaces of vulnerability, which is why an intersectional analysis is vital to challenge single understandings that homogenise discourses, as well as to make visible phenomenological experiences where various social structures intersect, without fragmenting such events (Dhamoon, 2011; Carastathis, 2014).

It is also well known that people who were victimised continue to feel the impact of the victimisation event (s) for relatively long periods. This process of persistent suffering can stem from the trauma of the crime, as well as from the fact that society overall and social institutions, in particular, fail to recognise and concede the status of victims to specific individuals or social groups (Condry, 2010). One possible institutional reaction that has been well developed in scientific literature is secondary victimisation, which, according to Manzanares (2014), highlights the process of interaction between victims and the formal systems of state control, particularly the damage and inconvenience it causes and that may increase suffering resulting from primary victimisation or the experience of the criminal event in the first place.

Based on empirical studies and theories explaining the phenomenon, such as “Belief of a Just World” (Lerner, 1980) and “The Ideal Victim” (Christie, 2018), this chapter is structured as follows: first, a brief literature review on secondary victimisation is presented; next the empirical study conducted about the experiences of migrant women with the police in Portugal will be presented, namely some details about the qualitative methodology adopted; notably the Narrative Analysis carried under the framework of Narrative Victimology (Pemberton & Aarten, 2018), as well as challenges regarding recruitment of participants and positionality of the first author. Participants of the study are Brazilian women who had been victims of crimes in Portugal (primarily gender-based violence) and who reported the crime to Portuguese police authorities.

The third part of the paper will present the results of this analysis and provide claims, from an intersectional perspective, about the extent to which the migrant status, intersecting with gender, race and nationality, are elements enhancing the occurrence of secondary victimisation and the impacts it has on identity, emotions and culture. Lastly, proposals will made to improve the practices of professionals in the criminal justice system and for future studies that push forward Narrative Victimology by stressing the centrality of people and the events they experience as the investigative essence (Sandelowski, 1995), thus placing migrant women at the centre of victimological studies, allowing them to feel empowered to provide new meanings to their experiences of victimisation.