Battered South‐Asian diasporic women: Culture, secrets and work

Research indicates that women's experiences of domestic violence (DV), perpetrated by intimate male partners, impacts their work and workplaces (e.g., Showalter, 2016). South‐Asian diasporic (SAD) battered women tend to keep their DV experiences secret (e.g., Tonsing, 2014). Workplaces may be one of the few places where women experiencing DV disclose secrets (e.g., Murray & Powell, 2007). Utilizing a transnational feminist perspective, we carried out an integrative review process on scholarship from 2000 to 2020 pertaining to workplace implications of DV for SAD women. We make three contributions: we synthesize the cultural norms surrounding SAD women and DV to illuminate why these women keep their experiences secret; next, we braid these threads into a Cultural sensitivity, Organizational preparedness, Recognition and Engagement framework to highlight how workplaces can mitigate the experiences of SAD battered women employees; and finally we highlight how workplaces may support other ethnic minority migrant and refugee women experiencing DV.