Feeling Safe and Secure from Gender-Based Violence: Highly Educated, Middle-Class Indian Women Migrants’ Gendered Understandings of Integration in the UK

Drawing on findings from 29 semi-structured interviews for a qualitative study that inquired into understandings of integration in the UK of highly educated, middle-class migrant women from India, this article explores a distinctive, highly gendered way to comprehend the concept of integration. The participants construed and equated integration in the host country with their own emotive approaches revolving around being safe and secure from gender-based violence, as well as being free from gender-based family constraints, which they experienced on a nearly daily basis while living in India. Addressing the notion of integration through gender and power binaries, as well as by foregrounding emotions to depict the same, usually falls outside more established discourses on integration, which revolve primarily around political, economic, labour market, social, and other aspects of integration. Yet, as the recounted feelings conveyed the essence of integration perfectly well for the interviewees, it is crucial not to overlook them. The article calls for the recognition of broader, transnational impacts of gender-based violence, to which women who would traditionally not be perceived as vulnerable (i.e. those who are educated, financially more stable, and live in urban spaces) are also not immune.