Over thirty years have passed since Kimberlé Crenshaw analysed the ‘double subordination’ experienced by migrant women of colour who were subject to domestic violence. ‘Compounded disadvantage’ is, to draw on and paraphrase Crenshaw, the term I use to state the difference that immigration law makes to an experience of violence against women.
The ECtHR uses the concept of vulnerability to respond to applicants’ different characteristics and experiences. This strand of its non-discrimination jurisprudence, in conjunction with Martha Fineman’s theorising, has been relied on by scholars who have sought to understand the disadvantage that flows from migration status as a distinct form of legally-created vulnerability. In the first part of this paper, I justify my analytical approach, one that is rooted in this jurisprudence and theorising, and which reveals the role of the State in first producing, and then compounding, migrant women’s disadvantage. I then explain the circumstances which give rise to compounded disadvantage and trace its features, drawing on empirical research that focuses on women’s lived experiences of violence and State power. While migration status and violence may interact to produce a constellation of different experiences, what is shared and what are, therefore, the defining features of compounded disadvantage are control, exclusion, a perilous migration status and an intensified experience of violence.