‘For the sake of my daughter and the new generation’: investigating a peer-to-peer approach to supporting migrant women exposed to partner abuse

Migrant women exposed to interpersonal violence often face barriers to accessing essential support, and can be hard-to-reach for support services. One way to bridge the gap between vulnerable persons and support provisions is the peer-to-peer approach. This article explores how such support can be provided in an ethnic minority context by analysing interviews with volunteers in the all-female NGO ‘Sister Supporters’. The analysis is structured around the nine-phase ‘Sarah Waller’ help-seeking model, showing how the shared backgrounds between the volunteers and the women they support facilitate trust-building. Their shared backgrounds include diverse cultural and linguistic competencies and the volunteers commonly being abuse survivors themselves. In the early cognitive phases of the help-seeking process, volunteer outreach provides vulnerable women with information and emotional support. In later help-seeking phases, users of Sister Supporters take overt action to leave their abuser. In these phases, NGO volunteers often pass cases on to NGO staff members, who engage in advocacy activities and bridge-building to support providers within the mainstream public service system. When reaching the final ninth ‘restoration phase’ of the help-seeking process, some users of Sister Supporters decide to become volunteers themselves. As the NGO’s work challenges established gender hierarchies in some ethnic minority contexts, volunteers must circumnavigate considerable resistance from conservative co-ethnic forces. However, the NGO provides a community that supports the volunteers in dealing with such resistance. Sister Supporters’ peer-to-peer approach constitutes a novel and promising approach to doing social work with vulnerable women in ethnic minority contexts.