‘My In-Laws Forced Me to Have an Abortion’: Coercive Control and Gendered Entrapment Among Migrant Women During COVID-19 in India

Abstract Violence Against Women and Children represents a global health crisis which was made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, empirical investigations of how gender-based violence changed with the pandemic remain scarce. This article seeks to understand migrant women’s experiences with coercive control in the context of COVID-19 in India. The VAW literature has increasingly urged us to understand coercive control as the very core of all (gender-based) violence whether as part of domestic abuse, human trafficking and exploitation, or high-control groups. Using storytelling methodology, the study draws on the narratives of eleven women who describe diverse situations of coercive and controlling behaviour and entrapment both as part of domestic abuse and violence and in the context of human trafficking and labour exploitation. The women described gendered entrapment, surveillance, and the control of their movements, sleep, food, social interactions, educational opportunities, and other freedoms, including reproductive coercion and control. These longer-term patterns of domination and control were perpetrated by parents, in-laws, siblings, and exploitative labour systems. The women ended up entrapped, controlled, oppressed and immobilised in their human rights and freedoms to an extent that they felt helpless and hopeless which was detrimental to their (mental) health and wellbeing. The article responds to the call to better bridge the interlinkages between domestic abuse, coercive control and human trafficking and exploitation.