Geographies of Violence: Intersections of Public and Private for Syrian Refugee Women

Drawing on the narratives of Syrian refugee women in Jordan, this research traces the forms of public violence that women and their husbands encountered across three stages of displacement, pre-flight within Syria, during flight, and after flight to Jordan, and examines how that exposure became entangled with intimate partner violence (IPV) in the private sphere. In-depth interviews with forty Syrian women living in the Zaatari camp and surrounding host communities were analyzed through narrative analysis. Across the accounts, public violence emerged as a recurring condition of each stage rather than an episode confined to the war. In many of the women’s tellings, the violence they and their spouses had endured in public did not remain there; it followed them into the home, where it reshaped marital relationships and was implicated, in their own interpretations, in the continuation and intensification of IPV. The home thus appeared not as a refuge from public violence but as a site where it was absorbed and redirected, with women’s own public experiences at times turned against them through the language of honor and blame. By following the entire refugee journey, the research foregrounds a continuum between public and private violence that protection responses rarely address.