Les représentations de la violence dans les récits concernant la santé et les moyens de subsistance de femmes migrantes vivant en Afrique du Sud
In this Master’s thesis, we will attempt to answer the following question: How do migrant women, living in high violence contexts in South Africa, portray and incorporate violence into their narratives about their health, healthcare access and livelihood? More specifically, our goal is to understand how these women integrate experienced violence and how they communicate it in order to identify the different representations that they make of it. Although several researchers have shown interest in these news waves of violence, few have focused their attention on how migrant women experience these adversities on a daily basis. To answer our research question, we performed a secondary analysis of a database. In total, fourteen interviews were selected in which violence was mentioned. Our sample is composed of migrant women and community healthcare workers (CHW) that are mandated to provide basic care as well as promote health and prevent disease within communities. As part of this qualitative research, the favoured approach to analyse our data is descriptive interpretative, because it allows the use of data that was not collected by the initial researcher of the study. We used the constant comparative method of data analysis, as developed by Professor Kathy Charmaz (2006), to analyse our data. The results of the process showed that xenophobia is the theme used by the women in our study corpus to represent the violence migrants experience on a daily basis. Although the concept was not explicitly mentioned in the interviews, it was noticeable in the passages where migrant women and CHWs spoke of social exclusion and discrimination against migrant population living in South Africa. Two conclusions were drawn from our analysis in regard to the way migrant women integrated the violence experienced. The first is related to physical and psychological abuse and can be described as protective strategies used by some women to avoid risky situations. The last conclusion drawn is the link between the adversities experienced by migrant women and they’re feeling of belonging, where violence reduces their sense of belonging. Finally, through our analysis, a link has been established between interpersonal violence and collective violence and the presence of a so-called structural violence in South Africa. This could help explain, to a certain extent, the high prevalence of violence in the country.
Violence Qualitative Public health Migrants South Africa