Enabling Access to Welfare Services - the Place of Social Solidarity and Dialogue

The welfare state in the UK presents immigrant communities with a set of institutions, which are potentially new and unknown. What is the best way to ensure that the questions of access to the welfare institutions are best managed? Trusting, understanding and feeling solidarity with the welfare state will obviously help with this problem. In order to shed light on this phenomenon, this paper presents a qualitative exploratory study dealing with elements of solidarity as perceived by members of the South Asian Community in the UK. Six indepth interviews with South Asian first generation immigrants who had never experienced mental health problems were conducted. They were asked questions about who their support networks would be in the event of them experiencing mental health problems. The thematic analysis of the interviews suggests that the respondents believed that solidarity and support ties are found to be present in families, within the south Asian community and also with welfare institutions. It is concluded that there although things are far from perfect, assimilation and integration based on dialogue is an observable positive aspect of mental health service provision in the UK.

Domestic Violence

Since the 1960s, there has been growing awareness regarding the issue of domestic violence as a form of violence against women, which has been largely influenced by the work of feminist activist and scholars in North America and Europe (Dobash and Dobash 1992). Other terms have been used to describe the same phenomenon, including domestic abuse, spousal abuse, wife battering, marital violence, intimate partner violence. Though there is no doubt that this problem has existed for much more than five decades, the tendency to label it as ‘private matters’ or ‘marital disagreements’ has obscured the reality of women living with abuse in their home. At a general level, domestic violence can be defined as the means used by a man in order to assert his control and domination over his intimate partner, whether they are married or not (Mullender 1996). It can involve incidents of physical and sexual violence, as well as verbal, psychological and financial abuse. Though some of its manifestations may be associated with particular cultural or religious groups – e.g. forced marriage and honour killing in South-Asian communities – domestic violence affects women from all classes and backgrounds.