The gendered harms of ‘voluntary return’: women’s experiences of disrupted relatedness, bodily precariousness, and gender-based violence in the UK and Punjab

Since 2012, the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ immigration regime has sought to precaritise non-citizens’ lives, and thereby encourage their voluntary departure.

In recognition of this explicitly violent objective, empirical legal scholars have increasingly sought to elucidate migrants’ experiences of adversity in the UK with attention to the legal structures and practices that comprise this regime. This research will seek to expand this focus to return practices.

Previous research on return has overwhelmingly focused on deportation – which comprises a minority of returns from the UK – and neglected voluntary return, despite its statistical and conceptual significance to the hostile environment regime.

As voluntary return also affects far more women than deportation, the practice carries additional importance for scholars of gender and migration.

Through ethnographic and narrative accounts of South Asian women’s lived experiences of ‘voluntary return’ from the UK to Punjab, this research will foreground voluntary return’s impacts for women’s health, safety, wellbeing and relationships, and consider whether these experiences might be conceptualised as ‘gendered harms’.

These findings will develop understandings of migrant women's autonomy, dignity and bodily integrity, and states' obligations to non- citizens under a political and legal system that sharply differentiates their rights from those of citizens.