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Silenced through fear, threats, and betrayal, women share experiences of racism, intergenerational trauma and abuse, displacement through migration, and displacement through space, by the men who abused them and, for three women, the women who abused them. Experiencing multiple forms of abuse and violence, a "continuum of oppression" keeps women silent for up to 20 years in some cases, but this is not without attempts to speak. Forms of violence and abuse have similar consequences where women describe feelings of fear, confusion, intrusion, and alteration in how they negotiate public, private, and relational spaces (see Kelly. Surviving sexual violence. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988). Women also relay narratives in the context of wider, collective, and familial accounts of trauma and oppression, mostly of female relatives.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-58389-5_2

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