Managing the Long-Term Effects of Psychological Abuse on (Im)migrant Domestic Workers.

Abstract

While researchers have highlighted the emotional distress of migrant domestic workers who experience abuse by employers, less is known about long-term effects of the psychological abuse that they experience. Drawing from a broader ethnographic study of Filipino and Indonesian migration to Chile, we analyze three Filipina domestic workers' migration narratives to examine how they narrate and manage the long-term effects of psychological abuse in the domestic workplace that they experienced more than ten years earlier. Building on insights from medical anthropology and using narrative analysis, we contribute to discussions on migrants' mental health and psychosocial wellbeing by showing how these migrants seek to make meaningful sense of their previous experiences to deal with the enduring effects. We show that they construct alternative narratives that foreground their experiences as linked to structural factors and suggest that their psychosocial wellbeing is linked to their ability to subvert or derive meaning from earlier experiences of structural violence.