This article explores the structural factors that hinder Vietnamese immigrant wives from escaping domestic violence by applying an institutional ethnography perspective. Taiwan’s Domestic Violence Prevention Law requires the government to assign professionals to help abused victims, but the law in action shows that abused Vietnamese wives must go through multiple institutions, which put different structural constraints on them, to reach the goal of escaping domestic violence. Following the structural intersectionality approach, we contend that gender, nationalism, and class structural factors intersectionally impose constraints on immigrant women seeking help from the state. © The Author(s) 2014.

Intersectionality domestic violence Immigration/emigration/migration Nationalism/sovereign Gender-based violence

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