This article uses legal consciousness to discuss the influence of Portuguese culture on women's perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence. It is based on an in-depth small-scale study of Portuguese women living in England, and proposes that culture is central in shaping their behaviour, regardless of whether they experienced violence or not. The cultural characteristics that influence women the most are analysed here under the themes of 'familism', 'shame and community pressure', and 'acculturation'. These do not operate all at the same level and their influence can change according to structural and individual circumstances. As such, the article suggests that immigrant women's perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence can only be fully understood by articulating national culture with other structural and individual variables; this will enable a multi-layered and situated understanding of women's legality that avoids a simplistic attribution of their behaviour to national or ethnic provenance. I. IntroductionDespite official numbers suggesting that there are currently 175,000 individuals with Portuguese nationality living in the UK (Observatório da Researching the impact of culture on women's perceptions and responses to domestic violence is not a simple endeavour, partly because of the complexity of the concept of culture itself, an aspect that will be explored later in this article. The complexity of the concept should not, however, detract from exploring its potential impact on behaviour, as it can be generally accepted that national culture operates at individual and community levels.Although national identities can be conceptualised as artificial and serving the purpose of supporting 'imagined communities', individuals nonetheless adopt cultural practices that reflect these national identities (Anderson, 1991; Berlant, 1991: 168; Gellner, 1994: 48; Hobsbawn, 2000: 269). Once successfully assimilated by a population, state promoted cultural traits determine how individuals organise their daily lives, including how they perceive and manage family life (Yuval-Davies, 1997: 36).A discussion of the cultural characteristics that are most prevalent in participants' discourses is, therefore, presented here. These are addressed against common findings from literature on immigrant women and domestic 3 violence across a variety of countries and nationalities. Such literature reveals that it is not unusual to expect immigrant women to experience certain added cultural barriers that influence how they experience domestic violence and respond to it. Common barriers identified in this literature are here aggregated and explored under the themes of familism (or women placing the interests of the family ahead of their own), shame and family honour, pressure from the community and acculturation (see, for examples,

Please cite this publication as follows:Graca, S. (2015)

This article provides a theoretically informed examination of migrant women's responses to domestic abuse in the host country. It departs from an analysis of research on South Asian women in England, on Portuguese women in England and on Portuguese women in Canada to suggest that women's apparent lack of mobilisation of law (primarily by eschewing contact with the justice system of the host country and preferring informality), both perpetuates hegemonic discourses and presents a possibility for change. The theoretical approach undertaken combines literature on legal consciousness, power and resistance, and on socio-cultural structures and barriers that affect migrant women. The article ultimately suggests that, rather than an acceptance of hegemonic discourses, women's behaviour is best understood as a form of resistance to, and from within, socio-cultural pressures encountered in everyday life; as a form of "entrenched" resistance.

In recent years, heightened attention has been given to the control and management of the so-called ‘night-time economy‘. This refers to the entertainment industry that operates during the evening and night-time, that flourishes in many UK city centres and consists mostly of licensed establishments. This type of entertainment has brought with it problems in terms of binge-drinking and antisocial behaviour which pose more demands on the already strained resources of the police forces in these areas. The thriving industry and the communities' demands for more public order are the basis of this study. The literature review presented here was made with the example of Margate in the southeast of England in mind. Nevertheless, the examples given here are all too common in other areas of the UK and the discussion can easily be imported to these other areas in order to solve similar problems. This study will be focusing on some of the key stakeholders of the night-time economy and possible ways of formal and informal control, and town and community engagement.

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