Introduction

Attempting to analyse the migration of females to Cyprus from the vantage point of locating their integration is a rather problematic venture. Firstly, the literature available on the subject is mostly ‘international,’ and as such we are forced to erect artificial ‘national’ or ‘state boundaries’ in order to confine the ambit of our work. Secondly, there is an inherent contextual problem relating to the de facto division of the country in which we are faced with the fact that Cyprus is a bi-communal and bilingual country, but due to EU-related budgetary reasons and political issues research fails to properly capture the situation in the whole of Cyprus. For instance, unless the literature is in English or has been translated into Greek from Turkish, there is usually a failure to deal with the situation to the north of the barbed wire. The third difficulty relates to the fact that the subject of integration in general in the context of Cyprus has never been a subject of study, save for some papers written by the researchers themselves (see bibliography and literature review that follows) and one study by Harakis (et al., 2005). Moreover, the question of integration of female migrants has never been directly, and to a large extent indirectly examined before, meaning that this is essentially an exercise of locating the gaps in ‘local’ knowledge in the literature.