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Focussing on violence in ethnic communities

R S Shankar

When novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and entrepreneur Radha R Basu founded Maitri about a decade ago, one of the goals they had was to empower battered South Asian women to be self-sufficient. They also wanted the South Asian society to look within itself and ask what it was doing for battered and abused women.

Last week, Maitri, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, joined several other advocacy groups -- as it has done many times in the past -- to seek more awareness of an "illness" that affects one of every four families.

Women working with Indian communities across America have often complained that community leaders are not comfortable with discussing spousal abuse and ill-treatment of women in their communities.

The high media exposure that followed the death of a teenage Indian girl due to carbon monoxide and the subsequent sexual mistreatment charges against her landlord and employee Lakireddy Bali Reddy angered many in the Indian community. Some of them wrote nasty letters to the editors of the publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News.

At the first conference dealing with abuse among racial groups, held at THE San Jose State University on Saturday, about 220 professionals, teachers, law officers, students and the public mused about forming a coalition to prevent domestic violence across ethnic and cultural lines.

Mukta Sarangapani of Maitri spoke of a young Indian mother being battered by her husband because she was dependent on him because she lacked a green card, a job and family support.

In recent years, because of Maitri and other support groups like Asha in Chicago, Sakhi in New York and Manavi in New Jersey, many battered women have taken the first step to give up their hopelessness -- and seek help.

Spousal and child abuse is deeply embedded in the cultures of many ethnic societies, the conference agreed. But community leaders often look elsewhere. And the victims wondered about the stigma that might be slapped on them if they rebelled against abusive spouses.

In Los Angeles, for instance, social workers say Narinder Virk, who is charged with the attempted murder of her two children by drowning, endured an abusive marriage for nearly a decade because she was afraid her community would ostracize her.

Only when her husband told her he was going to divorce her did something snap and made her try to kill herself and her children.

Keynote speaker Beckie Masaki, a co-founder and executive director of the Asian Women's Shelter in San Francisco which offers shelter to 16 women at a given time, warned:

"If we are truly going to prevent violence in our communities, then we must make the connections between all forms of violence: family abuse, violence against women, youth violence, hate crimes and the violence of poverty, racism, sexism and homophobia. We need to understand that the roots of violence lie in the abuse of power."

Even children learn to imitate their abusive parents.

"You look at kids today and you wonder where in their lifetime they ever got the idea that violence was not okay," said Masaki.

"No one is giving these children alternatives to violence,'' she said. "There is a lot we must do if society is to change.''

Indian American activists have started discussing violence among gays and lesbians too.

Participants warned against the belief in many cultures that the family should handle domestic violence because the perpetrator's arrest becomes a public embarrassment. But the participants also said social workers should understand that such a belief often results from distrust of the police in many countries, particularly those in Asia. And yet it would help to create trust if there are more minority police officers, they said.

In recent years, police departments in many major American cities including New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles have begun recruiting more minority police officers, especially of Asian origin.

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