Getting Creative to Combat Domestic Violence

As advocates strategize to maximize the potential of the Violence Against
Women Act, marginalized groups are arguing for a need to expand the range of
protections available to women of color.

The South Asian community has become particularly active on
this issue in the past few years, with a significant number of culturally
targeted advocacy organizations emerging to raise awareness of the unique ways
that domestic violence impacts South Asian women.

“We’d like to move towards being present at the next
reauthorization [in 2018] for the Violence Against Women Act,” noted Tiloma Jayasinghe
during a recent event at New America. “That would be a good indicator of how
we’ve muscled up more than what we are now.”

Jayasinghe was joined by Aparna Bhattacharyya of Raksha, Inc., Manjusha Kulkarni of the South Asian Network, the New York Anti-Violence Project’s Sharon Stapel,
and Shilpa Phadke of the Center for American Progress’s Women’s
Initiative for a discussion on how VAWA can best accommodate the needs of survivors
of domestic violence within the US’s rapidly expanding South Asian population.

Between 2000 and 2010, the number of South Asians living in
the United States (defined as individuals originating from India, Bangladesh,
Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives) grew by 81 percent, officially
making it the “fastest growing major ethnic group in the United States” according
to US Census data.

Despite this growing
presence, federal policy on issues affecting South Asian women has faced a
remarkably difficult road to becoming law. The 2013 reauthorization of VAWA is
a good example—despite protections for immigrants already existing in previous
versions of the domestic violence policy, GOP
legislators blocked the bill after finding its expansion of specific
minority-oriented protections disagreeable.

And while the act eventually passed, the final version of
the bill lacked the bite that many activists were expecting.

“My frustration is that when this law passed in 2005,
survivors were supposed to get some path to apply for temporary work
authorization,” explained Bhattacharyya. “Ten years later there’s still not a
way to apply for this relief.”

The inclusion of visas for immigrant survivors of domestic
abuse in particular has become more of a political football in the wake of President
Obama’s recent actions on immigration, but protections for immigrant women
have actually
existed within the VAWA legislation for the past 15 years. In 2000, U-visas
were created to give noncitizen survivors of domestic violence a legal means of
staying in thecountry and securing employment, but incredibly high demand coupled with federal delays
in the visa application process have left survivors unable
to access the benefits granted by the legislation.

“Imagine being undocumented and having to support yourself.
How do you survive?” Bhattacharyya wondered. In her opinion, finally
implementing the provisions governing work authorization for immigrant
survivors is a much needed step in making VAWA live up to its goal of “increasing
access for survivors.”

But for Kulkarni, increasing access won’t mean much if
survivors are too afraid to report abuse. “One of the main gaps that our
community faces as a result of VAWA is really the focus on law enforcement,”
she pointed out. “A limitation of when you look at law enforcement is [knowing
if] they are prepared to deal with our community, and in a
lot of situations they just frankly are not.”

Since some forms of immigration relief (U-visas for example)
are
only available to survivors that comply with criminal investigations, instances
of police incompetence can have very real effects
on the lives of immigrant survivors, with fears of deportation trumping the
desire to report and cooperate.

“I think we are talking about marginalized
communities generally, but I also think we are discussing intersecting themes,”
Stapel noted after emphasizing how her work to pass VAWA protections for queer
communities overlaps with the current work being done by South Asian domestic
violence organizations.

As the director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project,
she has worked to reduce domestic violence in LGBTQ communities, yet “to this
day I still have people tell me that domestic violence doesn’t exist in LGBT
communities,” Stapel admitted.

When asked about her experiences during the last
VAWA reauthorization cycle, Stapel said that “framing is so critical” when promoting
so-called “niche” issues to a larger community.

This tension
between policy and social perception raises an important question: If VAWA only
deals with part of the problem, what else can be done to support survivors? “I think that the power of stories and personalization tend
to help,” Shilpa Phadke observed. In her work at the Center for American
Progress, Phadke has found that storytelling can be a powerful tool in making community
members “comfortable on issues that they’re not comfortable with.”

But raising awareness about the need for cultural change is
arguably a lot easier than actually producing it, especially in communities
that have deeply entrenched notions of gender relations. To deal with this
problem, Kulkarni and Bhattacharyya offered two approaches to engaging the
community in domestic violence awareness—direct conversation and a broad
offering of community resources.

“We’ve had couples come in for healthcare, and our staff has
been able to spot it [signs of gender violence],” Kulkarni acknowledged. As an
example, Kulkarni recalled a moment when
a husband became verbally abusive to his
spouse, and a member of the South Asian Network stepped in and refused to help
the couple until the husband apologized.

“[After the incident] there were tears in her [the wife’s]
eyes because no one had ever stood up for her,” Kulkarni said, reiterating the
need for domestic violence organizations to actively promote gender justice in
their spheres of influence.

Bhattacharyya agreed that addressing signs of domestic
violence with a more direct approach often works in isolated situations among small
groups, but quickly clarified that addressing domestic violence “is different for
other organizations” that want to impact the community at-large.

In her work, Bhattacharyya has found that providing multiple
services allows people to see her organization as an integral part of the
community, which in turn makes it easier for the group to bring up
uncomfortable issues like domestic violence and patriarchal traditions.

Unfortunately, this approach presents a unique challenge. Couching
domestic violence within broader efforts for social justice in specific
ethnic communities can do much to spread awareness internally about the problem,
but this strategy can also have the unintended effect of sacrificing engagement at broader levels. The resulting balancing act leaves South Asian
organizations in a difficult position where their advocacy must hover between overgeneralizing and
being too specific.

But the panelists were confident that the South Asian
community could find a way to simultaneously encourage external allyship while
also promoting an internal shift in perception. “If you talk about the issue you can’t forget the community,
and if you talk about the community you can’t forget the issue,” Jayasinghe
concluded.