HOMICIDE, GENDER AND CULTURE
By Shamita Das Dasgupta

Decoupling Gendered Homicide and Culture

When violence occurs within the family in our API communities, it is immediately thought to have occurred because of the implicit or explicit dictates of our cultures.  Lately, I have started to think about culture as learned behavior as opposed to biologically determined behaviors.  So if culture represents behaviors that are learned and nature represents those that are biologically determined, then domestic violence becomes cultural. However, most people and institutions here do not view culture in terms of learned behavior when they talk about India, Japan, Guam, Bangladesh or any of our API cultures.   When discussing  "minority" cultures, they refer to the symbols, nuances, guidelines and teachings of our cultures that condone and even encourage men to abuse the women related to them. Having stated that, I will try to decouple these issues a little later.

We, ourselves, as activists and advocates, sometimes get confused about the origin of violence in our communities. I have heard many advocates fall into the trap of saying "your culture."   In my case, South Asian activists and advocates say, "our culture condones this" and "our culture teaches us woman-abuse." In our effort to explain woman-abuse, we regularly evoke culture-especially when homicide occurs in our communities. Many non-activists and many of our own community members also speak about culture; however, they speak about it in a different way. They use culture to say woman-abuse has been imposed on us and we are in fact, these good and peaceful people. They say the behaviors of the Euro-American world, colonization and violent American culture is corrupting our peaceful one. Class and religion as cause and variables also are implicated in these arguments. We say it is "those people" or "that religion." This finger pointing goes on in very interesting ways.

I will attempt to decouple the notions of domestic abuse and culture by talking about domestic violence related deaths, specifically focusing on the South Asian community. I have collected data and information haphazardly. I started literally by collecting newspaper articles and throwing them into a folder, which I did not review for about 10 years.  Then I started putting the information in the computer because the folder had become very thick.  Once I began doing that, I literally started crying because of all the reports of women being killed - until then I had not recognized that so many South Asian women were being killed.  It was just horrendous. I have started gathering information more carefully now.  However, there is no systematic data available about domestic violence related homicides in our communities.  Newspapers report incidents carelessly, the stories are often misleading, and only a story that some reporter thinks is interesting or knows something about gets reported.  Much of the information reported is suspect and suicides that are obviously related to domestic violence never get reported as such. It is a pretty dismal situation.

Domestic homicides in the South Asian community: what the data reveals

In the South Asian communities of the United States and Canada, individuals have been killed, suicides have occurred, there have been attempted murders, suspicious disappearances, and individuals have been killed by the police.  The following information was collected from ethnic (South Asian) and local newspapers.

Summary of domestic violence related lethal and near-lethal incidents in North America
USA 1981- 2002

Canada 1986- 2001

• Men Killing Heterosexual Partners, or Intended Partners - These killings target the wife, ex-wife, lover, ex-lover, or a woman this man may be pursuing. A number of killings have occurred where the woman does not know the man but he has been pursing and sending her letters or telling his friends he was going to marry her.  In some cases, the man was pressuring the young woman's brother, saying he wants to marry the sister. He eventually ends up killing the woman.
• Women Killing their Heterosexual Partners - All of the instances that I collected indicated the woman was being battered.
• Murder-Suicides - Most of the instances involved a man killing his wife and then himself, or the man killing himself and the children. There was one rare instance I found of a woman killing her whole family, which included her husband and children. There also were two incidents of battered mothers trying to kill their children and themselves. There are pieces missing here because many of these killings of children as well as mothers and children were reported later as accidents.
• Men Killing Adult Family Members, Mothers-in-law, Fathers-in-law, and Others Related to His Spouse - Often men are not killing their partner but attacking the mother-in-law, father-in-law and related people who are probably providing support to the woman.
• Men Hiring Killers to Murder their Wives - In only one instance, I have a report of a woman trying to hire killers to murder her husband.
• Fathers-in-law Killing Daughters-in-law - The newspapers reported the reasons for these killings as being misogynistic. The incidents involved fathers not wanting their son to be married to their chosen partners because she was of another culture. (Most times the killings occur because the woman is of another culture, not another race.)  In cases that involve property, there was fear that the woman was going to go away with a lot of property and the son would be left a pauper.
• Teenage and Adult Children Killing Parents - The reasons why teen and adult children kill their parents are unknown.  None of the newspaper reports offered an explanation.  Suspicions are that abuse in the home perhaps of their mother and/or of themselves may have been occurring; however, it is not clear.
• Sibling Killing - All of the newspaper reports showed brothers killing their sisters.
• Domestic Worker Killings - Female domestic workers were reported in the newspapers as being killed by their employers.

Some Observations

The methods of committing homicides varied-by setting women on fire, shooting, bludgeoning, poisoning, beating, stabbing, strangulation, etc. These deaths appear to be much more brutal when the man is doing the killing; for example, one woman was bludgeoned 60 times, one had 16 stab wounds on her body.

I have not found in our community newspaper, articles involving same sex domestic violence related deaths, which probably indicates that they are not being labeled or reported as such.  There is no record, for most of the South Asian women victims and perpetrators of domestic homicide, to show that they sought help from a domestic violence agency or other community-based organization (CBO). We must ask why that is, given that there are now 22 domestic violence organizations across the country serving South Asian battered women. We also must recognize the fact that many small API-specific CBOs do not have the capacity to deal with these kinds of complex cases.

We need to do is look at obituary columns and see what is happening there in terms of suicides. We also should go into neighborhoods, interview individuals and listen to community 'gossip'. The latter can be a useful, but not always reliable, way of gathering information about what might have been happening in particular families.

Internal and External Perceptions of Culture

I could not find instances in the newspaper where cultural issues played a part. The only questionable area I found involved mother-child murder -suicides where culturally held beliefs about motherhood may have some impact. However, we are missing the issue of the immigrant status these women have and the isolation they face.  Immigrant status and isolation may play a crucial part in the woman's decision-making.  For example, perhaps the woman is trying to kill herself to take herself out of her abusive situation and she could not find alternate caretakers who she confidently believes would care for her children. Would she have tried to kill her children if there were caretakers she could entrust her children to?  That is a question that remains unanswered.

Unfortunately, culture is evoked at every level in these cases; and when they appear in the courtroom, by the media and larger community as well.  Typically, culture is used to mitigate the actions of the male perpetrator and to vilify the female when she is the perpetrator.  Interestingly, the ethnic newspapers pick up the theme of culture also. For example, in a couple of cases with which we have been closely involved, the local newspapers called us immediately after the death occurred and said, "Oh, we understand this was an arranged marriage." We were able to dissuade them from using "arranged marriage" as an explanation.  However, the ethnic newspapers that are familiar with India and South Asian immigrant communities reported the cases using quotes such as, "Arranged Marriage", and "Dowry".  Rather than focusing on the prevalence of abusive men or abused women in our communities, these deaths were portrayed as anomalies having cultural associations and origins. 

Most community members do not discuss cultural arguments openly. When we go to community settings to talk to groups, they tend to absolve men's violence by placing the blame squarely on women. The implicit idea of culture, teaching, and socialization of men also comes up when activists and researchers are called to provide expert witness testimony in court. Usually, it is defense attorneys-but sometimes prosecutors also-who are calling and asking for expert cultural testimony.  They present individuals as cultural experts and not as domestic violence experts. When API experts are called, they are told, "You don't have to talk about domestic violence. We have [white] people coming in and doing that. But you are going to explain culture."  That gets repeated over and over again, and it puts us in a double bind.  If we accept the invitation to go and present, we are perpetrating this notion that there is something different about our culture and that it is problematic. Meanwhile, no cultural expert is called upon when cases involve white or African Americans in very similar situations.

When we find ourselves having to go to court; we have to face several thorny dilemmas, particularly since the court system itself is based on the ethos of the dominant culture.  So should we, or should we not, provide expert testimony? Refusing may mean we are abandoning the woman to her fate. The first imperative we have as a group is to collect information because we do not know what has happened in these homicide cases. The work performed by homicide review boards is not sufficient because they review only official documents. Pertinent information goes missing in these reports. For example, in New Jersey there was a murder in a Latino community. Right after the woman's murder, the Immigration and Naturalization Service made a number of sweeps into the community because they discovered the woman was undocumented. That type of information is never going to make any of the official documents; however, it is critical in reviewing subsequent cases in that neighborhood.

Concluding Questions

So, what should we do? Should we try to eliminate culture totally from our work?  If so, then what would be our strategies and tactics? Should we retain some elements of this cultural based argument and use it to support victims and battered women who use violence? Which elements should we keep and how should we keep them? What are the unintended consequences we can anticipate in retaining parts of our culture and cultural argument? How are activists and experts contributing to perpetrating cultural stereotypes? How can we provide cultural testimony to support individual women while not jeopardize the safety of other women who will come through this system in the future? If we eliminate the cultural argument totally how can we justify the existence of CBOs? How can we use public education effectively to stop extreme and all other forms of violence in our communities? Do you as advocates and community workers think the larger society, community members, and women we work with view domestic violence issues and nuances as cultural phenomenon? How can we use this perspective to end violence? How can we use culture for our purposes or would taking it on mean going down a slippery slope?

Shamita Das Dasgupta is the co-founder of Manavi, the first South Asian service program established in the United States.