HOLDING OUR COMMUNITIES ACCOUNTABLE
By Debbie Lee

Adding our Asian Voices

Repeatedly, we see studies done in which Asians are left out. When homicide studies are conducted, data on Asians is excluded because of the view that "the numbers were not that big and so we just didn't do any analysis in that category." We cannot continue to accept this. We must collect the data within our urban centers and other places where there are Asian populations so that we can better understand the nature of these homicides. We must do this in addition to collecting newspapers articles and clippings, as was suggested earlier.

We are called to put a larger portion of our time into working with our community leaders, despite the frustrations we might face. We sometimes may not be able to talk about our feminism up front. However, we can still build an understanding of domestic violence in our communities. We can do that through bringing data and repeated stories that show domestic homicide is not an infrequent circumstance and that it was not the woman's behavior that caused her death. We need to come up with plans for developing public education campaigns and for helping those already in leadership to become more outspoken about domestic violence.

With our ideas and the information we collect, we can assist our communities by showing them what they should do next to respond to domestic violence homicide and to prevent these kinds of deaths.

Debbie Lee is the Managing Director at the Family Violence Prevention Fund.  She directs the National Health Initiative on Domestic Violence.