Domestic Violence Specific to API Women

Domestic violence in Asian and Pacific Islander communities has some different patterns, forms and dynamics of abuse. There are certainly similarities between all battered women’s experiences; these are not enumerated here. Some of the dynamics Asian and Pacific Islander women describe may be particular only to certain API ethnic group(s); some may be common to many of them. We are trying to develop a complex picture of what is happening in our communities, without essentializing or stereotyping them.

Distinguishing Dynamics

• Multiple abusers in the home: perpetrators may include mothers-, fathers-, brothers-, sisters-in-law, ex-or new wives, adult siblings or other members of a woman’s natal family.
• Internalized devaluation and victim-blaming are that much deeper when there are multiple perpetrators.
• Our women describe ‘push’ factors (“leave the house, give me a divorce, I can always find another wife,” etc.) more frequently than ‘pull’ factors (“come back to me, I love you,” etc.).
• Gender roles are tightly prescribed and more rigid, minimizing female agency and shrinking the space within which women and men can re-define those roles.

Sexual abuse can include

• Excessive restrictions designed to control women’s sexuality; grave threats about sexual activity; being blamed for rape, incest or coerced sex; being forced to marry their rapist; kept in ignorance about sex, sexual health and anatomy; and denied a different sexual orientation.
• Young women can be victims of trafficking: as mail order brides, sex workers, or indentured workers.
• Women face sexual harassment not only from co-workers but from family members, community leaders, clergymen, etc.
• Forced marriages [not to be confused with arranged marriages] can exacerbate sexual abuse.
• Marital rape; extreme sexual neglect; being forced to watch and imitate pornography; and being forced into unprotected sex can result in sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS.

Physical abuse can mean

• Dealing with multiple abusers; severe isolation because a woman has left her home country and thus her support systems; complete abandonment; hyper-exploitation of women’s, including elderly women’s household labor; withholding healthcare and medication; and the mistreatment of widows.
• Mothers can be threatened with the kidnapping of their children; lose custody of their children because divorced women are severely stigmatized, or because of prevailing cultural beliefs that children belong to their father.
• Domestic violence related homicides encompass a broader range of deaths carried out through honor killings, contract killings, dowry [bride price] related deaths; killing of family members in the home country; and being driven by husbands and in-laws into committing suicide.

Same sex domestic violence in API couples carries greater threats associated with outing a partner in a community where homosexuality is ostracized.

Threats to immigration status are part of the pattern of abuse

• Threats of deportation, loss of children, making false declarations to the INS about her, withholding/hiding passports and other important documents, not proceeding with green card applications
• After marriage in the home country women come here and sometimes have to contend with another partner her husband has: her vulnerable immigration status forces her to accept whatever arrangements he insists upon.

Abusive community norms

• Gender discrimination is directed at girls early in childhood by withholding proper nourishment, health care, or education.
• Community reinforcements that keep gender violence in place utilize victim blaming, silencing, shaming, and rejection of battered women who speak up or seek help.
• Covert or overt support and the lack of sanctions that accrue to batterers, only increase their impunity and entitlement to violence.

Analyzing Violence Against Women: Lifetime Spiral | Coiled Spring | API Specific

Analysis | Statistics | Ethnic Specific Information | Organizing