Conclusion

This report signifies the first inquiry into the exploration of API contributions to interventions addressing domestic violence, and thereby the safety and health of API women and communities. 

Future reports will focus on documenting and analyzing concrete examples within theme areas emerging from this report.  Further exploration will undoubtedly present new areas of promise and of challenge.  Examples and results from diverse ethnic or other communities, geographic areas and institutional contexts will inform our future strategies.  Examination of the assumptions, values and visions underlying these strategies will create more solid foundations for our work.

Each theme area poses unique questions regarding effectiveness, ethics and implications for the future.   Answers to these questions will contribute to greater safety for abused women and children; replacement of systems of oppression with the promotion of equity; and to the enhanced wellbeing of API communities and to all of us facing violence in our lives.

Where We Start:  Viewing the Survivor within the Context of Her Community

How have API programs created interventions and options which take these factors into account?  How are these interventions structured? Where are they located?  How are they presented?

Reshaping Intervention:  Expanding Options

What do these programs look like?  What are their goals - self-determination, empowerment, independence, increased safety, leaving abusive relationships? How do they reach survivors - in the community, at home, at school, at work?  Do any of these options include children?  Youth?

Intervention Approaches:  "Family-Style"

Are these innovations?  Do these types of interventions foster paternalism as opposed to empowerment?  Do they help women and their children increase their safety?  Do they address gender bias, sexism?

At the Edge of Safety:  Redefining Survivor/Abuser Boundaries

What do these approaches look like?  Do they compromise safety?  Do they collude with abuser denial?  Do they impose agendas of family unity?  What is the survivor role in defining these interventions?  When and how are they effective?

Community Accountability for Abusers

What defines community accountability?  Is it based on notions of "treatment," monitoring and management of abusive behavior, public shame or humiliation, punishment, revenge, abuser responsibility, survivor safety?  Is there a presumption of guilt?  Who determines the intervention?  How is it implemented?  How is the survivor involved in acts of community accountability?  Are these interventions effective in increasing safety in the relationship addressed? In preventing future violence within the larger community?  When and how?

Community Organizing

What do community organizing strategies look like?  What is their relationship to intervention?  How do programs  balance  interventions and community organizing?  How do organizing strategies differ from community education, outreach or increased awareness?  Which sectors of community do these engage?  Where and how?  What are the goals of community organizing?  What are the results?

Redefining Domestic Violence

Does the nature of domestic violence need to be redefined?  Do the relationships need to go beyond the intimate relationship or the nuclear family?  Do we need to reconceptualize the dynamics of domestic violence in order to effectively address violence?  Do we need to move beyond interpersonal violence to larger societal notions of violence?  Are there universal responses for API communities or are they relative to that particular community?

Redefining the Vision

What goals or visions most effectively capture our work?  What goals or visions lead to more effective and/or ethical strategies?

Organization of a Pan-Asian Response

What are some of these organizational formations?  Under what conditions are these most effective?  What degree of autonomy and collaboration do various formations require?

Children in API Domestic Violence Interventions

What programs have developed interventions for children and for youth?  What are the underlying assumptions regarding the impact of domestic violence on children and youth?  How have these assumptions influenced interventions?  Are these interventions innovative?  How?

Men in the API Domestic Violence Movement and API Domestic Violence Interventions

Is this an area of innovation?  How have men been included in the API domestic violence movement?  How have men been included in domestic violence intervention?  How is the issue of men in the movement related to the issue of patriarchy?  Masculinity?  How have API programs conceived of the role of men?  When and how does the inclusion of men appear effective or necessary?