Making It Stop Columnist Phil Tajitsu Nash on how community members can help end domestic abuse.
	Singaporean University Students Seeking Community (in National News) Japantown Bowl Fight Not Over Yet (in Bay Area News) Vietnam: An Emerging Market (in Business) Dan 'The Automator' Nakamura (in A&E) Death and Birth of a Hood: Hunters Point (in Opinion)

Fighting Back Against Domestic Violence

Asian American women organize to break the silence

Clara Tempongko, mother of slain domestic violence vicitm Claire Joyce Tempongko, holds up a symbolic candle at an anti-domestic violence rally on the steps of San Francisco's City Hall in October. Photo by Neela Banerjee.

By Neela Banerjee

Chanting “No justice, no peace,” a crowd of some 50 Asian American domestic violence and community activists from across the Bay Area stood on the steps of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice to voice their grief over the death of Filipino American Claire Joyce Tempongko, who was murdered last month.

Twenty-eight-year-old Tempongko was killed in the basement of her Richmond district apartment with her 5-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son nearby, according to homicide Inspector Maureen D’Amico. Her former boyfriend Tari Ramirez is accused of stabbing her to death.

There had been a history of domestic violence disputes up until two weeks before her death.

In one incident on Sept. 1, police were called to Tempongko’s home where they found her on the bed with her kids, crying uncontrollably and bleeding heavily from the mouth. Red marks were found around her mouth and on her neck. Police said Ramirez had forced his fingers down her throat and tried to choke her.

Tempongko had feared for her life, and her children’s, the report said. Ramirez had been arrested several times, and once jailed for six months for abusing his ex-girlfriend. Tempongko had also sought an emergency protective order but “never followed-up with criminal proceedings because Ramirez would apologize every time,” according to records.

On Oct. 22, Tempongko was found stabbed to death. Ramirez is being sought for her murder.

“I am angry,” Claire Joyce’s mother, Clara Tempongko cried into a television camera at the rally. “I am so angry.”

Joy Caneda of the Asian Women's Shelter leads the crowd in protest at the rally. Photo by Neela Banerjee.

Joy Caneda, financial coordinator for the Asian Women’s Shelter and key organizer of the protest, yelled, “We need to look at each other, look at what is happening to our sisters and make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Tempongko’s murder, she said, is indicative of a problem still rampant — and hidden — within the Asian American community.

Statistics that cross all ethnic and class divisions show that nearly one-third of women living in America admit to being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some time in their lives. Moreover, victimization by an intimate accounted for about 21 percent of the violence experienced by females in this country, according to a 1996 U.S. Department of Justice report.

For many API women, the path to getting help has been blocked by language and cultural barriers. However, in the last 10 years domestic violence programs aimed at Asian American communities have worked to tackle the problem with everything from fully functioning shelters to ethnically specific phone-lines which offer advice.

HELPING TO SAVE LIVES

Hofstra University Professor Margaret Abraham studied the experiences of South Asian American women grappling with domestic violence. Much of her work focused on organizations that help these women.

“What was really amazing was how many women spoke about how important these organizations were to them,” said Abraham. “And in the last five years, the major change I saw was the emergence of so many ethnic organizations, regionally and nationally. These organizations are crucial to stopping this issue.”

Hofstra University Professor Margaret Abraham's book Speaking the Unspeakable is the first account of South Asian American women's experience with domestic violence, and one of the only books on the subject within the Asian American community.

In her book, Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence Among South Asian Immigrants in the United States (Rutgers University Press), Abraham interviewed 25 South Asian American survivors of domestic violence, along with workers from six South Asian American domestic violence organizations. She contends the problem in that community “remains invisible,” thus preventing “an understanding of the systemic ways by which American cultural, economic, and political institutions contribute to the violence against ethnic minority women.”

In the Bay Area, one of the first organizations to provide services to Asian American victims of domestic abuse was the Asian Women’s Shelter (AWS), which opened in 1988.

Today, the 18-bed safe haven offers nine-week stays for women and children, and provides a multi-language access crisis-line, which has served as a model for other organizations throughout the country.

Mimi Kim, women’s advocate and domestic violence trainer with the shelter, was doing community education around sexual assault in the Asian American community in Chicago when the first organizing around this issue began.

“It started because at that time there were a handful of Asian American women working in shelters and they realized that there weren’t any Asian women coming to them,” Kim said.

The reasons were obvious: The mainstream shelters and organizations weren’t outreaching to API communities, language-specific services were virtually nonexistent, and few counselors were aware that fear of deportation prevented many women from seeking help.

Traditional Asian practices further perpetuated the problem. For example, the dowry system and the custom of the husband keeping the children after a divorce trap many women in marriages no matter how violent, Kim pointed out.

But there are also universal patterns. In fact, Kim said the underlying “dynamic of domestic violence is always the same. It is still about power and control,” she said.

“It is still about finding whatever excuses you can, as the abuser, to blame the woman for the abuse. And that is true no matter what culture you are from.”

Even though it’s considered a pan-Asian organization, AWS can’t reach every Asian community without sufficient resources. To compensate, AWS utilizes the strong network of ethnic-specific organizations.

SERVING SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN

One such organization is the South Bay-based Maitri, which provides crisis and ongoing services to South Asian American women. Founded in 1991, Maitri is run by 15 core volunteers with the goal to “empower the women so they can make independent decisions that affect their lives,” according to their Web site. In nine years the center’s yearly budget has increased from $500 to $400,000.

Maitri president Sonya Pelia, who has been with the organization for some 10 years, said initially the community resisted the idea of widespread education and public acknowledgement of the problem.

“We would put up booths or tables at Diwali or other community events and people would not come near our booth,” she said. “There would be 1,000 people at the event and of all the people there, maybe one or two would stop by to harangue us.”

Things have changed dramatically since then, however. People approach them and many already know about the work Maitri does, Pelia said. But not everyone is sympathetic.

“You still get people who ask ‘Don’t you think these women are exaggerating?’ But the small changes that I have seen, the gradual education of our community to this issue, is amazing,” Pelia said.

As part of her work, Pelia gives talks on the subject of domestic violence to South Asian American religious and community groups. She said that sometimes she will drive for hours to speak to a room of four people. “But, I know I reached those four people,” Pelia added. “Sometimes you have to do it one by one.”

Officially peer counselors, Maitri volunteers do much more than immediate crisis help. An average Maitri client will stay with the organization for three years, during which time they may get help with everything from legal matters to driving lessons. Maitri often becomes the survivor’s entire support system.

“That is why we started, really,” Pelia said. “The mainstream shelters help people for a limited period of time because women from this country know how to get around, how to get back on their feet. For us, our clients need to be provided every little thing. Some of these women left their homes without even a change of clothes.”

A major problem for Maitri clients, and any immigrant who suffers from domestic abuse, is learning to deal with the confusion and restrictions of immigration laws. This is especially true for the thousands of women who, as the wives of high-tech workers, come to the country on dependent visas.

“Immigration issues are more important than ever,” Pelia said. “Three years ago, 10 percent of our clients had dependent H4 visas. Now, at least 40 percent do. Our hands are tied by these laws, especially because it prevents them from getting jobs.”

Immigration advocates have been hard at work to change existing legislation to help battered women and some very important pieces were written into the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) this October.

“One of the main pieces that was put into the legislation was that battered immigrant women will no longer have to leave the country to get a green card,” said Leslye Orloff, the director of the immigrant women’s program at the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense Fund.

In the past, to receive a green card, battered women would have to prove their marriage, the citizenship status of their spouse, that they had been battered and that their deportation would cause extreme hardship. These were often hard to prove without a proper lawyer, which these women had no access to. The new legislation will no longer require women to verify these facts.

“It is really going to open up the VAWA protection to a lot of women,” Orloff said.

For the first time, the legislation is able to offer help to women on dependent visas. New T and U visas are non-immigrant visas that allow these women to work and then apply for a green card in three years.

“The U visa is a general crime visa which is granted to the woman if she has been the victim of rape, trafficking or abuse and she helps prosecute,” Orloff said. “These apply to all dependent women who are the spouses of H-1B workers or have student visas.”

BRINGING AWARENESS TO KOREAN AMERICANS

In a collaboration between the AWS and the Korean Community Center of the East Bay (KCCEB), Shimtuh started in May of this year. The program was the brainchild of a group of Korean American women who met monthly to discuss the problem of domestic violencl in their community. They called themselves the Korean American Coalition to End Domestic Abuse (KACEDA).

Peaceful Homes, Health Relationships is an illustrated pamphlet produced by the Oakland-based Korean American Coalition to End Domestic Abuse (KACEDA). The pamphlet contains tutorials, resources and advice about domestic violence. It is distributed for free and is translated in English and Korean.

After two years of discussion, the group received a California State Department of Health Services grant for under-served communities and Shimtuh began in May.

“Our first three months were supposed to be just a needs assessment of the community,” said Ann Menzie, an ordained minister who volunteered with the AWS for two years before heading Shimtuh. “But from the beginning, as we just started to tell people what we were about, we had calls coming in from almost the first week.”

Shimtuh’s detailed needs-assessment program included an extensive survey distributed throughout the community in both Korean and English, interviews with survivors and witnesses of domestic violence, and six community focus groups.

The results of the survey found that 42 percent of the general community said they knew of a Korean American woman “who had been slapped, hit, kicked or suffered … physical injury by her husband.”

“I guess there were no really big surprises because so many of us had been working as volunteers with AWS and we were aware of the need,” Menzie said.

Menzie and Sujin Lee, the other half of the Shimtuh staff, are now working to break the silence surrounding this issue in the Korean American community.

“I think that a lot of women have gone through this in some form or another but have never made an issue of it,” Menzie said. “For these women, just hearing that what was done to them was not right helps release their pain. They knew it was wrong, but hearing this minister or this Korean center say that it was wrong legitimizes their pain.”

Lee said that looking at this work through a cultural lens is very tricky. “You can’t ignore the fact that patriarchy in Korean culture is a big source of some of these problems but you have to be careful about how you put that across to people,” she said. “People don’t respond very well if you attack these things.”

Menzie and Lee agreed that immigrant groups often cling to traditional cultural values more aggressively than those still in the home country. Lee said that many Korean American community members were shocked to hear that there are a large number of domestic violence programs in Korea because they viewed the violence as a by-product of American society.

BEYOND THE FIRST GENERATION

While the Asian Women’s Shelter, Maitri and Shimtuh have focused most of their work on immigrant, first-generation women, the needs of second-generation Asian American women have become increasingly apparent.

During Shimtuh’s needs assessment phase, one of the focus groups was made up of 1.5 and second-generation Korean Americans. While talking with these participants, Lee and Menzie discovered a surprising lack of truth behind the myth “that violence will end after the first generation.”

“The first generation women were sure that their daughters did not have to deal with this problem,” Lee said. “But the second generation said that these problems are still real for us.”

Though most of these women have adopted American culture, they “do not necessarily feel comfortable going to the mainstream agencies,” said AWS’ Kim. “But they might not want to go to the so-called immigrant organizations either and I think they tend to get caught in-between.”

Kim recalled one Asian American woman who said before she was trained, she blamed the victim, thinking the woman must have done something wrong to make the man upset. With training, however, she learned that was wrong, Kim recounted.

“That in itself is huge,” she said. “For one thing, we challenged the views of one woman. Not only that but she is in a position where she is talking to a lot of women; she is in a position to help.”

Though the organizations continue to reach more women each year, there are still many who do not have access to services or who refuse to ask for help.

Sadly, Tempongko was murdered just when groups like the Asian Women’s Shelter, Maitri and Shimtuh, had increased outreach and education efforts as part of October’s domestic violence awareness month.

“Two thousand years ago we had this problem,” Menzie said. “There is even mention of it in the Bible. And I think we will still be dealing with it 2,000 years from now. It is part of human nature to be involved in this power and control struggle.”