South Asian Women and Domestic Violence Shelters

In Monisha Das Gupta’s Unruly Immigrants, she spends quite a bit of time in Chapter 4 separating the goals of Manavi, Sakhi, and SAWA from those of traditional domestic violence groups, women’s groups, LGBT groups, and Asian American groups. Women’s groups and LGBT groups tend to exclude people of color, while Asian American groups tend not to deal with South Asian issues. While all of these South Asian women’s organizations had more or less the same stated goals as all of the other types of groups, none of the other groups has the ability to serve the needs of working-class South Asian immigrant women experiencing domestic violence. Manavi, Sakhi, and SAWA were each founded to deal with specific shortcomings of other organizations in working with domestic violence survivors.

Traditional domestic violence organizations tend to provide services temporarily to affected women, but cannot or will not serve those whose immigration status is uncertain or dependant on that of the abusive partner. Likewise some will not serve the needs of women who are experiencing violence at the hands of a female partner. Many organizations are not equipped to deal with the issues specific to South Asians, even in simple matters such as clothing and food, as the story of the young woman who did not eat or change her clothes for three days due to a misunderstanding on the part of the shelter made very clear. Manavi, Sakhi, and SAWA each try to help South Asian women who have experienced domestic violence, in different ways. All have redefined domestic violence to include other forms of family- or work-related violence. Manavi tried to create an alternative to the solutions proposed by traditional domestic violence shelters, which do not work for undocumented immigrants or those who are not fluent in English. Sakhi tries to change the individual empowerment focus of those groups. SAWA tries to educate those groups about South Asian women’s issues so that they can better help these women.

I found it interesting that domestic violence shelters, which one would think to be largely beyond criticism since they simply provide a service and help people get past traumatizing situations, have so many criticisms against them. In fact, there are enough critiques that Manavi, Sakhi, and SAWA each used different tactics to attempt to change how that service is provided with regard to specific shortcomings.