Immigrant women twice as likely to face domestic violence
In 2012, when Mandas returned home after selling tortilla all day long in Brighton Beach, she discovered that her husband had tied a tight rope around the neck of her six-year-old son and put her four-year-old son inside a bathtub filled with water, as he got high on drugs.
That horrific day, Mandas said she rescued her son from the tub, removed the rope from her older son’s neck and together they dashed out of the room. But her husband chased after them, pursuing them for four blocks, before he hit Mandas on the back of her head. She recalled waking up in the hospital with 21 stitches. To her great relief, her sons had not sustained major injuries.
After enduring two marriages as a child bride, first at 14 and then at 16, both marred with domestic violence, Mandas said she was hopeful to move to the US with her third husband at 19. “After we came here my husband got addicted to drugs and alcohol. But I had two sons with him and I had to keep my family together,” said Mandas. That was not the last marriage where Mandas suffered domestic violence. Only two months back she said she called the police on her husband, of her fourth marriage, after he hit her for the umpteenth time. “I decided I needed a new opportunity in life. I don’t deserve a bad life,” said Mandas, 38, who has been residing in Brighton Beach for the past 19 years.
Immigrant women in the US, including Latinx and South Asians, are twice as likely as other women to experience domestic violence. Local organizations in Brighton Beach, where South Asians and Hispanics comprise one-fifth of the population, report similar realities. Interlocking factors such as ingrained gender roles, their status as immigrants, and their tight knit racial communities make them extremely vulnerable to violence and prevent them from seeking help.
A Pakistani immigrant, Abeera Aijaz, is a case worker at Apna Community Center, a non-profit supporting the South Asian survivors of domestic violence in Brighton Beach. “The victims find us after months of experiencing violence, and anonymously ask about resources. Only when things get very violent, do they come forward,” said Aijaz, 23. The organization reported supporting up to three victims of domestic violence every week.
The normalization of violence in Latinx and South Asian culture perpetuates the cyclical pattern of abusive relationships. “When one grows up witnessing domestic violence around them, abuse isn’t seen as a problem but a result of women’s bad behavior,” said Veronica Barrios, an assistant professor of family science at Miami University, Ohio. “Our brains seek out environments that are familiar to us. So if what’s familiar to us is an abusive environment, then without our conscious effort, we would find ourselves in the same pattern of relationships that are abusive.”
As immigrants they also have a limited support network and rely on people who are close to the abuser for help.“Sometimes the in-laws advise survivors to remain in marriages saying they have to change him, they have to be tolerant,” said Nayla Khoury, assistant professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University, New York. “Norms around what it means to maintain a happy family and the stigma around divorce makes women reluctant to take their ‘problems’ outside of the family.”
Mazoor Ahmed reported feeling helpless when he could not stop his neighbor from being violent. “My tenant used to hit his wife because he claimed she nagged him,” said Ahmed. Three decades back, he migrated from Pakistan and settled in Brighton Beach and has been renting his house to other Pakistani immigrants in the neighborhood. “One day when they were arguing, he seriously injured her and their children came running to me for help. I went to their room and asked the woman if I should call 911, but she pleaded with me not to. Sharing about their conflict publicly would risk damaging other marriages in their extended family, as their relatives were intermarried,” said Ahmed, 55.
Racial solidarity and distrust with the systems that are supposed to protect them also prevent people from reporting domestic violence. “As black and brown immigrants dealing with xenophobia and racism, their community is tight knit, discouraging them from reporting an abuser of their community,” said Raisa Rodríguez-Torres, program manager at the Latina-led non-profit Violence Intervention Program. She called for transformative justice to address the roots of domestic violence. “People don’t want the father of their kids incarcerated, but right now that’s the only consequence of reporting domestic violence,” she said. Also, the immigrant women, who are often undocumented, feared being deported when seeking help and losing their children if social security intervened.
Despite the barriers some women are breaking the cycle of domestic violence. A resident of Brighton Beach, Saima Fnu started working at an adult day care five years back. After years of her husband refusing to give her any money and not allowing her outside of their house, Fnu said she had enough and started to work. “I still live with him and his family but I feel free. I have my own money,” said Fnu, 40, who immigrated from Pakistan 10 years back. “I can send my son to school and give him gifts.”
