Something old, something new: How I used theater (and a chatbot!) to inform immigrant women about domestic violence
I wanted to raise awareness of the dangers of marriage fraud in the U.S. Then attorneys told me that real marriages were actually the problem.
Let’s play a game.
A group of people needs a piece of information to stay alive. These people are also forbidden to access to this information. Here is where you come in: you have been given the information. How do you get it to them?
Before you think of a strategy, here are some facts and constraints on this operation:
- You don’t know who these people are.
- Most of them don’t speak English.
- If they are found to possess such information or accessing it, they can die.
- They are constantly being watched; their phones and computers are scraped regularly.
- They don’t convene anywhere in person; they live in isolation.
- They don’t know you.
- Many don’t even know they need this information.
This is the game we graduate students in the class of 2019 played during our year and a half in the social journalism program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. We had to choose marginalized communities that needed information and come up with a way to inform them.
Here is how this game is usually played in the journalism industry (which doesn’t happen very often): the information that vulnerable, marginalized audiences need is packed into a conventional journalistic product or service, anything that has been traditionally associated with journalists: newspapers, magazines, documentaries, podcasts, newsletters.
But in the social journalism program, we understand that the audience’s needs come before journalistic tradition. If the news industry hasn’t come up with a format that serves a group we need to inform, then it is our job, as journalists, to create that format or borrow it from other areas of expertise.
This is how the Women Against Violence Experiment (W.A.V.E.) was born. I created this platform as my social journalism practicum to develop unconventional services to inform Brazilian immigrant women who are victims or at risk of domestic violence.
How I chose my community
Two Brazilian immigration attorneys working in New York, Stephanie Mulcock and Michelle Viana, told me that women in the Latino diaspora are vulnerable to domestic violence, regardless of social class or education. They tend to be:
Women without legal status who prematurely marry their American (or U.S. permanent-resident) boyfriends and find themselves victims of abuse, or
Wives of foreign nationals with work visas such as the H1B, which doesn’t allow spouses to work, who find themselves victims of financial manipulation, a form of domestic abuse.
Mulcock and Viana agreed that domestic violence was going to become more of an issue. Brazil is now the third country with the most nationals overstaying their tourist visas, which leads to illegal immigration status. In addition, Brazilian nationals are crossing the Mexican border in unprecedented numbers: according to the Associated Press, 18,000 of them were apprehended in the 2019 fiscal year that ended in October, a 600% increase from the previous high in 2016.
The U.S. is not the safest country for Latina women seeking status adjustment, either.
The information
Remember the game we were playing in the beginning? This is the information that I had and needed to deliver to my community.
1 — Women think domestic violence means only physical violence, which is not true. Financial and psychological abuse by a partner are also domestic violence.
2 — Immigrant women don’t know U.S. legislation and resources are available to help the ones in an abusive relationship. The U visa helps undocumented women adjust their status, while the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) allows spouses of U.S. citizens and permanent residents to petition for their own green cards without the partners’ acknowledgement.
I learned from attorneys what the community’s information gaps were. But it was through talking to survivors and women in abusive relationships that I understood what barriers had been preventing them from accessing the information they needed:
To cut through these barriers, I looked for inspiration in IT and in one of the oldest art forms, which also happens to be my favorite: theater.
Chicabot, the chatbot
U.S. legislation and immigration procedures are complex and can intimidate any immigrant, let alone one who feels threatened by a partner and the government. With that in mind, I created Chicabot.
This chatbot shares information in a way that is easy on the eye and the ear. GIFs and memes are part of the conversation, and the information is not given all at once. During the chat, the user dictates how much she or he wants to know about a particular topic by clicking on the buttons.
Chicabot is embedded in W.A.V.E.’s webpage (look for the speech balloon on the bottom right corner.) She was developed with Dexter app, which allows building a prototype without having to actually know how to code. I wrote about my experiment here.
In addition to delivering information that immigrant women need to stay afloat when their relationships are sinking, I wanted Chicabot to be able to do a few other things:
1. Motivate and empower
Google searches about VAWA or the U visa often show these bureaucratic expressions and terms, most of them completely foreign to immigrants, in both language and meaning. I wanted Chicabot to give information in a way that fostered curiosity and hope, and didn’t overwhelm a potential victim.
2. Show empathy
At a time when people are more connected than ever through social media, surveys have found that half of millennials and Generation Z feel lonely. The lack of empathy — the ability to understand another person’s feelings — has a lot to do with that.
In a study by the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford School of Medicine in California, college students who self-identified as having symptoms of anxiety and depression chatted on Woebot, a conversational interface that delivers Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in the format of brief daily conversations. While the control group reported no changes in symptoms after two weeks, students using the chatbot reported a significant reduction in depression (See chart.) Asked what were their favorite things about the bot, students praised the empathy it showed while facilitating learning.
“Just as the lack of empathy makes cruelty and oppression possible, the presence of empathy heals conflict,” wrote Steve Taylor, Ph.D., in Psychology Today.
I wanted Chicabot to be the empathetic friend that victims of domestic violence and abuse often find it hard to have.
Qualitative and quantitative feedback
Twenty-one people — mostly Brazilian women who are green card holders or who have or had a visa — tested Chicabot. Here’s what they shared:
95% learned something new.
52% know at least one immigrant woman who has been in an abusive relationship.
86% would definitely recommend Chicabot to a friend.
Next steps for Chicabot
1 — Expand the content based on the suggestions given by the early testers.
2 — Translate it into Spanish and Portuguese.
3 — Integrate the chatbot to W.A.V.E.’s Facebook page, from which it can be accessed through the Messenger app.
Chicabot didn’t go unnoticed: After posting my article about the experiment on Medium, I was contacted by Planeta Chatbot, which will publish a Spanish version of my article, and by CUNY’s marketing and communication office, which wants to learn more about my prototype.
However, I was not finished with my practicum.
I had heard and read how isolation is one of the most crippling results of being in an abusive relationship. So I also wanted to develop a service that informed people while bringing them together in the same space, in the hope of allowing victims to connect with a support system or with women facing the same challenges.
I already had an online solution: the chatbot. Now it was time to come up with an offline one, an event. Having a background in theater, I thought that the forum theater could be a good fit for this.
“What if It Happened to You?”: a forum theater play for the immigrant community
Forum theater is part of the Theater of the Oppressed methodology, developed by the world-renowned Brazilian artist Augusto Boal (1931–2009), who was inspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
In forum theater, members of a marginalized community who are experiencing some sort of oppression come together with the help of a facilitator and create a play portraying that issue. After they perform it for the community, the facilitator invites audience members to replace actors onstage in moments of crisis to try to change the outcome of the scenes.
Boal used to say this form of interactive theater is a “rehearsal for the revolution.”
The inspiration for a forum play about domestic violence in the immigrant community came from the work developed since 1985 at the Jana Sanskriti Center in Kolkata, in India, around the same topic. The Madalena-Berlin group, established in Germany in 2011 through the Kuringa collective, was also a reference for our work. Like the Jana Sanskriti, the collective uses forum theater to tackle the oppression suffered by women.
Last summer I participated in a workshop on forum theater with Boal’s former assistant and facilitator Geo Britto. There, I met theater director and educator Becca Kenigsberg, who had gone to Brazil twice to study under Britto at the Centro de Teatro do Oprimido (CTO-Rio) in Rio de Janeiro. She was serving as his assistant and translator at the Brooklyn workshop and immediately accepted my invitation to participate in my project.
Looking for participants
Finding people willing to participate in theater exercises and rehearsals for at least 23 hours over five weeks with no financial compensation seemed like a hard task at first. Luckily, I was completely wrong. After posting a callout on Facebook, I had 13 people show up for our first meeting. We ended up with 10 people in the cast, all with previous theater training, and some of them with experience with abusive relationships.
In our first three meetings, I shared my findings with the group and had guest speakers answer the participants’ questions. Marize Campelo, a school psychologist, told how she had survived her abusive marriage. Candice Andrews, coordinator of the project She Is in Trinidad and Tobago, talked about the theater work she developed with girls who were victims of violence. The group makes art interventions and performs short plays about the topic in public areas, schools and community centers.
Kenigsberg then guided us through the crafting of the forum play. We had six rehearsals at the Newmark School, in which I worked with Kenigsberg as her assistant and occasional translator.
The forum play
The 15-minute play was completely developed by the participants based on their or their friends’ life experiences. It portrayed a highly educated immigrant, played by actress Fay Vera, who finds herself in an abusive relationship with Brazilian-American musician, played by Victor Fontoura. While she is in denial, her friends (played by Yasmin Santana, Suzane Senna and Ana Moioli) can’t agree if her husband is abusive or just hotblooded.
The play was promoted online via W.A.V.E.’s Instagram profile and Facebook page. I also posted the digital flyer on WhatsApp and closed Facebook groups of Brazilian women in New York and New Jersey. I wrote press releases in English and Portuguese and had the help of two Brazilian journalists who sent it to Brazilian online and print publications in New York.
We sold out five days before the performance. Opening night was Dec. 6, and we had 60 attendees, 15 of them men. The play was in Portuguese, but the facilitation was translated into English, since almost 10 people did not understand Portuguese.
We had four interventions from the audience, one from a woman who was in an abusive marriage and had just managed to leave home.
After the performance, I was contacted by an organization called Mulheres do Brazil (Women of Brazil), which promotes events for women in the diaspora. We were invited to perform in February 2020 in a community center in Newark, which has a big Brazilian community.
We want to go on tour! If you know of any space that would host our event, please email me at wavexperiment@gmail.com.
A final word for this final post
As someone who went to both journalism and theater schools in Brazil, I was often seen as lacking career focus. In my 20s, I felt inadequate and weird for having equal interest in crafts that seemed so different in nature — reporting and acting. A fortuneteller and astrologer told me in 2011 that I was going to be able to combine both crafts in my professional career.
“You are not supposed to choose one or the other,” he told me. I believe in astrology, yet I didn’t buy it. He then drew some tarot cards and confirmed his prediction.
Now I can pull out my master’s diploma in social journalism to confirm it, too.
In this program I have learned many things about being a better journalist: how to listen better; how to honor a community’s struggle by sharing control over the narrative of a piece about its people; how to go for stories that benefit the community rather than stories that satisfy my personal curiosity. Journalism is, after all, a public service.
But after graduating with a practicum that involved theater and a chatbot, this is the biggest lesson I learned: if your interests don’t seem to fit in a particular career, it’s not a liability; it’s a leg up. Odds are that you are up to something good and simply got there before your industry did.
