Kimberlé Crenshaw’s article outlines a number of ways in which most women of color suffering from domestic violence are excluded from services which claim to protect them. Some of the reasons are less the fault of the service providers and more the fault of cultural and societal pressures. For instance, she says that as a result of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990 which as designed to protect immigrant women being battered by the US citizens they moved to the United States to marry. It prohibits application for permanent residency until after at least 2 years of being “properly” married and it demands the application be filed by both spouses. This act caused many immigrant woman to be reluctant to leave their abusive partners because they did not want to be deported. Even after pressure to create a opportunity for these women to leave their spouses without fear of deportation it took a while for a waiver to be made available to claim domestic violence. Yet, most immigrant women have limited access to the resources to file the waiver and provide evidence that they are, in fact, being abused. Many cultural barriers also contribute to their inability to file the waiver and their reluctance to report domestic violence. Many minority women live with their extended families which means they have very little privacy and no opportunity to leave the home and communicate their distress to help centers. Additionally, they are often entirely dependent upon their husbands as a link to the outside world and for information regarding their legal status.
Even women who are permanent residents remain with their abusive partners because their husbands threaten them with the fear of deportation. They could not possibly be deported but they are unaware of the reality of the situation and rely on their husband’s manipulative misinformation. They often fear that they will put their entire family at risk of deportation if they call attention to themselves. Additionally, Crenshaw’s article focuses on the issue of language barriers. Many shelters limit their services to individuals who are English proficient. They turn away non-English speakers because they don’t have bilingual personnel or resources. Efforts to include women who are of minority cultures or who don’t speak English are often merely afterthoughts for these institutions and when the shelter in the article finally did begin to make efforts to include a Latina board, they ended up driving off their minority committee members by refusing to recognize their feminist credentials and forcing them to struggle with the bureaucracy of race and class issues instead of actively helping women suffering violence. The Latina women walked out of the program sick and tired of not accomplishing any good and returned to their own community programs. This was counterproductive, obviously because these women could not assist the program in diversifying its services because their hands were tied by politics.
Other women’s services which discriminate against women of color are organizations such as Planned Parenthood (traditionally anyway). I think recently they have removed themselves pretty substantially from their past of forced-sterilization and supposed goal of “killing black babies.” Another organization which I know of locally is SOS. The program has recently enforced a strict dress code and appearance guidelines which transform their advocates from the tattooed, pierced, alternatively hair styled women (and men) into upper-crust white-collar, pristinely dressed and sanitized “representatives” of the program. This has driven many of my friends away from the role of advocates because they felt that the limitation of their free speech and individual expression would have a negative impact for the victims they were attempting to help. If I were a rape victim I’d be much happier talking to someone pierced and tattooed, someone I could relate to, who wasn’t looking down on me from above (literally and figuratively) but someone like me. The program worried that victims would be made uncomfortable by the alternative appearances of their advocates, but I think it is quite the opposite. I think victims would be made more uncomfortable by being approached by women (and men) dressed professionally with supremely tidy ‘caucasionised’ dress. The victims of rape in South Bend are often members of minority cultures and subcultures who do not relate to the white middle class image, yet the program insisted that its advocates take it up in the name of helping the recipients of their services feel “more comfortable.”
The white, upper-middle-class women who dominate the antiviolence movement have the power to determine whether the intersectional differences of women of color will be incorporated into the basic formulation of shelter policies but they often fail to dos. This, as the article pointed out, often becomes a matter of deadly seriousness which decides which victims will survive and which will not. The powerful boards of these programs need to be diversified so that their members have a variety of experiences and understandings of minority cultures and they need to reevaluate their policies which are often made with good intentions but end up marginalizing those who are not white-middle-class. Additionally, law enforcement and minority cultures need to become more open to sharing statistical information about rape, sexual and domestic violence within minority communities so that the need for prosecution and investigation as well as increased protections and services for minority women can be understood, recognized, and acted on. If everyone keeps pretending that these problems are much less of an issue than they really are, then they will never be brought to full light and they will never be effectively resolved.
No comments:
Post a Comment