Refuge for Battered Asian Wives : Shelter Helps Overcome Language, Cultural Barriers

A wife and salted fish are alike. They have to be beaten once a day to keep them good.

--Old Korean saying

The 10 bedrooms at Every Women’s Shelter are tiny and sparsely furnished. Most of the rooms hold only a bed and a chair. Not much more can fit in them. The wallpaper is faded and the curtains dusty. But the women who stay in these rooms do not mind. The shelter is a haven for Asian battered women.

Like women of all races, Pacific-Asian immigrants who are beaten by their husbands want to escape, but often do not.

For Asians, cultural barriers compound the difficulty in seeking help. To many traditional Asians, breaking up a marriage is a personal embarrassment, what one social-service worker likened to wearing “a scarlet letter.” Then there are the bewilderment of a new language and culture, including a perplexing legal system. And, finally, they may have come from a society in which wife-beating is an accepted part of marriage.

Every Women’s Shelter is a 5-year-old program that helps Pacific-Asian women, most of them immigrants, solve some of these problems. It offers counseling, legal aid and a safe place to stay close to cultural ties that support, rather than bind.

Nancy (not her real name) is a Filipina in her late 30s. This is how she described her plight: A doctor, she and her husband came to the United States 10 years ago. Nancy and her three children fled to the shelter in 1983 to escape from John (not his real name), after he threatened to kill them. Frustrated one night after losing money in an investment, John choked his youngest daughter, hit Nancy and went on a rampage.

“I tried to stop him from hitting me. But he hit me all over my back and my shoulders. The children were crying and I kept shouting at him to stop. When he wouldn’t, I just grabbed my children and ran to my neighbors. They called the police. I didn’t know what to do. He scared me,” Nancy said quietly during an interview at the shelter.

Before the police arrived, John ran away. Knowing he kept a gun for protection, Nancy was unsure of where to go and was frightened that he would follow. “John knew everybody I knew. I didn’t want to endanger anybody in case he tried to find me, “ Nancy said as she looked at one of her daughters. “The police told me about Every Women’s Shelter so I went there.”

Nancy stayed at the shelter for three weeks and then found an apartment with the counselors’ help.

Wife-beating is not unusual in the Pacific-Asian culture, said Nilda Rimonte, the shelter’s founder and executive director. Many Asian men feel they have license to hit their women.

“They go home and feel safe, so they feel they are able to hit their wives. They have been told it is OK to hit them . . . (that) it might be good for her,” Rimonte said.

In traditional Asian culture, both husband and wife accept wife-beating as a way of life, said Lucie Cheng, director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.

While many Asian immigrant husbands are not more likely than other husbands to beat their wives, they are more likely to be excused for doing so, Cheng said.

“If the wife is seen as doing something wrong, the husband beats her. So, if the husband said she was disobedient, others would say she deserved a beating,” Cheng said.

There has been little documentation of wife abuse in Los Angeles’ Asian community, but it certainly exists, said Bill Watanabe, executive director of Little Tokyo Service Center, which has handled wife-battering cases that often involve women born in Japan. Typically, these women are afraid to make changes because they are used to being submissive. They are reluctant to split from their husbands, Watanabe said.

Unknown Quantity

“We don’t see hundreds of cases, but we do see several,” he said. “But these are the people who are willing to come forward and seek help. We don’t know how many are afraid to come out.”

“In Korean culture, the man comes first,” said Woo Lee, vice president of the Korean Federation, a Los Angeles social-service organization. But he added that wife-battering is rare among Koreans.

Because many cases go unreported, reliable data on domestic violence in any ethnic group is difficult to get, said Marge Nichols, a research director for the United Way, which compiles statistical information on Los Angeles’ Asian communities.

All battered women tend to be afraid of their husbands or boyfriends and are so embarrassed that they would rather keep the beating to themselves, agreed Asha Parekh, a crisis counselor at the shelter. For Asian immigrant women, the problem may be even worse because many are traditionally subservient to their husbands.

The immigrant women usually have more independence here than in their native country, said Alice Tsou, executive director of the Chinese American Service Center. The women assert themselves more. The men are confused by this and try to maintain control. Because the frustration and stress of immigration are so great for the Asian family, the husband sometimes takes out his anger on his wife, Tsou said.

The family structure is still very strong for Asians, even when they come to the United States, said Mindy Lee, domestic-violence program coordinator at the International Institute of Los Angeles, a social-service center for Pacific-Asians. When an Asian woman is beaten by her husband, she doesn’t want to seek help because it means she broke up the marriage first, she said.

Housed in a two-story building near Hollywood, the shelter has its office on the bottom floor, where several desks are crammed into one room and the counselors answer calls to the shelter’s 24-hour hot line. The shelter began as a hot line for Asian rape victims, with counselors also answering questions from battered women, Rimonte said.

The shelter often seems more like a fortress than a home. The front door is bolted at all times and visitors are not allowed in without questioning from the house management. Near the door hangs a bulletin board posting the names of expected visitors or angry husbands and boyfriends. The location of the shelter is confidential.

The women usually bring themselves, their children and nothing else, Parekh said. “Once the women make up their minds to leave their homes, they don’t have time to bring everything with them. They just leave.”

The women stay in the shelter for about six to eight weeks. During the day, the women are counseled and given information about their legal rights. On their own time, they take their children to a nearby park or watch them play in the heavily fenced backyard or in the shelter’s play rooms.

Sharing the cooking responsibilities and other chores, the women eat dinner together, and many become close friends. In the middle of the kitchen counter sits a hefty rice cooker, a reminder that many of the women prefer their native food and are not acquainted with American ways.

Although many of the women are Pacific-Asian, there are differences both among and within ethnic groups, Rimonte said. Korean women who have been here a few years may be as different from newly arrived Koreans as they are from Filipinas.

Lack of English Skills

Many of the women do not consider themselves to be Asian-Americans, Rimonte said. They speak their native language, they socialize with people from their own country and they are afraid, Rimonte said. Sometimes their lack of English skills prevents them from seeking help.

The language barrier is one of the problems Every Women’s Shelter tries to resolve. Very often those who come to the shelter had hesitated in going to other shelters for counseling, Parekh said.

Although almost half of Southern California’s 38 women’s shelters have bilingual counselors, most of them speak Spanish, said Jan Armstrong, director of the Southern California Coalition on Battered Women. The Asian women and others who do not speak English are left out because there is difficulty finding bilingual counselors, Armstrong said.

Every Women’s Shelter, which houses almost 300 women and children each year, employs six counselors who speak Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese and other South Asian languages. During their stay at the shelter, the women are also tutored weekly in English, Parekh said.

For any woman who is abused--Southern California shelters house nearly 7,000 women and children each year--talking about the experience is difficult. Talking with counselors whom they trust helps victims resolve their feelings about being beaten, Armstrong said. But trust is often hard to achieve when an Asian woman cannot speak English.

“I can’t imagine what might be more frustrating than to talk to a counselor who does not speak the same language,” Armstrong said. “It’s a terrible barrier. It’s important that people don’t have to battle with language when they have other crises.”

Because of cultural and language differences, the immigrants find the American legal system bewildering, said Lora Weinroth, counsel for the Battered Women’s Legal Counseling Clinic.

Many Pacific-Asian immigrant families do not consider wife-battering a crime, said Mindy Lee of the International Institute, even though their native countries may have laws against it. Many do not realize that wife-battering is a crime in the United States.

Under California law, any injury a spouse causes by physical force is a felony. However, some of the immigrants see themselves as their husband’s property rather than equal partners in a relationship, said Rimonte, the shelter director.

Weinroth, who has helped several Asian women draft temporary restraining orders, said it is difficult for them to understand that they do not need their husband’s permission to get a divorce.

Roz Perlman, victim advocate at the shelter, accompanies the women to Superior Court to file temporary restraining orders and to attend court hearings.

“I have seen many of them terrified of facing their husbands again. They just don’t want to see them anymore,” Perlman said.

Sometimes the hearings are confrontational because the couple have not seen each other since the woman left, Perlman said. During one hearing, a husband, angered by his wife’s allegations, lunged for her and had to be held back by three bailiffs, Perlman said.