Women’s Shelter to Serve Immigrants

A shelter for battered women from the San Fernando Valley’s Asian and Middle Eastern communities will be opening this fall.

The Coalition of Women from Asia and the Middle East, which meets monthly in Van Nuys, plans to open the shelter in a four-bedroom house in Silver Lake donated to the group by Tasneem Khan, an insurance broker from Kashmir.

There are about 25 shelters for battered women in the Los Angeles area, but only one specifically serves women from Asian-Pacific countries such as China, the Philippines, India and Korea. None specifically serve women from the Mideast.

“There is tremendous abuse, especially of Indian and Pakistani women,” Khan said, explaining at the group’s meeting Saturday why she donated a house she owns and offered to raise $35,000 to operate the shelter for a year.

The shelter will provide services in nearly a dozen languages. Counselors will be sensitive to the special needs of clients, including the strong cultural pressure to preserve the family unit that makes it difficult to leave abusive relationships, organizers said.

Khan and other coalition members said domestic violence may be more commonplace among immigrants from Asia and the Mideast than in other groups because men from those cultures are often taught traditional patriarchal values that clash with American expectations for women.

“Some men can’t tolerate that women have more opportunities here,” said Parik Nazarian, a Glendale social worker from Armenia.

The immigrant experience puts extra stress on families, said Lilla Hashemi, a Woodland Hills therapist from Iran.

“We’re talking about unsophisticated, uneducated women who have absolutely no means of supporting themselves without a man,” Hashemi said. “There is tremendous shame in seeking help.”

Jae Levine Weiss, an outreach counselor at Haven Hills, a battered women’s shelter in Canoga Park, recommended that the coalition operate a 60-day program to give women a chance to establish new lives for themselves, if necessary. The group is still working out the details of the program.

“This new shelter is desperately needed,” she said. “We get women from these cultures, but not in proportion to the need that exists.”