SHELTER FROM SHAME : Building Bridges Into the Multicultural Community, Local Refuge Has Award-Winning Programs to Reach Battered Women Who Are Up Against Barriers of Custom and Language.

Women chattering in foreign languages and broken English walk in and out of an ordinary blue stucco house in Orange County. The house, with white trim, lace curtains and a striped tomcat stalking birds in the front yard, looks like any other in Southern California.

But the women who live there know their home is a refuge, a place so hidden that few know what goes on inside. Every day the residents of this battered-women’s shelter share secrets of lives filled with terror and shame.

In the past few years, more and more minority and immigrant women have been turning up at battered women shelters throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties, a fraction of the number experts suspect are victims of their partners’ violence.

As Southern California’s immigrant population grows, the crisis worsens, leaving women trapped in their homes, “in their own little world of terror,” said Carol Williams, executive director of Orange County’s Interval House, one of a few places in the country where large numbers of immigrant or other non-assimilated women find safety and a new life.

Maria, 26, is typical of the women who live at Interval House.

Abandoned in Mexico at age 6, she fell in love at 15 with the first man who paid attention to her. Though they never married, they had five children. He rejected birth control. Two of the children were born with unformed hands and feet, probably a consequence of poor nutrition during her pregnancy, she said.

Maria and the children left several times, once when she was four months’ pregnant. They lived on the streets in a run-down neighborhood outside of Mexico City, begging for food and drinking tainted water. She returned to her common-law husband because she and the children were sick and hungry. Soon after, her baby was stillborn.

Last spring, when she was pregnant a fifth time, the children’s father went to the United States. Maria tried to reconcile with her mother, hoping for help; instead, she said, she was condemned. “She told me, ‘You made your own bed, now lie in it. Your children were born with deformities as punishment for what you did.’ ”

With no one else to turn to, Maria sold her few possessions, took the kids and followed their father to Santa Ana. She found him living “romantically,” she said, with his 17-year-old niece. After six months of living together with the niece and enduring frequent beatings if she complained, Maria left again and ended up at Interval House.

Interval House is one of a few Southern California shelters that has specialized, comprehensive programs to meet the special needs of non-assimilated women, with counselors fluent in several languages and sensitive to the mores of other cultures.

The Interval House program is the most extensive in the county, having won local, state and national awards for its work with immigrants. The county’s two other shelters also serve immigrant women, but in smaller numbers and with fewer bilingual staff members who speak mostly Spanish, according to administrators.

In the past, “there was very little effort on the part of shelters or social service agencies to take care of these women,” said Interval House’s Williams. In 1979, Interval House became one of the first in the nation to begin a program for Spanish-speaking women.

The house now includes women from all over the world. Every month, staff members accept into one of the two homes roughly 60 women from the 300 who call for help and referrals. They serve 65% minority women, and more than 70% of the staff is bilingual, Williams said.

A recent renovation project expanded the shelter’s capacity by one-third. Women and children can stay a month to six weeks at no charge--longer for those who need to--thanks to a combination of private and public funding that provides the house with a $600,000 annual budget.

“We’re busting at the seams,” Williams said. “We’ve always been busting at the seams. It’s a horrible problem.”

In the past few years, several other shelters in Los Angeles County have initiated similar programs for women, including two for Spanish-speakers and one for Asians.

But these are not enough, say local minority leaders; funding is one reason so many women have nowhere to go. At Interval House, for instance, the economic downturn has meant a reduction in donations, leaving the shelter without reserves for the first time in its 14-year history, Williams said.

*

Orange County’s Korean community “desperately needs” a shelter, said Dr. Miung Mi Ryu , a member of the Coalition Against Domestic Violence of Orange County.

“We’ve had a very hard time getting the funds,” Ryu said. Korean women “want a safe place to go, but there are many more abused women than there are places.”

At the Korean-American Legal Center, 20% of the cases handled are related to domestic violence, an increase of 15% from a year ago, Ryu said. “In Korean culture, hitting your wife and children is no big deal,” Ryu said. “I grew up that way, so I thought it was no big deal.”

Ryu and other health professionals of various ethnic backgrounds have begun offering domestic violence counseling in languages such as Spanish, Vietnamese and Farsi, helping women overcome cultural upbringing that encourages them to be submissive to men.

“Just getting the word out is important for women of different cultures, since they’re so isolated,” said Kathryn Miller, with the County of Orange Probation Department, which oversees a treatment program for batterers. “And they’re isolated even more if they’re battered.”

In Orange County, a recent public service television show highlighting the problems of domestic violence aired on Vietnamese-language television. It brought a storm of protests, Miller said.

“After the show, they got calls cursing them out, that it was none of their business, that people should deal with these issues within the family. A lot of Vietnamese women don’t know help is available,” Miller said. “Same with Spanish-speaking women.”

*

Statistics on the ethnicity of women who seek help from battering partners are impossible to come by, Miller said, but the California Department of Justice keeps tabs on the race of those arrested for spousal abuse.

From 1987 to 1991, the most recent period for which figures are available, the number of Asians arrested in Los Angeles County increased from 57 to 150; the numbers increased more than 20 times in Orange County, from two arrests in 1987 to 43 in 1991.

Considering that 10% of Orange county’s population is Asian, the raw numbers appear small. But that’s because in the past, Asian women rarely reported abuse, said Mary Ann, 35, an Interval House counselor and a former battered wife who fears revealing her last name because of retaliation from her former husband.

“The (Asian) community is so judgmental, the women don’t want to be perceived as victims,” she said.

The number of Latinos arrested for spousal abuse in Orange County more than doubled from 1987 to 1991, from 185 to 526. The same held true for Los Angeles County, where the number increased from 4,130 to 8,441.

Generally, in Latin culture “the husband’s word is law,” said Cecilia Rios, a social worker at La Amistad, a St. Joseph Hospital community outreach clinic in Buena Clinton, a poor, predominantly Latino neighborhood in Garden Grove.

“If they have problems with their husbands, they won’t get a divorce because they know they’re not going to survive economically,” Rios said. “That’s why they don’t want to upset him. Because if he kicks them out, they have no place to go. So they take the abuse, and they accept his word. They’re afraid of him and the outside world.”

*

At a recent Interval House support group meeting, the women discussed what made them accept abuse and what has helped them learn to live without it.

Cultural pressures to work instead of attend school, to marry young, have many children and sacrifice self for home and family kept most of them in abusive relationships, they said.

“When I was pregnant, my husband told me he was going to carve the baby out of me,” said Lilia, 34, who stayed with her abusive husband, she said, because “everybody told me to. My parents told me a husband is supposed to hit you, that man is made in the image of God and we’re just supposed to take it until he dies or I die.”

It was only after her former husband attacked her children that Lilia called the police. “They told me, ‘Why don’t you leave this fool?’ They gave me the phone numbers for a shelter. When I called, (my husband) took the phone and yelled, ‘She’s an illegal alien’ and gave them my address. I was so scared, I never called again.

“We moved to Anaheim, and he got more violent. He said if I ever left him he’d cut me up in pieces, throw me in the trash and take the kids to El Salvador. He’d spend his paycheck one day and want mine the next.

“We were brought up to marry macho men,” Lilia said. “We’re told a woman alone with her children is worse than zero. We have to have a man by our side to be somebody. A woman alone is nothing to society or the world. You’re nothing.”

Lilia finally did get help, after a neighbor assured her that Interval House would not have her deported. “I depended on him for so many years. And then all of a sudden I’m at a shelter with three kids and $100 in my bra. I kept asking myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ ”

Since then, Lilia has found a job as a nurse’s assistant and moved with her children to Bell. Her 15-year-old daughter just made the school’s honor roll, earning straight A’s, she said. “I’m so proud, I want to tell the whole world.”

*

Many other women stay with abusive men because they have no way of escaping. Mary Ann, a Vietnamese immigrant, left her abusive husband, but he followed her from Washington, D.C., to Texas to California, tracking her through Vietnamese contacts in the Social Security office, she says.

“The Vietnamese community is very underground,” Mary Ann said. The last time he found her, he broke into her house and attacked her and a friend with a razor blade. After arresting her husband, the police gave Mary Ann the number for Interval House. “I didn’t speak a word of English,” she said.

With the help of staff members, Mary Ann changed her name and Social Security number. “For us it is shameful to admit that we got into that situation,” she said.

The women nodded in agreement. “Not all men are bad,” Lilia said, her toddler Brittany squirming in her lap. “We just had bad luck, I guess. We had our eyes closed in a bubble. We don’t come out because we’re afraid. Knowledge and self-esteem changed me.

“I’m raising my children differently,” Lilia told the group. “I want them to avoid what I went through.” Not long ago, Lilia said, her 8-year-old son hugged her waist tightly and said, “Mommy, I’m never going to be like my dad. I’m going to love you.”

*

More shelters will probably begin programs for non-assimiltaed and other minority women.

At South Orange County-based Human Options, staff members are trying to launch a special program for Asians to add to what they have for Spanish-speaking women, said Shirley Gellatly, community education coordinator. And at the North Orange County-based Women’s Transitional Living Center, administrators are seeking bilingual staff members and are part of a multiethnic mental health task force.

“People are becoming more aware in California of a huge immigrant population,” said Interval House’s Williams. “Everyone now is addressing the problem and trying to figure out how to serve this population. I’m sure, in the future, every shelter will have to help the women who have been ignored.”