Ethnic Victims of Domestic Violence Finding a Haven

With her husband’s fingers clutching her throat, Maria Mercado felt she had lost her last chance to escape.

For a year, off and on, she had tried to leave her abusive husband. But every time she called battered women’s shelters in Los Angeles and Orange counties for help, the mother of two was told she would have to go elsewhere because they didn’t have Spanish-speaking staff members.

“I couldn’t speak English, and they couldn’t speak Spanish,” said Mercado, 37, who lived in Pico Rivera at the time but has since moved to Orange County. “I left him a few times, but I was so desperate that I was going to go back to my husband.”

The circle of multiethnic women surrounding her at a Westminster shelter nodded in sympathy, for they too are part of a shared sisterhood of survivors. Mercado’s stumbling blocks of language, cultural background and economic dependence are all-too-familiar problems facing domestic violence victims in Southern California’s growing immigrant Asian and Latino population.

But a host of changes within the past decade, from new laws to growing outreach programs in the immigrant community to bilingual services, have made it easier to address the issue of family violence--a culturally taboo topic within the Asian and Latino communities.

Increasingly, everything from batterers’ programs to court services are accommodating the culturally sensitive needs of immigrants.

And the attitudes toward domestic violence within ethnic communities are slowly but surely changing, said Mary Ann Lam Bui, director of the Asian program at Interval House, a shelter that offers Orange County’s most comprehensive services for immigrant women.

“We get asked to speak all the time now,” said Bui, herself a former victim of domestic violence. “Before, the Asian community would never even consider talking about such a shameful issue openly.”

Mercado found haven at Interval House in 1988 when it was one of the very few shelters to offer services to ethnic clients.

These days, the majority of Southern California’s social service agencies that help domestic violence victims have at least Spanish-speaking staffers.

In Orange County, the four shelters for battered women all have bilingual Spanish services, and in some cases offer staff fluent in Chinese, Persian, Cambodian, Vietnamese and Korean.

Perhaps most important, state and federal funding that targets immigrant communities has blossomed in recent years, said Lissa Martinez, executive director of the Domestic Violence Project of the YWCA in Glendale.

For example, her organization recently received funding from the state’s health services and criminal justice departments to establish an intervention program for Armenian and Spanish-speaking clients.

Armenian immigrants make up nearly 45% of Glendale’s population.

The issue of domestic violence has drawn more public awareness and interest in recent years, in part because of the O.J. Simpson trial, according to Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Jane Shade, who runs the family violence unit in the county.

For years, law enforcement agencies in Orange County received increasing numbers of domestic violence calls, peaking at 17,705 in 1995, according to the state Justice Department.

In 1996, the most recent year for which figures are available, the number inexplicably dropped to 14,410. In 1997, the county prosecuted 989 felony and 3,372 misdemeanor cases involving domestic violence, the first year for which numbers were kept, Shade said.

Federal laws such as the 1994 Violence Against Women Act included provisions that allowed immigrant domestic abuse victims to petition for residency status without relying on the sponsorship of spouses who were legal residents or citizens.

In other words, husbands would no longer be able to hold the threat of deportation over their wives’ heads, program director Nancy Rodriguez said.

“One of the women’s biggest fears was that if they called for help, their children would be taken away and they would be deported,” she said.

But other barriers stand. Immigrant women already isolated by language and financial dependence also are tied to abusive relationships by cultural pressures to keep the violence a secret and to keep the family together.

“In our culture, there is a very strong belief that marriage is forever and family should be together,” said Guadalupe Vidales, 37, a UC Irvine psychology student and former abuse victim who is now researching Latinas and domestic violence. “That makes us very vulnerable to abuse, and then we stay because of our children.”

Similar cultural beliefs exist in the Asian community, in which wives are taught to be submissive and family honor keeps them from finding help, said Bui, 42.

“If you’re a good wife, you obey your husband. If he hits you, it must be your fault,” she said. “If you’re stuck in your situation, you’re supposed to bear it. It’s always kept in the family, and if you talk about it, you bring shame to your family.”

Bui speaks from experience as well, having left an abusive marriage of beatings that ended after her then-husband held a knife to her head. Yet she never sought help from her family.

“I remember being too embarrassed, too ashamed to go to them,” she said.

When Bui and Xuyen Dong-Matsuda, a county mental health specialist, discussed domestic violence on a radio show, they received calls from angry men who berated them for talking about a taboo subject.

“But the next day, we got more than 100 calls from women who said they couldn’t call the day before because their husbands were home,” Bui said.

The Domestic Violence Assistance Program, which helps spousal abuse victims obtain protective orders and child custody, has seen a growing number of Asian and Latino victims seeking help. In fiscal 1996-97, the program aided 1,704 such victims, up from 1,417 the year before.

Programs also work with batterers. In Santa Ana, the Latino Service Center and the Vietnamese Community of Orange County are two nonprofit groups that work with Latino and Vietnamese clients who are referred by the courts.

Isabel Melloni counsels abusers through a yearlong program for the Latino Service Center and finds that in most instances, the violence is learned behavior in a culture that emphasizes machismo.

“All of them see their parents being abusive, father hitting mother, and mother accepting it,” she said. “I teach them it’s not macho to beat up someone, that it doesn’t define a man.”

Sometimes, the need is as basic as explaining the laws to the abusive spouse.

“In [Vietnam], domestic violence is treated as a private, family affair. But in the U.S., domestic violence is a crime,” counselor Chau Nguyen said. “They come here very angry because they say this is how they are supposed to act. But they walk away knowing that if they hit their wife, they go to jail.”

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How to Get Help

* Domestic Violence Helpline: (800) 978-3600

Orange County Resources

(All numbers are 714 area code)

Shelter Hotlines

* Human Options: 854-3554

* Interval House: 891-8121

* Laura’s House: 498-1511

* Women’s Transitional Living Center: 992-1931

Other Help

* CSP Domestic Violence Assistance Program (help with protective orders): 973-0134

* Children or Parental Emergency Services: 836-3601