Asians, Latinos Now Find Refuge From Domestic Violence

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

But a host of changes within the last decade, from new laws to growing outreach programs in the immigrant community to bilingual shelter 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 being geared to accommodate the special needs and culturally sensitive issues 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,” she said. “Before, the Asian community would never even consider talking about such a shameful issue openly.”

Mercado found a haven at Interval House in 1988, when it was one of the few places to offer services to multicultural clients.

These days, the majority of Southern California’s social service agencies that help domestic violence victims have at least Spanish-speaking staffers and in some cases, offer other languages, including Chinese, Farsi, 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. Nearly 45% of Glendale’s population are Armenian immigrants.

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

For years, law enforcement agencies in Orange County received increasing numbers of calls for help in domestic violence-related situations, 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.

For years, law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County also received increasing numbers of domestic-violence calls, peaking at 75,639 in 1995, according to the state Justice Department. In 1996, the most recent year for which figures are available, the number dropped to 72,725.

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

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

“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 isolated by language and financial dependence are also 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, where wives are taught to be submissive and where 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, having left an abusive marriage 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, went on a radio program to discuss domestic violence, they received calls from 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, a nonprofit agency that helps spousal abuse victims obtain protective orders and child custody in Orange County, has seen a growing number of Asian and Latino victims seeking help. In fiscal 1996-1997, the program aided 1,704 such victims, up from 1,417 the year before.

New 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 Hispanic and Vietnamese clients who are referred by the courts.

Isabel Melloni, who counsels abusers through a yearlong program for the Latino Service Center, finds that violence is usually 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 law 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,” said counselor Chau Nguyen. “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.”