Abuse Shelter to Fill a Need Long Unmet

After suffering nearly two decades of almost daily beatings from her husband, Ethiopian-born Tsehai Wodajo fled to a domestic violence shelter three years ago.

But she didn’t understand the laws protecting battered women and was uncomfortable with the shelter’s procedures. Terrified and confused, she left on the second day. “I cannot fit there,” she said. “I went back home.”

It would be a year before the social worker managed to leave again--a year, she said, she would not have endured had the shelter staff understood the barriers of language, culture and isolation she faced as an African immigrant.

Now, a facility with just such a staff is on the way.

Refugee Safe Haven, a home in West Hollywood scheduled to open in the fall, will be the first domestic violence shelter in the country for African immigrants, say national experts.

“There is such a need for this,” said Gerri Rosen of the African Community Resource Center, the Los Angeles advocacy group behind the project. “We don’t have a great understanding of the background and cultural differences that African women bring. We have good [shelters for] Latin support and good Asian support but not African.”

The Los Angeles housing department has approved a $648,000 city grant to purchase a 4,500-square-foot home in West Hollywood for the shelter, said Laurie Weir, a manager in the department. It will be open to all women, but will be designed specifically for African immigrants, Weir said.

The funding is expected to be approved soon by the Los Angeles City Council, she said.

Organizers are raising $400,000 to outfit the five-bedroom home with the furniture and facilities needed for a shelter, said Dr. Nikki Azebe Tesfai, director of the African resource center and the lead advocate for Refugee Safe Haven. Women will be able to stay as long as six months.

Nearly 200,000 cases of domestic violence were reported in California and 62,278 in Los Angeles County in 1998, said Linda J. Berger, executive director of the Statewide California Coalition for Battered Women.

But she said underreporting is widespread.

“This number should be at least doubled, and that’s especially true for an immigrant or refugee population because they have a mistrust of law enforcement,” Berger said.

There are about 130 shelters for battered women in California and 25 in Los Angeles County, she said. Most in Southern California have Spanish-speaking staffers, and several are operated specifically for Latina and Asian immigrants.

But there are none for Africans, domestic violence advocates said. And the need is great.

The number of African refugees in the United States nearly tripled in the 1990s, said Melanie Nezer of the U.S. Committee for Refugees in Washington, D.C. About 550,000 African immigrants live in Los Angeles County, according to African Community Resource Center and census data.

The resource center gets several calls a week from abused women seeking help. Usually, the center refers callers to existing shelters, but women say those environments can make them feel unwelcome.

“The mainstream shelters are basically not accessible to women in our community,” said Arek Strzelecki, a respected Atlanta-based advocate for battered immigrants. “They would like to help us, but they have no services available that would be culturally or linguistically accessible.”

Refugee Safe Haven will operate much like any other shelter. But it will offer services with an eye toward the hundreds of cultures of Africa.

Staff members will offer translation in African languages and provide African food. There will a separate kitchen for Muslims, who keep strict diets.

Women, many of whom have never worked outside the home, will take life skills and job training classes.

In addition to advice on family law and child custody that domestic violence victims often need, newcomers will get help navigating the complex immigration laws.

Under the Violence Against Women Act of 1996, spouses of legal U.S. residents are protected from deportation and have a wide range of rights--even if the immigrants are undocumented, said Daliah Setareh, a staff attorney who works in the Battered Immigrant Women’s Unit of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

With 54 countries and hundreds of tribal groups in Africa, cultural practices vary widely. But, in much of the continent, women occupy traditional roles and do not have the same legal protections as men.

“[Some] Africans think this is the norm,” Tesfai said. “Women don’t feel they can live another life. They think that maybe life is like that.”

Tesfai and others said that African newcomers are not unique, and that immigrants in general are not more prone to domestic abuse than other groups.

But immigrant families often face isolation, language hurdles and cultural confusion--stressful factors that can lead to abuse and can make it harder for battered women to break free.

“I had thought about leaving for over a year, but at first it was very hard, very hard” at a mainstream women’s shelter, said one 23-year-old African immigrant. “I had to find a translator on my own.”

Battered immigrant women often encounter the prospect that, in breaking free from their husbands, they lose the support of their tightknit communities.

Women from the Middle East, for example, “have been trained to think that the sanctity of the family and the marriage is the highest good . . . and if she betrays what is happening inside the marriage, it’s a betrayal of the entire family and the culture,” Setareh said.

“In a lot of cases she won’t get support from her family or her community,” she said.

Similarly, Wodajo was told her reputation in her community would be destroyed if she left her husband--no matter that he was abusive.

“People heard about it and intervened,” she said. “The church elders told me, ‘You have to take him back.’ . . . It’s such a taboo.”

She added: “I can really understand when women say they have to stay in that situation. The pain of facing your community is worse than living in the [abusive] situation.”

Often, experts say, immigrant men who batter their spouses use the women’s migrant status for intimidation and control. Some refuse to legalize their wives’ residency in the United States or threaten to have them deported if they report abuse.

“Slowly, slowly shelters are realizing” they need to serve the needs of immigrant women, Setareh said.

For African women, there will soon be Refugee Safe Haven.