| TrainingForums.org http://www.trainingforums.org/forums/ |
|
| Helping Culturally Diverse Victims of Interpersonal Violence http://www.trainingforums.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=67 |
Page 1 of 1 |
| Author: | DFBova [ Wed May 13, 2009 1:52 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Helping Culturally Diverse Victims of Interpersonal Violence |
Helping Culturally Diverse Victims of Interpersonal Violence: Avoiding Stereotypes & Meetings Needs If we are to serve all victims of interpersonal violence who might need our services, we have to understand the many facets of their circumstances and cultures. We have to meet them where they are as individuals and members of groups. In short, we must be culturally competent. Advocacy, prevention and recovery programs must attend to cultural issues if they are to be relevant to the “real world.” If we avoid considering culture, we commit the grave error of assuming that everyone is “the same,” which usually means applying unquestioningly to all people the ideas that have been generated by and for people from the dominant cultural groups in industrialized nations. Discussing a stigmatized topic like violence against women (VAW) from a cultural perspective feels risky. When we discuss any particular kind of violence against women within a particular culture, we risk contributing to overgeneralization and stereotypes. If we offer suggestions for preventing VAW or ameliorating its effects in varying cultural contexts, we risk advocating models for contexts where they won’t fit. Like many activists, as I think about discussing cultural issues in violence against women, I am held back by my commitment to avoiding stereotyping and propelled forward by my commitment to end violence against women everywhere. Sometimes, violence against women is excused as “cultural” and therefore unchangeable. The desire to preserve cultural autonomy has been used as an excuse for failing to eliminate certain harmful practices that curtail women’s right to live without violence—perhaps the most basic human right. I reject these cultural arguments. The United Nations Secretary General’s report on Violence against Women (United Nations, 2006) wryly notes that the same (male) leaders who advocate the use of modern technologies to advance the interests of their people often resist measures to assure the physical safety or advancement of women in the name of “tradition”. This almost seems to imply that women alone do and should serve as the repositories of traditional cultural identity and therefore must be sacrificed in the name of culture. Cultures change all the time in response to pressures of all kinds. Cultures are in constant evolution; they can evolve in the direction of keeping women safer. We must avoid stereotyping. Only rare forms of violence are inflicted against every woman in a culture, and there are few forms of violence against women that belong exclusively to any particular culture. Most forms of VAW are not exotic and hardly raise an eyebrow: the everyday slapping, beating, and sexual assaults of women of all ages around the world within their romantic or marital relationships, and at work. In the United States, the research on cultural issues in violence against women is contradictory and inconclusive in terms of prevalence—whether people from a particular cultural group are more or less likely to be abused in this way or that. It is hard to obtain good data in part because people from different groups respond differently to researchers, and because issues of social class complicate the findings. For people who work in the field directly with victims and perpetrators of violence, I’m not sure how important it is to know the percentages of violence within a particular group. We know interpersonal violence exists among all racial, ethnic, religious, and social class groups. The percentage probably will not affect how we work with a particular individual or family. Avoiding Stereotypes in Intimate Partner Violence Work Stereotypes can distort what we see, how we act, the weight we give to particular behaviors or statements, and how we discuss and write about the people we work with. Several kinds of bias can create distortions in our work. These include motivational bias, in which the professional is motivated to provide a particular kind of outcome to please a person or group. As an example of motivational bias, a police officer might want to find incriminating evidence against a suspect because of pressure from a commanding officer to “get the guy.” Or a victim advocate who believes sexual abuse is “everywhere” might be eager to find evidence of sexual abuse in a given family, and ignore contradictory information. Motivational biases sometimes have a cultural element. Sometimes staff members of an organization are told they need to increase or decrease the number of people from a particular group who obtain a service or who are subject to a penalty. This might influence professionals to code clients incorrectly, assigning them to the wrong cultural group, or it might influence them to skew the outcome of their work in subtle ways. A second class of biases is referred to as cognitive biases. These are thinking errors caused by the way we process information; these affect our thinking processes such as remembering and estimating. Cognitive biases include the following: • Confirmatory bias is the tendency to notice what we expect to see, while ignoring or discounting the rest. This tendency is one reason that stereotypes persist—we are apt to notice aspects of individuals that confirm our stereotypes about members of that group. • Fundamental Attribution Error is the tendency to view others’ actions as stemming from their personalities or other enduring characteristics, while underestimating the influence of the situation. This can be problematic when, for instance, we write a report based on one meeting with a person without checking with other sources of information. If the person felt particularly sad, angry, weary, physically ill, sleepy, or suspicious in that one conversation for some reason—perhaps because she was recently subjected to an assault--we might have a tendency to assume the way she presented is characteristic of her in general, rather than a transitory result of the particular situation. • Halo Effect is the tendency to allow one aspect of a person’s appearance or personality to "spill over" and influence our global evaluation of that person. For instance, good looking people are often seen as more outgoing and kinder than people who are considered less attractive. This also works with more negative characteristics, so that people who are considered less attractive are assumed to have other negative characteristics. It is easy to see how this tendency might distort our work. If, for instance, an interviewee’s clothes give off a food aroma that is unfamiliar and interpreted as disagreeable, or if the client wears clothes that the professional considers inappropriate, or if the person uses language awkwardly, the professional might tend to rate that person more negatively on a variety of other unrelated characteristics. Professionals might be similarly biased by a person’s skin color, accent, or other external, superficial characteristics: These characteristics might bias the professional’s perceptions of the person and influence the professional’s ratings of more important characteristics (such as trustworthiness, honesty, and intelligence). • In-group Bias is giving preferential treatment to others whom a person perceives as being from his or her own group. Professionals often show in-group bias without even being aware of it. In any given day an advocate could—unintentionally—focus more on people who are similar to her in age, sex, race, social class, political or sexual orientation, religion, or other characteristics. She might just feel more comfortable with these people who are similar to her and therefore feel more disposed to helping them. • Self-fulfilling prophecy is the tendency to engage in behaviors that elicit results that will confirm our own beliefs. This can work in a negative or a positive way. For instance, an advocate might approach an Italian or Latina assault victim brusquely if he has an expectation that this patient will speak excessively about unrelated matters, engaging in what a physician described to me once as “the mama mía syndrome” (Fontes, 2005, p. 8). In response to the advocate’s interruptions and curt approach, this victim might feel a need to convey as much detail as possible: She senses the advocate will not take all factors into account unless she insists on describing them all to him in detail. In a more positive vein, a professional who approaches a person optimistically may unconsciously create the conditions that lead to successful work together. It is easy to see how these cognitive biases could skew our work. The cognitive biases described here are natural, human, and—at the same time—problematic, and may result in unfair outcomes. However, there are ways we can correct for cognitive biases. Increased self-knowledge will help us see our own specific areas of ignorance and teach us where we need to stretch ourselves to eliminate our prejudices. Increased self-knowledge can help us reach out to people from different groups, and watch ourselves to make sure we are behaving fairly. Additionally, we can fortify ourselves against confirmation bias by checking in with ourselves and our colleagues honestly before and during our work. “What am I expecting this person to be like? What will I be looking out for?” Once we’ve engaged in this first step, then we need to make sure we notice and record in our notes any aspects of the person, or statements the person made, that defy our stereotypes. I am not suggesting that we purposely distort what we see and record. Rather, we all need to be aware of potential bias in our observations and take great care to be unbiased in recording what we hear and observe. True emotional empathy and intellectual understanding will help us correct against the fundamental attribution error. We will be able to see the constraints that may be inhibiting the person’s capacity to perform “up to speed,” (for instance, language difficulties, recent trauma, or nervousness about the conversation) and we will be sure to inquire about possible problems. We will be humble enough to assume that one conversation alone will not reveal to us how a person “really is,” and we will seek additional information from other sources, where appropriate. It can be helpful to ask people about how things used to be “before”—before the move, before the attack, before the disaster, before they were living in a homeless shelter. If, indeed, their functioning deteriorated suddenly with the change, this is worth noting. It suggests that with improved circumstances and support, the person is likely to be able to return to the level of functioning that existed before the trauma. We can avoid negative self-fulfilling prophecies by replacing them with positive ones. We should assume from the start that all our work across cultures will be successful, and that we’ll be able to achieve the necessary rapport. Ethnic Matching Organizations sometimes believe they can resolve cultural dilemmas simply by matching clients and professionals for race or ethnicity. Some people suggest that a professional from the same ethnic background will be able to understand the client better, will automatically have better rapport with people from the same group, and will have greater interest in the wellbeing of people from their own community. In short, matching is seen as a way to reduce the interpersonal distance between two people; this is assumed to lead to a better outcome. Other experts have questioned these assumptions. For instance, De Souza (1996) writes that ethnic matching in mental health care is “reductionistic and simplistic” (p. 8). She suggests that matching people on the basis of their race or color reduces individuals to their cultural characteristics, and might lead us to “forget the human aspect which is integral to our work” (p. 8). Others have pointed out that people may not be so happy to see someone from their own ethnic group in a professional role related to interpersonal violence. They may doubt the qualifications or status of a member of a minority group, may fear gossip, may feel the person is too acculturated or too removed from their ethnic roots to be helpful, or may be concerned about the person’s political or personal connections within a small community. Matching for ethnicity usually means that clients from minority groups will have fewer options about whom they work with. That is, a person from the majority group may be matched with someone who has a special understanding of their issues or advanced training in how to work with their issues, whereas a person from a minority group who is matched on the basis of race or ethnicity alone will not be given as wide a range of choices, or perhaps no choice at all. Also, matching for ethnicity does not by itself assure the quality of connection or communication; and it can distract from other aspects of the encounter, such as power imbalances and other pressures (Gunaratnam, 2003). Research into racial or ethnic matching has found mixed results (e.g. S. Sue et al., 1991). In some studies the practitioner’s competence and personal qualities were found to be more important than racial or ethnic similarity. In other instances, racial or ethnic similarity appear to be important. Clearly, these issues are complex and much remains to be discovered about the advantages and disadvantages of ethnic matching in work with people of various ages and backgrounds, and in different settings related to interpersonal violence. In some cases, two people from the same ethnic group or nation may come from different clans or religions, and these differences may make a working relationship next to impossible. For instance, in my area an agency recently hired a social worker from the Sudan to help with Sudanese refugees. The refugees uniformly refused to work with her because she came from a region and group that had caused the refugees’ original displacement in their native country. They could not trust this social worker. They still saw her as part of the enemy, and they preferred working with U.S. professionals with the help of an interpreter rather than working with this Sudanese social worker who spoke their language, but who came from a rival ethnic group. When racial or ethnic matching is seen as the only or most important way to achieve cultural competence, sometimes organizations become less vigilant in taking a host of other steps that would advance cultural competence. Advocating for the end to discrimination may come to be seen as the exclusive province of the few staff members from minority groups who have been hired, as if these matters are no longer the responsibility of others. Having an ethnically diverse workforce is an important step for an organization to achieve cultural competence, but it is not the only answer. In many situations, of course, it can be an advantage for the professional to come from the same ethnic, racial, cultural, or other identity group as the client. Richie (1996) describes her identity as a Black woman giving her an easier time establishing rapport with incarcerated battered Black women. A Mexican police officer told me about what he called a surefire technique for getting confessions from Central American and Mexican offenders. He says they cry and confess when he tells them, “God knows what you did.” He takes advantage of his knowledge of the offenders’ culture and religion to make them tell the truth. These are all examples of cultural commonalities facilitating communication and rapport. Being Just and Fair We want our work to be fair and just. How to achieve this is not straightforward, however. We ourselves are subject to stereotyping and biases, as are our colleagues and clients. Stakeholders who have an interest in the outcome of our work are unlikely to give us purely objective, unbiased information; and so we need to take this into account as we incorporate information from other sources. We also need to be aware of our own cultural assumptions as we approach interpersonal violence. The self-examination part of the equation is often referred to as “cultural humility.” We want to provide culturally competent services so we can meet people “where they are” with all the fascinations and complications of their cultures. To this end, we need to be careful how we phrase questions, offer support, hold our bodies, use our voices, and challenge people—so we do not impose our cultural ideas on vulnerable victims. Many of the articles included or linked in this forum discuss ways to improve our cultural competence. I see Violence Against Women in all societies—including our own—as both cultural and criminal. That is, while VAW has cultural explanations, it all still merits legal and criminal justice responses. VAW is never “just cultural” and therefore acceptable, any more than assaults on any other particular group of people would be considered tolerable because they are “cultural.” Appalling levels of VAW are present in the dominant culture in the United States and other Western industrialized nations. Thankfully, we also know that there are people from all cultures who work tirelessly to end VAW within the United States and throughout the world. Culture in VAW Prevention Prevention remains a relatively impoverished area within the field of violence against women, claiming but a miniscule amount of public funds as compared to criminal investigation and prosecutions, and victim treatment. This sad state of affairs seems even sadder when we consider the communities whose members/residents are most likely to be victims of violence against women: the poor, and—within the United States--disproportionate numbers of African American, Native American, and Latina women (Amnesty International, 2008) . While committed activists throughout the world are working to reduce violence in their communities, a recent survey of the literature reveals a glaring lack of information on how to achieve cultural competence in the prevention of violence against women. Violence against women is often divided into subcategories such as sexual violence, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. While each of these areas receives some discussion of cultural competence, I have not seen writings that pull these threads together into a larger whole to address the serious question “How can we prevent violence against women from diverse cultures in diverse societies?” The answer undoubtedly involves many strategies aimed at all the levels where change can happen: In individual hearts and minds; in ethnic, geographic and religious communities; in local, state, national, and international law; and in the media that both normalize and glorify violence against women. Members of given communities are apt to be best prepared to address violence within their communities. However, people working to end VAW in their ethnic minority communities may be stymied in their efforts by a lack of resources and by prejudices in the wider society that tolerate violence against women by accepting the defense of culture and tradition. In some cases, assaults are seen as characteristic deficiencies of the assailant’s and victim’s culture with an attitude of, “They can’t help it and it’s okay. That’s how X people treat their women.” Cultural defenses have even been used successfully in homicide defenses in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere (Kimm, 2004; Levesque, 2001; Yang, 2004). Such cultural defenses make mockery of all women’s right to safety. There are two ways for prevention and intervention programs to be culturally competent. Some are culturally open and meant to reach diverse groups—for example, a public service announcement that is delivered in a way that addresses the needs of various ethnic communities (multicultural). Other programs can be targeted to the needs of specific ethnic groups (culture specific). For instance, a violence prevention program that takes place in a Korean church is clearly targeted to Korean participants. I recommend a “both/and” approach to cultural competence in prevention programs. That is, prevention programs that aim to reach a broad population should work to improve their ability to respond to all populations regardless of cultural background—demonstrating cultural openness. Additionally, targeted programs established by and in close partnership with members of specific cultural communities will succeed in reaching members of those communities who might not be reached by the more general programs. Conclusions For girls and women to be safe throughout their lives, in all the spheres in which they conduct their lives, enormous changes in women’s status will have to occur in individual, community, cultural, and international contexts. Attitudes cannot be legislated, but they can be changed by deliberate campaigns designed to reach the general public and members of specific communities. These campaigns must be conducted in schools, workplaces, the media, religious institutions, and in cultural communities. Prevention campaigns need to be targeted to men and women, boys and girls, to change the attitudes that allow violence against women to continue unabated across generations. Unlike attitudes, however, behaviors can be legislated. Criminal justice responses to violence against women do make some difference. As long as perpetrators are allowed to continue their violence with impunity, such violence will continue. Structural changes that raise the cost of perpetrating violence for abusers, and lower the costs of reporting and resisting violence for victims—will help achieve the goal of securing safety for girls and women. As you will see from the documents accessible here, broader social issues—such as poverty, racism, and immigration law—impact VAW in general and in specific populations. Along with others, I believe culture stands prominently as a factor in all situations where women are subjected to violence—not solely in cases where women come from visible minority groups. No article, checklist, or set of principles can adequately address the range of women’s experiences of violence, and the multiple cultural milieus that allow the violence to continue both pervasively and invisibly. Cultures are always evolving; and learning about culture will forever challenge both activists and scholars to remain flexible, to serve the diverse girls and women who are victims of violence—and to reduce violence in the future. References Amnesty International (Spring 2008). Maze of Injustice: Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA - 1 Year Report Update. Author. DeSouza, R. (October 1996). Transcultural care in mental health. Presented at the Australian and New Zealand Conference of Mental Health Nurses Annual Conference, Auckland, Aotearoa - New Zealand. Fontes, L. A. (2005). Child abuse and culture: Working with diverse families. New York: Guilford. Gunaratnam, Y. (2003). Researching “race” and ethnicity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kimm, J. (2004). A fatal conjunction: Two laws, two cultures. Australia Federation Press. Levesque, R. J. R. (2001). Culture and Family Violence: Fostering Change Through Human Rights Law. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Richie, B. (1996). Compelled to crime: The gender entrapment of Black battered women. New York: Routledge. Sue, D. W. (2003). Overcoming Our Racism: The Journey to Liberation. New York: Jossey-Bass. Sue, S., Fujino, D.C., Hu, L., Takeuchi, D.J., & Zane, N.W.S. (1991). Community mental health services for ethnic minority groups: A test of cultural responsiveness hypothesis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 59(4), 533-40. United Nations Secretary General (2006). Report on violence against women. New York: Author. Yang, J. A. (2004). Marriage by capture in the Hmong culture: The legal issue of cultural rights versus women’s rights. Law and Society Review at UCSB, 3, 38-49. NOTE: Portions of this piece are adapted from the 2008 book by Lisa Fontes, Interviewing Clients Across Cultures: A Practitioner’s Guide. Guilford Press. http://www.guilford.com/cgi-bin/cartscr ... d&cart_id= |
|
| Page 1 of 1 | All times are UTC - 5 hours [ DST ] |
| Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group http://www.phpbb.com/ |
|