Domestic violence prevention cannot succeed when the tools used to assess danger fail to reflect the cultural realities and lived experiences of the survivors they are meant to protect.
As another recent domestic violence homicide-by-strangulation in the Punjabi Sikh community (in a West Coast city otherwise comparatively resourced with feminist organizations) went entirely unreported outside the cultural community, we are reminded of missed opportunities for identifying risks and proposing related interventions.
These misses come not only from systems with apparent biases, but also from service providers lacking community-specific knowledge, tools or sensitivities: Even the weight of the word immigrant is missed by those with the privilege of earlier immigration.
When domestic violence (DV) discussions, research and surveys focus only on individual intimate partners, excluding familial, communal and systemic sources of violence (polyvictimization and complex trauma), they have limited reach. When they make vast generalizations, even while trying to signal “neutrality,” they exclude. When immigrant or culture is code for a particular group or vulnerability, they discourage. But, when DV discussions recognize complexity and incorporate individual and collective protective factors, they could signal hope for those caught in the risky web of being a victim, of color, of an often demonized identity group, in the present-day United States.
Sadly, in our experience, a lack of cultural humility makes the “mainstreaming’”of essential tailored tools and discussions less likely—continuing the tragedy of losing extremely vulnerable women and children to abuse, despite their attempts to seek services.
While community-based organizations continue developing creative responses to the current heightened challenges, established empirical knowledge and expertise that the DV movement has taken decades to establish need not be cast aside. However, that expertise must be iterated beyond the myth of neutrally-applicable-to-all-victims; and must be effectively married with community reality and wisdom.
This is possible, as we exemplified through one of the tools we at Sikh Family Center created for early intervention and prevention: the Danger Assessment for Sikh Women.
Employing the Danger Assessment Tool in Multicultural Communities
Our organization, Sikh Family Center, works with a community with multiple interlocking vulnerabilities, and as is the case for many collectivist cultures with inter-generational trauma, there is often a ‘ranking’ of trauma. Whether in the face of xenophobia post-9/11 or present day, DV might be pushed to the shadows without advocates insisting on its dangerous pervasiveness, while acknowledging other dangerous realities for the community.
When a survey tool does not reflect their lived realities or seems to assume their vulnerabilities and identities, it loses its persuasiveness for prompting life-changing decisions.
Employing the empirically proven Danger Assessment tool, created and validated by the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) School of Nursing (henceforth “DA”), was one effective strategy to highlight the seriousness for many survivors and their support networks.
Then, while creating a Punjabi translation of the questionnaire for the JHU research team, Sikh Family Center encountered challenges and realized why and how employing danger assessments in many multicultural communities is often more complicated, incomplete or even unpersuasive to survivors themselves. When a survey tool does not reflect their lived realities or seems to assume their vulnerabilities and identities, it loses its persuasiveness for prompting life-changing decisions.
DV remains a persistent and dangerous, even if understudied, problem in the Punjabi Sikh community. Similar to other communities, one in four Punjabi Sikh women report being victimized in their lifetime. Unlike other communities, there are few resources for Punjabi Sikhs: Sikh Family Center, founded in 2009, remains the only organization focused on gender justice in the U.S. Punjabi Sikh community, giving it a unique perspective into the specific experiences of Punjabi Sikh DV survivors in the U.S., and the general needs felt by underserved survivors across the U.S.
Community-Based Questions, Confusions, Concerns
The DA is an empirically validated risk assessment tool that helps predict the level of danger an abused woman has of being killed by her partner. Pioneered in the 1980s by Dr. Jaquelyn Campbell and her team at JHU, the DA has been widely used by advocates, lawyers, courts and law enforcement.
In 2013, the JHU team released the Danger Assessment for Immigrant Women (DA-I). This version removed some of the questions in the DA, added new and unique questions, and was made available to trained advocates to use with “immigrant women” survivors.
But, who is the “immigrant woman”?
Like many binaries, the dichotomy of “immigrant” and non-immigrant is confusing for many. It also immediately signals both other-ing and a lack of nuanced understanding. It is now clear through more recent research articles that the DA-I was originally created with smaller samples of primarily Latina immigrant women and defined immigrant as “foreign-born.” But the public DA-I survey does not state this, leaving room for confusion, and in our experience, irritation: The “immigrant” identity is carried by many, generationally, beyond being foreign-born.
Categorical binaries of “immigrant” and “non-immigrant” miss opportunities to engage diverse survivors. For Sikh Family Center’s peer counselors and survivors, it was unclear when to pick the DA versus the DA-I—each with differing questions and very different scoring guidelines, when compared side by side.
Differences in the DA and DA-I seemed to obscure specific risk factors, limiting safety planning. For example, the presence of firearms carries a very high danger score in the DA, but not in the DA-I. In many communities of color, private firearms ownership represents a means of protection and survival in the face of historic and contemporary injustices. Gun ownership and the multiplied danger when guns are present in DV situations, is certainly not limited to non-immigrants. The death-by-firearm risk remains high for Punjabi Sikh survivors, whether new or earlier immigrants, and is particularly dangerous to understate.
Similarly, jealousy and shame are high-scorers for the DA-I but not the DA. Fact is, many cultural ideas of machismo fuel risky behaviors, including stalking, against Punjabi Sikh victim-survivors, foreign-born or not. To our community peer counselors administering these surveys, the diminished weight of jealousy and shame in one survey but not the other felt arbitrary and unhelpful for risk mitigation.
Part of the difference is that the DA predicts homicide versus the DA-I predicts re-assault and near-fatal violence, JHU researchers recently published. The DA-I has not been tested for homicide—this, in fact, is not as much of a surprise for those of us who work with immigrant communities and regularly notice how immigrant DV homicides are either missed, wrongly coded or under-studied. The recent under-reported homicide we hold in our hearts now fits this bill. However, the survivor did not fit the narrow imaginary of a foreign-born immigrant.
The notion of cultural humility acknowledges that everyone carries a unique cultural identity, visible and invisible, and we can always learn about unique identities, iterate and improve: even on strategies we once thought to be perfectly inclusive.
For example, if a woman goes to an agency that confuses her ethnicity, wrongly assumes her religion and repeatedly mispronounces her name, she might feel a further unbelonging that compounds her sense of disempowerment in her relationship. When she does not return to the agency, does it reflect her “cultural” inhibition or the agency’s lack of cultural humility?
The Danger Assessment for Sikh Women: One Example of Embracing Risk and Protective Factors
The Danger Assessment for Sikh Women, in English and Punjabi, was co-created over the years by Sikh Family Center alongside Punjabi Sikh survivors of DV and their families. Folding in relevant idiom and protective factors, the DA for Sikh Women survey integrated relevant questions to improve accessibility, effectiveness and engagement with Punjabi Sikh survivors, toward more focused safety planning. Asking specific, direct questions can help plant seeds of awareness in the survivor’s mind—encouraging reflection and proactive planning versus creating panic or compounding alienation. The goal, like the original DA and DA-I, is to help survivors recognize the potential lethality of their situations and consider informed next steps.
We added sub-questions (for example, on in-law abuse), then five new questions, while retaining JHU’s statistically validated scoring system for the DA-I that provides a clear enough picture of the survivor’s applicable score band, thus danger level. Moreover, the numerical score of Danger Assessments is never meant to be dispositive. The purpose of the survey is to aid in informed and realistic safety planning.
The sub-questions we inserted reflect particular increased vulnerabilities for Punjabi Sikh survivors, for example, those in intimate relationships outside of marriage. Dating in the community is often clandestine, and survivors may not directly share such relationships. The survivor may even be secretly engaged or agree to an engagement in order to remove stigma from dating. (Sikh Family Center has created specific resources on what we identify as the unique dynamics of “fiancé abuse.”)
The added new questions seek to reflect additional lived realities of Punjabi Sikh women. One new question seeks to identify possible sources of support, even for survivors without immediate family nearby. It is often assumed that when someone is an ‘immigrant,’ they may not have any support; however, this may be far from the truth in communities that have organized to support one another when no other support exists.
The ultimate question, “Have you identified someone in the community who you can trust with your experience?” is an invitation for survivors to test their possible support system. Given the isolation most survivors endure, many times their social network comprises only individuals they have met through their abusive partner.
So how can we connect the survivor with a community that will stand with her? The question, asked by a community-based peer counselor/advocate, begins to seed hope.
The experience with one specific cultural group offers a general window into how traditional DV tools and strategies must be humble and nimble, ready to adapt to better speak to victim-survivors from collectivist cultures, immigrant traditions and multifaceted communities.
