ABSTRACT
Family violence is not a familiar concept for many newcomers and other visible minorities in North American or predominantly Western societies, especially those coming from collectivist backgrounds. In many cultures, conflicts that could lead to violence between intimate partners or between parents and their children are considered private family matters that should be dealt with through traditional cultural means. Collectivist cultures tend to keep any family conflicts within the family and treat these as family secrets, morally obliging everyone in the family to not share information about them with outsiders. In these circumstances, family members are most likely to first seek guidance from elders of the extended family or leaders in the faith or ethno-cultural community. Usually the focus of the solution is preserving the family, and not necessarily resolving the conflict as that might lead to separation and divorce. In a collectivist context, it is a common practice for an abused woman to take her children and go to her family when she experiences abuse by her husband. Her family would then talk with her husband or her husband’s family and come up with a safety plan to protect her from any further victimization along with some compensation. Following this practice, newcomer females in Canada, whose family members are not nearby, would usually talk with their friends or neighbours about problems they are having with their husbands, including incidents of abuse. These women may be encouraged by these support persons to go to shelters or call the police, or they may directly choose to ask for outside help from shelters or the police. Women in these circumstances would typically expect that someone would tell their husbands to stop the violence and ask them to respect their wives. However, they would not expect that their male partners would be arrested or forced to stay away from the family. In many cases when women from collectivist communities do choose to go to a shelter, they will soon choose to return home where they are more vulnerable and continue living within an abusive situation. According to Baldev Mutta (CEO, Punjabi Community Health Services, Brampton, Ontario, Canada – informal communication), South Asian women will avoid going to shelters because they see women’s shelters as encouraging divorce and they want to avoid the associated stigma attached to marital dissolution.
