ABSTRACT
The Culturally Integrative Family Safety Response (CIFSR) is a strengths-based response to family violence in collectivist immigrant families. Such a response engages all members of the family, including extended family and the broader collective. CIFSR coordinates highly individual supports around families and service agencies to increase safety and decrease risk of violence. We refer to CIFSR practices as culturally integrative responses to issues of
family safety. By this we mean that the model goes beyond “cultural sensitivity” (often addressed by educating service providers about cultural differences, providing language interpretation, and conducting outreach into underserviced and diverse communities). In referring to “cultural integration,” we mean that the model promotes dialogue between the minority collectivist community and the various agencies involved in anti-violence work in the broader community, while also integrating established best practices for serving families from more marginalized communities. In addition to the important aspects of service such as education, interpretation, and outreach, a cultural broker works with service providers to assist in the understanding of the unique aspects of each family’s situation when they come into contact with the agency. As well, a broker organization can bring cultural communities and service agencies together to prepare coordinated prevention, awareness, and intervention materials and protocols. The CIFSR model includes a framework of family safety that incorporates
prevention and early intervention, even if this is somewhat outside of traditional mandated services, and also attends to the resilience and strengths already present in the family and collective community. Over time, and regardless of the start or completion of interventions directed toward individual families, this practice model maintains attention to the concepts of continuity of care and partnerships between established services and marginalized cultural communities as key to improving services provided to individuals and families more generally. The CIFSR model promotes the importance of developing, strengthening,
and sustaining relationships between service agencies and members of the cultural community – religious leaders, community leaders, and persons who represent the broader social fabric of a collectivist community – in a
proactive manner. These relationships and ongoing interactions facilitate changing ideas and community norms around abuse and violence in families, as well as providing a more collaborative institutional response that is grounded in the local community and the broader system (police, court, child protection, professional services in the areas of counselling, etc.). The model promotes building relationships prior to specific interventions and recognizing the importance of these relationships over time. This allows for early intervention that includes measures of education, prevention, awareness, support, and collaboration with service providers, and encourages the development and provision of alternatives and supports that enhance safety and reduce risk for families. An example of CIFSR early intervention practices specifically linked to particular families and family members is the Safe Integration Project (SIP) offered by the Muslim Resource Centre for Social Support and Integration (MRCSSI). SIP organizes a collaborative community of service providers around a specific newcomer family in a pre-emptive move to support and assess potential for risk of violence when pre-migration trauma (often associated with migration from conflict zones) is an issue. A note about terms – we are using the term “family violence” throughout
this book as a broader term to include intimate partner violence, child abuse, and elder abuse within the context of family/intimate relationships. Family violence itself, as a concept and as understood by primarily Western societies, may be unfamiliar to many non-Western immigrants to Western countries who see what happens within families, including possible violence or aggression, as “private matters,” and that others from outside the family do not have the right to intervene in these. An understanding of family violence will differ across cultures. We also refer, from time to time, to “victims” and “perpetrators” of violence
in families. We do so with the recognition that this is familiar language to service providers and professionals who work in the field of family violence and intimate partner violence. At the same time, as we will describe at various points, the line that marks an individual family member as solely a victim or solely a perpetrator of violence is not always clear. This is particularly the case when past intergenerational violence or trauma experiences related to war, political violence, or migration are inflicted on and influence some or all family members in diverse ways and to varying degrees. It may also be that the demarcation and/or terms themselves do not fit well with collectivist cultural understandings of conflict and violence in families or communities. We do not wish to oversimplify when we use these terms, and attempt to use them more as a means of describing application of service provider mandates. In this book, we try to identify the potential gaps in services and responses
to family violence in collectivist communities. We are particularly interested in what may be overlooked when identifying risk factors of family violence in the context of migration and culture, as well as protective factors that also reside within the family and/or the community of origin. We want to
consider ways to move beyond improving the cultural sensitivity of established services and develop a different kind of response that integrates best practices of contemporary Western services with the cultural context of collectivist families. We see the CIFSR model as representing a way to engage in this type of response.
