One evening in Baltimore, Maryland, a woman from Sierre Leone arrives at the local YWCA homeless shelter with her child. She is escaping her husband's physical abuse, but wants to remain in the United States. Her legal status is tied to that of her husband's, however. She stays in the shelter for several months, holding on to hope that she can get legal papers to remain in the States. Her efforts are unsuccessful, and she eventually is forced to return to her home country that she had left.

Domestic violence knows no borders. And when people cross those borders, the practice can follow them, but with new permutations that arise from the pressures, attitudes, socially structured systems of inequality and many challenges of a strange land.

Violence against immigrant and refugee women in their homes is all too common, and rarely a subject of discussion in public debates. Whether a woman enters a partnership with a native-born American, lives with her partner from her home country, meets her partner for the first time through an arranged marriage, or is trafficked into another type of living situation--such as domestic work--her experience is often veiled from public view. Yet researchers and service providers estimate that domestic violence is more prevalent among immigrant than native-born women and, in some cities, is more likely to lead to death of immigrant women.

While it is all too often believed that immigrant women come from more abusive cultures, Uma Narayan clarifies how this misconception occurs. In the United States, when we hear that women in India or Pakistan die “by fire” in dowry deaths (a man or some of his family members kill the woman because they are dissatisfied with her dowry to the paternal family line with whom she often lives) the “culture” tends to be blamed. But, when women in the U.S. are killed by guns (at the same rate as dowry deaths in India), this is rarely, if ever, said to be due to the culture. It is typically blamed on the individual man’s unstable personality at best or the system of patriarchy at worst. But the American culture is not said to be “backward,” “overly violent,” or to blame for her death.

Clearly, culturally justified abuse may follow a migrant woman to her home in a new country. It may taboo for a woman to question a husband’s authority in her culture, for example. Yet many other conditions intensify the risk of abuse for foreign-born women.

Economic struggle is one of these conditions. Low wages, unanticipated expenses, and barriers to finding work are sources of tension in any family. Many immigrant workers show up for a paycheck at the end of a job, and there is either no check or no sign of the employer. She may make a decent wage, but not be allowed to keep or have access to it by a controlling husband and a culture that supports that dominance. Hostility by members of the host country, including alienating experiences with a public school system or another agency, can contribute to the tension. These newcomers are trying to live on a cusp between two cultures, and that experience may take a dark turn. One immigrant man, for example, brought a patriarchal attitude of dominance over women from this home culture, and felt empowered by the more sexually permissive environment in the United States to engage in a pattern of repeated sexual abuse against his wife.

Like any woman, an immigrant woman can feel entrapped in such a situation. She may fear consequences for herself or her child if she leaves or speaks up. She may not believe that she has the financial means of self-support. Yet unlike many native-born women, some of the circumstances entrapping immigrant woman are unique to their immigrant experience. She may not have the language or professional skills to secure living wage employment. In fact, 67.1% of battered immigrants (as compared with 40% of U.S. citizens) cite lack of money as a main reason that they stay with their abusers. Public assistance is less available than in the past, following the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) (“Welfare Reform”) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which also limited the number of public benefits available to immigrants.

Many are fearful of the consequences for their immigration status. According to Julie E. Dinnerstein, "Battered immigrant women may fear deportation more than they fear their batterers." Abusers commonly use this threat of deportation to silence their partners. A recent study of Latina migrant farm workers found that legal status is one of the primary predictors of couple violence. A woman will be hesitant to call the police both because she holds suspicions of the criminal justice system and because she may associate the system with immigration officials.

Social and legal services may not understand, or they may interpret violence against immigrant women as falling within the domestic violence framework commonly understood in the United States. For example, in some South Asian cultures, when a woman marries and lives in her husband’s home, she may be responsible for taking care of the needs not only of her husband, but his parents and brothers. In such a situation, she may be abused by his mother—another woman—which is not covered or understood by the domestic violence laws in many jurisdictions. Further, an abused woman may fear rejection by her own ethnic community if she leaves her spouse, as this community may be her source of support, strength, and identity. Quite often, she is unaware of social services and legal remedies available to her. But even these sources may not be able to help her because they do not understand her language, her culture, or the structural barriers that face any immigrant, let alone a battered immigrant woman.

Lest we contribute to an image of a passive woman with no resources to change her situation, an immigrant may come to this country armored with one of many traditions of resistance and resilience that are known throughout the world. Women of Nigeria, practice a tradition called "sitting on a man." When a man is known to have beaten a woman, women gather in a group, dressed in costumes, and harass the man until he pledges to change his ways. And women from some South Asian cultures may surround the abuser’s home, banging pots and pans, mobilizing protests against a batterer, thereby using public shaming as a tactic to fight against his abusive behavior against his wife.

In recent years, the United States has introduced new legal remedies to help empower immigrants in this situation. The 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), for example allows spouses and children of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents to self-petition to obtain lawful permanent residency. The recently introduced U Visa gives legal relief to victims of many crimes, including domestic violence, but only under certain conditions. One of those is a pledge to assist the police in their investigation of the crime. It is recommended that women interested in using these measures seek out the assistance of a knowledgeable attorney or legal specialist. Like any U.S. citizen, immigrant women can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) for help. While these new laws can help immigrant women with abusive partners, many more safeguards are needed if we truly want to TOP domestic violence in immigrant communities—not just respond to it AFTER it has occurred. This requires working for large scale social change in the area of violence against women and social inequality that intersects so brutally with that violence at the same time that we provide meaningful culturally competent services for immigrant women who find themselves in violent family situations.

With the reaction to the 9/11 disaster in the United States, immigrants have been treated more harshly—and this applies to battered immigrant women as well. As Bernstein and Santora report on a recent study by the Congressionally appointed U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “women and children seeking asylum, ‘whose trauma histories and emotional needs may be more severe and require specialized training’ were at a greater risk of harm.” As Gretchen Ely argues in reviewing the literature on social workers’ ability to help battered immigrant women and their unique needs, we need comprehensive interventions not only at the micro level (culturally competent services and resources for the individual woman and her family) but also at the macro level (immigrant laws, educational, occupational training, job availability, income equality, and housing). We wholeheartedly agree.

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