Which abuse???

Note: This was originally written April 2010. I am updating missed entries into this blog.

There have recently been quite a few refugee women coming into the CTRC office complaining of serious domestic abuse. Our NGO’s executive director normally intervenes immediately in each of these cases. All of the most recent claims have come from Rwandan and Eastern Congolese women, however, and they have all been Kiswahili speakers. For this reason I have played a fairly significant role in these cases. After our director completed the initial interviews, she gave me the clients’ files so that I might hear out their Swahili-based narratives. This has no doubt proved a serious challenge on a number of levels.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, my ability to listen to holistic Swahili narratives and follow all the details is not yet 100% there. I have struggled to understand all the details of clients’ stories, though for the most part have been able to understand the story itself. Since the matters at concern relate to the serious accusation of domestic abuse, my lack of acquired details worried me quite a bit. I developed a two-prong coping mechanism in order to perform this auditory duty to the best of my ability. Firstly, I ask each domestic abuse client to recount her story as slowly and carefully as possible. Slowing down the speed of Swahili helps me to pick up more words than I might at a normal flow. Secondly, I ask far more questions than I would otherwise. This ensures that I am accurately understanding who did what, where, why and in what way.

A second major challenge has been the gender dynamic. I’ve felt as though domestically abused women seem rather uncomfortable sharing the details of their abuse with a young, white, man. The director of our NGO warned me about this ahead of time, explaining that the countries from which many of these women hail stigmatize talking about such marital issues with someone of the opposite sex. Even in the face of excessively violent abuse, wives and girlfriends often exhibit a culturally bound, paradoxically loyal allegiance to their husbands and boyfriends. Talking about such personal issues with a different member of the opposite sex is taboo.

As in many other domains of my work, there also looms the ever-present specter of resettlement claims. It is not unheard of for wives to put themselves in situations where they might be abused so that they can manipulate the injuries as political capital. That is not to say that domestic abuse in any way, shape, or form is, or should, ever be tolerated. It is rather, as my director explained to me, the way in which some of these women appear to “cry wolf” for which we as refugee development workers must be wary. If a woman claims she is being abused, then we immediately step in and ask her if she has gone to the police. She should rightfully escape a violent private sphere, and it is our job at the CTRC to ensure that any immediate assistance we have available be issued. We offer to take the-woman-in-question to an available shelter, phone the necessary legal authorities, and provide trauma relief therapy references as deemed necessary.

I realized that there is hence an enormous gap between social issues for [South African] citizens and for refugees. Whenever a refugee becomes involved with a particular social issue; be it lack of work, domestic abuse, a broken law, a housing crunch, or a need for education; the entire social schema becomes overtly politicized. Refugees often fall between the cracks of the South African justice and social service systems; jurisdiction over their actions is frustratingly fuzzy. Some blame domestic abuses in refugee households on “backwards” foreign cultures. The results of said cases cause questions of resettlement, [re-]integration, and repatriation to reappear at the forefront of socio-consciousness. One must transcend the matter at hand to evaluate what is really at play and what is really at stake. A case of domestic abuse is never just a case of domestic abuse. The challenge lies in remembering that it is, at the same time, domestic abuse, which must be accounted for.