Tapping Cultural Values Against Domestic Violence

“Do not let your husband abuse you. Cambodian women have received their share of violence and abuse during the Pol Pot regime. I had one reason [for coming to the United States]…to keep my children safe.”

This poignant statement was a response to domestic violence in the 1990s in Lowell, Massachusetts, which is home to the nation’s second-largest Cambodian American population. The woman delivered her message in a community education video that addressed the problem with culturally sensitive messaging. That’s as grassroots organizers recognized that they must engage with how gender roles were changing for newly arrived refugees who were still adjusting to life in the United States.

Community advocates Tuyet-Lan Pho and Anne Mulvey had earlier helped Lowell families work toward school desegregation. In grappling with family violence, they would reflect that as “refugees felt they had overcome the external hurdles of securing adequate housing, employment, and schooling for their children, they also began to contend with the internal problems facing their families.” In particular, many older Cambodian American women of that period “struggle[d] to balance multiple roles as women of other backgrounds do, but economic barriers, linguistic and cultural conflicts, and experiences of war and resettlement are distinctive.”

High rates of domestic violence faced by the Southeast Asian community were “attributed to war-related violence, post-traumatic stress disorder, and urban violence in the United States generally.” However, victims were also more reluctant to report violence, with Pho and Mulvey identifying “adherence to traditional values and roles, fear of government and legal authorities related to political histories, fear of deportation, language barriers, and immigrant status” as key reasons.

Older, home-bound Southeast Asian women were at risk because of their social isolation. But younger women were also considered vulnerable, partly due to social factors such as men’s perceived loss of status as women took on more public roles.

Families were also oriented around traditional structures, which Pho and Mulvey described as a “paternal hierarchy that may not be clearly articulated but that permeates the home environment.” Regardless of their religious backgrounds, many refugee Southeast Asian families were familiar with, and still observed, Confucian customs governing gendered behavior and fathers’ authority. But, after moving to Lowell, “[m]any parents complained that their daughters were too Americanized and have abandoned their traditional roles,” the researchers wrote.

To uphold traditional values and avoid unwed pregnancies, parents might arrange marriages for daughters as young as twelve or thirteen, in customary ceremonies that didn’t carry legal force. That’s as Lowell had the seventh-highest teen birth rate in the state in 1999. In fact, teen pregnancy and young motherhood were also associated with the risk of domestic violence. Cultural changes such as “women wearing make-up, going out too much, earning money, and being too independent” were also flashpoints that could escalate family conflicts.

Given the rate of such violence, concerned Southeast Asian and white American organizers of the time decided to tackle the issue through a bilingual video targeting the Cambodian American community.

“The diversity of experiences within and between Southeast Asian groups—and long-term effects of trauma and relocation—were considered throughout the planning process… Concern with cultural appropriateness and respect were ongoing priorities,” Pho and Mulvey report.

Still, organizers were initially divided on how best to convey their message.

“While there was agreement that domestic violence was caused by multiple factors, disagreement emerged about which factors were most important,” the authors write, while also noting that these differing opinions “did not break down neatly into gender or cultural categories.”

Some told the organizers that interventions should come from within, pointing out that “extended families in pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia served as buffers against domestic violence and that parents-in-law intervened to discourage violence. Others felt that extended families in traditional Khmer culture ignored or even condoned domestic violence.” And some Southeast Asian American men “were outspoken against using any reason—traditional roles, affairs, alcohol, stress, or dress—to justify violence against women.”

Ultimately, a consensus was reached: the film would include both men and women narrators, and it would discourage victim-blaming by stressing shared cultural values that prioritized family unity and children’s welfare.

The film’s production speaks to the crucial social changes that newly resettled refugee communities experienced in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Some women worry that cultural values are being lost or that the authority of elders is eroding, though these same women appreciate the greater individual autonomy that is possible in America,” Pho and Mulvey write of the Southeast Asian American community in that period. “Women want education for their daughters as well as their sons, though they continue to place greater family demands and more restrictions on girls than boys.”

While these women and their daughters navigated evolving cultural norms, cross-cultural grassroots organizing offered strong potential for driving positive social change, according to Pho and Mulvey. As one woman, who works in social services, put it in the film, “It is important for me to be in this field and to help Cambodian women and children because it ‘unbreaks’ the stone walls.”

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