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SPH prof reveals domestic abuse among South Asians in Boston

By Hope Green

When Anita Raj recruited immigrant South Asian women two years ago for a public health study, their stories made it hard to simply collect the data and turn away.

	Anita Raj teaches a course on women's health issues at the School of Public Health. Photo by Fred Sway

Raj, an assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at the School of Public Health, had set up a telephone number for prospective survey participants. She and her research team polled 160 South Asian women in the Boston area who were either married or in a current relationship. But some respondents asked as many questions as they answered.

"I started getting calls from people who just wanted my help," Raj says. "Usually it was people saying they were calling for friends, but you never know. One woman said, 'I have a friend, her husband has moved out of the apartment and left her there. She doesn't have any money.'"

Another woman told of how she had argued with her spouse, who subsequently threatened to deport her along with their premature infant. Several others called asking for advice on visa and green card problems.

Then Raj collated the alarming survey results: 40 percent of the participants reported that they had been abused in some way by their partners, and 90 percent of these incidents had occurred within the past year. Among the abused women, about two-thirds reported sexual abuse and almost one-third reported injuries, some requiring medical attention.

"I can't say that South Asian women have partners who batter them more than other populations of women, because I don't have the data to make a comparison," she says. "But what we can conclude is that domestic abuse is very pervasive, and there are culturally specific and immigrant-specific issues that increase a woman's vulnerability and affect her ability to seek help. It's a clear indication that we don't need to be just talking about the problem, we need to be doing something about it."

Raj already was a member of Saheli, a Boston-area fellowship and support group for women from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, Burma, and the Maldive Islands. But the survey inspired her to step up her involvement with the organization, she says, "because that way I could use my research to actually help people in the community."

Today Raj is Saheli's grant writer and one of its most active members. Saheli has close ties with community agencies, and members draw on personal friendships with immigration lawyers, doctors, and therapists to help those in need. The group also raised $8,000 for victims of the January 26 earthquake in India, and has sponsored family and cultural events.

Besides her work with Saheli, Raj is a member of the South Asian Advisory Board of Boston's Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence. The task force is including a synopsis of Raj's study in a larger report on domestic violence, and Raj hopes this information will help the agency attract new grant money.

"As a researcher," she says, "one of my goals is to learn what needs specific to the South Asian community are not being reflected in current government services, so we can provide services that are more tailored to this population."

The domestic-abuse portion of her study has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Medical Women's Association.

Raj, an Indian-American who grew up in Mississippi, has overlapping interests in both the problems of immigrant populations and issues affecting women, especially partner abuse. At SPH, she teaches a course focusing on women's health. When she first arrived at the school as a research fellow, colleagues encouraged her to seek funding to study South Asians in the Boston area.

Raj received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study depression as well as sexual health and abuse, and Saheli helped her recruit a representative sample of immigrant South Asian women.

"We went to apartment complexes where there were what we call software wives -- women who come to the United States on their husbands' H-1B work visas and are not allowed to have jobs," Raj says. "We also surveyed women who were born and raised here and very much acculturated, and women like my mom who arrived in this country already married, with children."

The survey was not large or comprehensive enough to conclude that South Asian women are abused more than immigrants from other parts of the world, Raj says. But it demonstrated that if a husband has abusive tendencies, his wife can be more vulnerable when they are on foreign soil.

"It's typical for women to come to this country with lower legal immigrant status than their partners," she says. "For instance, the husband will be sponsored on a work visa, and his wife is brought into the country under a spousal visa. She depends on him for her status."

This may help to explain at least one finding in her survey: only 3 percent of women who reported having been abused said they had taken out a restraining order against their partner. Also, many immigrants are not aware that wife-beating or sexual abuse in a relationship is illegal.

A stigma against divorce in many South Asian cultures can complicate matters. So Raj was not surprised to find that few abuse victims in her survey had ever gone to a battered women's shelter. And respondents who have no relatives in the United States were significantly more likely to acknowledge abuse.

With a new grant from the School of Public Health, Raj plans to look at these areas more closely by conducting a study of 200 additional women. "This one will focus more on attitudes than behavior," she says. "We plan to identify the risk factors for the variety of public health concerns we identified in the first study."

She hopes she can apply her data to help solve real problems in the community.

"You can't do this kind of research without the end result being that you have to get involved," she says. "Otherwise you just feel frustrated."

To reach Saheli, call toll-free 1-866-2saheli.

16 March 2001
Boston University
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