In our opinion, a problem as complex as prevention of wife assault in immigrant communities, can only be solved by an integrated and simultaneous intervention at the above five levels. But before we go on to do that, a brief description of the victim seems necessary.

Profile of Battered Immigrant Women

Testimony: Maria J.

"I work as an office cleaner. I can't follow instructions very well, but l know that my boss expects me to finish four floors in a four hour shift. Bathrooms and kitchens are not in my job description, but I am forced to do them under threats. When I get home at midnight, I cook lunch for my husband and children for the next day and clean the kitchen. Then I try to go to sleep and my husband  who usually accuses me of having affairs with men at work  forces me to have sexual intercourse with him even though I feel exhausted and alienated. The next morning when he leaves for work, he unplugs the phone and locks it up in the closet. "1

At the time Maria J. reached out for help she looked much older than her age, and her selfesteem was very low. She eventually got out of the violent situation, but the reality is that the system did not make it easy. So, one can not say that a great number of immigrant women will be able to come out of the violent home. The reality is that women, understandably so, continue to feel insecure and dependent on the men who are abusing them thus perpetuating the cycle o violence.

Violence against women in the home is a social problem which occurs in all social classes and ethnic groups though we know that first, even second, generation immigrant women face special problems and have fewer alternatives than women born in mainstream Canadian culture.

The first barrier immigrant women face is the lack of English/French language. If we add to this the impact of the cultural l shock experienced in the new society, which may last several years, she will be in a vulnerable position. As violent husbands usually prevent their wives from having their own friends, she will end up with no social, intellectual or recreational activities.

Among immigrant communities, isolation is a common problem in which women can be trapped forever. This problem creates a cycle of dependence where the woman's selfesteem is gradually eroded by isolation and abuse, lack of social interaction and support systems, compounded by exploitation and discrimination in the workplace.

It is our experience as front line workers that most immigrant women are afraid of being condemned and isolated by their communities which can very well happen if they expose their husbands' violence either by calling the police, talking about the problem with friends or by leaving home. Fear of ostracism can not be underestimated in its capacity to immobilize the immigrant victims of wife assault.

The role of police can be particularly threatening in some communities, especially those who come from countries where police are arresting, killing and torturing people. A woman will experience strong feelings of guilt and betrayal if she has to call the police in order to stop the violence. The community, again, is likely to play an important role in condemning the woman who called the police or went to court, if the man had been previously jailed or tortured in his country of origin. She, then, will be accused of using a repressive institution to inflict more pain on 'the poor man', so to speak.

Most immigrant women will be threatened with deportation by their violent husbands, who are usually their sponsors. This yet another advantage of a man will be used as a tool to keep their wives scared and inside a violent home. This threat usually is coupled with the fear that he will be the one who gets to keep the children in Canada while she will be deported. Her fear is magnified by the fact that in her country there might be regulations penalizing a woman for leaving home, such as losing custody of her children.

Another factor which often keeps a woman in a violent home is to have been socialized as totally responsible for the unity of the family. She will feel so guilty at the idea of the children growing without the father, that she will remain in the violent situation for the sake of the children. This guilt might be further fed by her resistance to leave the family house which she might have worked long years to help pay for. She will feel scared of having to face a society she does not relate to, with no voice or financial means and she will not be able to visualize a future without the man.

Refugee Women

At present, there are many countries which produce refugees and the reasons for it are not totally divorced from economic , political and military interferences of the industrialized countries such as United States and Canada.

Refugees are a vulnerable group of people, but among them women are especially subject to being oppressed because of gender and class. They also go through a dramatic change in role and status in the new culture.

"They are subject to risk of sexual abuse and they experience poor nutrition and difficulties in caring for children in camp conditions. "2

To this, we add poor health, housing, education and employment opportunities which the women will be carrying from their countries of origin, through the refugee camps and into the new society.

Some of them will also have endured imprisonment and torture. We would like to make a special mention of these women, because many of them dared to challenge militaristic patriarchal regimes. They suffered torture techniques especially geared toward their sexuality, such as rape and sexual abuse.

"The common element experienced by a femalepoliticalprisoner in violent sexual attacks upon her body and psyche, are consciously designated to violate her sense of herself, her female human dignity." 3

Torture is also a clear message to all women that they are expected to remain passive and fulfill their social roles as housewives and mothers.

We can imagine the level of trauma carried by women who have been so brutally deprived of their sense of dignity and identity. How could they avoid feeling stigmatized in their own eyes, their husbands', and the world around them? With this massive amount of violence in their lives  either suffered directly on them or on their loved ones  these women arrive in Canada as refugees.

They don't speak the language. They cannot relate to the new culture. Their husbands can't either, but at least they are offered the opportunity of taking subsidized ESL classes while the women are bound to take any job in order to help feed the family. We need to evolve a support system capable of sharing and nurturing the emotional, psychological and physical scars of refugee women.

In spite of all the difficulties faced by an assaulted immigrant/refugee woman, her life can be improved if she receives support and becomes fully informed about her rights. Individual counselling, as well as support groups, can lead her to positive changes. But that might not be enough.

Towards Economic Independence

"Immigrant policies bring immigrant women to Canada as wives of immigrant men to be totally dependent on them as main providers for the family. The state expects her to be primarily maintained as a wife of a regularly employed worker, or as a dependent of the state through social assistance. In both cases, they will be part of the reserve labour force." 4

What does being part of the reserve labour force mean for women? It means that, as long as there is an elevated number of women working at home without any salary who can be used by the labour market as cheap labour any time, that gives a disproportionate amount of bargaining power to the employers in order to keep all women's salaries low.

The other side of the coin, of course, is that soon after their arrival in Canada, the women are likely be the first to find employment outside their homes while their husbands are attending subsidized English classes. As large numbers of immigrant and refugee women come from their countries with little or no marketable skills because they have had limited access to education, they will be trapped in the most poorly paid jobs in the Canadian labour market.

This is a vicious circle: we enter these jobs because we need to survive financially, we are not learning English, and we are not earning enough to survive, but if we want to get out of this situation we would not even qualify for work training because we are not dependent on social assistance or because we do not speak English. In addition to this, we also face lack of access to subsidized day care, affordable housing, and mental health services.

In this economic reality, wife assault/abuse occurs and if the woman decides to leave the relationship, her situation becomes worse because of the immigration law which requires the following in such situations:

"If the relationship breaks down and the sponsorship is withdrawn before landed immigrant status is granted, the applicant can be considered as an independent immigrant" 5

This means that she will be evaluated in her own capacity to establish herself in Canada without relying on social assistance. For a woman who is under cultural shock, isolated by lack of language skills and community support, in addition to the stresses and vulnerabilities that leaving a violent relationship entails, she might not be the perfect candidate for the status of landed immigrant, may be far from it.

Improving Quality of Social Services

It will be difficult for assaulted immigrant women to find a way out of the cycle of violence and poverty because we not only have to face barriers imposed by the mainstream society: we are also, often, blocked by the services available in our own communities.

Due to real differences in socioeconomic class and differing levels of education among immigrant women, some have achieved positions with the government, the social services or community organisations. Many such women belonged to middle or upper classes in their countries of origin. This power differential will likely be reproduced in Canada within their own communities.

The assaulted immigrant women who reach out for help are strong survivors. They try to learn not to be dependent on their husbands through some of the few available culturally sensitive support groups and counselling. They start growing

and learning about themselves and the dynamics of wife assault, then they need access to training and education in order to become selfsufficient and realize their full potential as human beings.

For assaulted immigrant women it would be beneficial to transform their personal experience as survivors of wife assault into an empowering process of learning and growing and reaching out to other assaulted women in their own communities. This way, they could become real agents of change in the field where their life experiences come from.

What they generally get from service providers, though, is referrals to training which will lead them again to lowpaid, deadend jobs. One of the reasons for this is that the social services field is controlled by professionals who in turn require professional work experience and academic qualifications from women.

"Professionalism mitigates against our values of diversity and of giving formerly battered women leadership in the movement. There are growing numbers of formerly battered women in the ranks of professionals today. But their number is still small. Racism and disproportionate poverty among visible minorities in this country continue to limit the number of women who can complete the lengthy and expensive training required for professional certification. Womanbatterng and its frequent result of women as empoverished single mothers equally pose barriers to completing professional training. "6

Simply put, the survival of assaulted immigrant women is directly related to the quality of support they can get from services. Placing value on our culture and experience is important, but that value needs to extend beyond the counselling session and across the entire field of social services to empower immigrant women to truly stop the cycle of violence in their lives.

Attitudinal Changes

Machist and/or patriarchal values aredominant in most cultures around the world. This is at the root of women's oppression everywhere, and it is further reinforced by economic systems which promote class exploitation. Patriarchal values are protected by social myths which maintain power inequalities.

Myths can be used to reinforce irrational prejudices against immigrants by the mainstream culture as well as the woman's own community. Social lies which define some cultures as superior to others, feed the conditions for power imbalance within this society. We can see this clearly by the fact that some ethnic groups have disproportionate numbers of women kept in job categories totally defined to serve the privileges of the dominant group, such as domestic workers.

In the cases of wife abuse, those false beliefs will be used to keep women in violent relationships. Since most women have been socialized to accept that these myths are true, the role of the counsellors will be to facilitate the process of demystification at two levels: mainstream culture, minority culture and special sensitivity to the refugee community.

Mainstream Culture

The myth which holds that immigrant men beat their wives more could be dangerous for immigrant women, because the service providers who accept this as a reality will then become ineffective in helping the women in violent situations. Studies show that wife assault occurs in all ethnic, economic, religious and educational backgrounds.

Another myth leading to much discrimination is the one about women of colour, in particular, enjoying being hit by their men. We find here an example of racism, classism and sexism, in that men and women of colour are already a victimized group within this society, but the men will be allowed some power to act out their frustration on the women. The myth that those women enjoy the violence leaves them without alternatives to fight back.

The reality is that no woman enjoys being beaten. Violence is degrading, and all women feel shocked and terrified by it.

This is especially true in countries with repressive regimes where the armed forces torture, kill and abduct people every day. Violence will be a daily reality for most of the population. It will permeate all levels of human life, from the state and its institutions down to family units. In this context, violence against women will be the last problem to be identified and acted upon.

In Canada, where the law has defined wife assault as a crime, service providers will have to understand that women coming form those oppressive realities will have a great deal of difficulty using the police and the state as protectors. In fact, we must be especially cautious in assessing whether the role of the police or the legal system will be supportive to women at all.

Minority Culture

In an effort to keep the personal away from the political arena, most cultures overprotect the privacy of the home in order to keep women controlled and powerless. Trapped in their roles as family keepers, women find it hard to challenge violent husbands. In different cultures there might be different messages to prevent women from leaving a violent home. If she leaves, she might be stigmatized by her husband and community as becoming a 'whore'.

"The combination of culturally defined moral debasement and physical battering is the demented scenario whereby the prisoner is to undergo a rapid metamorphosis from  madonna  a respectable women  to whore. "7

In Latin America, as in many Catholic countries, women and men are socialized into two extreme gender identities: marianismo  the cult of the Virgin Mary, emphasizing purity, motherhood, selfsacrifice  and machismo – virility seen in terms of superiority and control.8  Similiar themes are found in different cultures at varying degrees of crudity.

Men exert dominance over women at all levels of society e.g. government, institutions, work places, and families. Most cultures emphasize family values, which mostly translate as the control of husbands over wives, fathers over daughters, brothers over sisters, and even sons over their elderly mothers.

This control is particularly oppressive with regards to reproductive rights of women; in India for example, "baby girls are considered a severe liability. Women who have girls lose social status and later the baby's parents will have to pay substantial dowries to marry her off". 9 Also, most societies condemn unmarried women who may get pregnant, as well as women who commit adultery, although this penalty does not apply to adulterous men.

Culturally, women's sexuality is repressed all over the world, for example statistics show that 75,000,000 African women are still being subjected to clitoridectomies.10 All this sexual violence is culturally justified by the need for marriage and social identity.

Multinational technology is invading cultures on a world scale. This again, translates into more issues of females' oppression. In India, one study by a women's group of 8,000 abortions following amniocentesis in 1986 revealed that all but one were performed on female fetuses. 11 In Bolivia, rural Indian women's wombs are being used to meet the needs of the American adoption market by implanting fertilized eggs in their uteri.12

One of the most important sources of income for some governments like the Phillippines, is the dollars spent by women being exploited in industrialized countries either through prostitution, domestic labour, or cheap and unhealthy factory jobs.

It fits into a continuum of worldwide repression of women that goes from clitoridectomies, wife abuse through to the state and military brutality.

On the other hand, cultures have their positive aspects: the sense of belonging and identity, importance of the group over the individual, the sharing and the nurturing. But, ironically, these positive aspects become negative for women.

This is how it goes: both men and women arrive in Canada as immigrants, they become 'minorities' within the context of a dominant culture. Minority groups are groups that have unequal access to power.

'Each of those immigrant groups whose language and physical and cultural characteristics make them visible and identifiable  like Blacks, Latin Americans, Asians, has developed its own methods of coping with the inherent conflict between traditional and adopted lifestyles." 13

The fact that each of these groups is facing discrimination and oppression in terms of employment, English training and opportunities, forces them to develop coping mechanisms. For immigrant communities to adjust and cope with the realities of life in a different culture, it's like the survival of the fittest as a group. Resultantly issues like wife assault are not dealt with for a period that could go up to two generations or more. Because before that they will have to be able to survive as a group. So, in order to maintain their identity, as a defense mechanism, individuals within the group, namely women and children, will have to be sacrificed if that provides means for the community to cope, to function.

Most immigrant communities still view wife assault as a taboo, they don't even want to acknowledge it among themselves, so that their survival in the dominant culture won't be threatened. This is a double bind for women, because although the coping paranoia might be essential to survival, it postpones the definition of certain problems within each ethnic community by denial and minimization, and it allows for the myths that entrench violence against women in those communities to continue to be perceived as facts, hence perpetrating the cycle of violence as one more social cost paid by women and children in order to make patriarchy work.

Changes In Laws & Policies

We believe that assaulted immigrant, refugee, sponsored and illegal women will continue to be voiceless in this society until their specific needs are properly addressed and met. These needs are physical, emotional, social, economic and legal.

One of the most important aspects of their life in Canada is to start off with a fair chance with regards to their landed status. We believe that the Immigration Department should consider wife assault as a ground to guarantee automatic landed status to the women who report it, on the basis that it is a life threatening situation for them and their children. This consideration should include refugee and illegal immigrant women as well.

It is clear that Canada has historically denied immigrant women the right to subsidized English training. We believe that this is a basic right which should be granted to all refugee and immigrant women upon their arrival in Canada.

Appropriate police intervention can be crucial in the fight to end violence against women. We recommend training programs on wife assault and crosscultural sensitivity for police officers, crown attorneys, and other elements of the justice system.

We strongly believe that assaulted immigrant women should be granted immediate subsidized day care spaces. For a woman on her own, with no support systems  extended family, relatives, community  it is essential to find subsidized day care in order to be able to further her education, learn the official language and achieve economic independence.

Service providers must find a way to reach out to immigrant women in order to break their isolation. We strongly urge the creation of more support systems for abused immigrant women, especially those without landed status.

We believe that each community agency, including shelters, must hire their staff on the basis of their representation of the Canadian cultural diversity, in addition to being womenpositive, and possessing a thorough knowledge of the dynamics of wife assault and its legislation, as well as the social and political roots of the problem.

More education campaigns on wife assault must be generated within each ethnic community, hopefully with the leadership of survivors of wife assault from those communities. These campaigns should be targeted at challenging the cultural traditions that perpetrate violence.

We recommend the creation of more shelters and subsidized housing units for all women coming out of violent situations, particularly refugee and illegal immigrant women.

Mental health programs with a feminist and crosscultural approach are strongly needed, to support women and children who have been subjected to state violence and family violence, in Canada and/or their countries of origin.

We believe that it is crucial that survivors of wife assault be encouraged to participate fully at various levels and capacities of the struggle to eradicate violence from their lives. We envision this participation as a partnership and team interaction with the professionals in the field, in shelters, community agencies, and mainstream organizations.

Notes

1. Testimony from a client of the Women's Program, Centre for Spanish Speaking Peoples.

2. Davidson, Loni, Women Refugees, Special Needs and Programs.

3. Bunster, Ximena, The Torture of Women Political Prisoners.

4. Riutort, Monica, Immigrant Women and the Labour Force: The Reserve Army.

5. Fact Sheet: Battered Immigrants and Immigrant Status.

6. Friedman, Cynthia L., Pitfalls of Professionalism in the Battered Women's Movement.

7 & 8. Bunster, Ximana, The Torture of Women Political Prisoners.

9, 10 & 11. VisaVis, Spring 1989, Volume 7, Number 1.

12. Panel presentation, 5thFeministEncotinterofLatinAmerican and Caribbean Women, Taxco, 1987