GUEST BLOG: Asylum Seekers and Domestic Violence-Informed Work

By Guest Blogger Shanali Inchaustegui

The headlines from New York City are filled almost daily with recent updates on asylum seekers. Their arrival has not only shifted the scenery of our news but has also added a dimension to domestic abuse-informed work. Even though New York City is known as “a city of immigrants” and a “Sanctuary City,” NYC’s human social service agencies had to adapt to this new work.

For as long as I’ve worked in this city, intersectionality has been at the forefront of domestic violence work. Intersectionality is described in the Safe & Together™ Model as “Dynamics related to socio-economic status, oppression, gender, sexual orientation and ability (living with a disability). Intersectionality can include race, ethnicity, religion, urban vs rural, immigration status, and language spoken.” (source: S&T Core Curriculum)[1] This definition of Intersectionality from the Safe & Together Model is rooted in the original working definition by Kimberlé Crenshaw[2] (source: Columbia.edu).

Different Work for Asylum Seekers

Domestic Violence work in New York City means you can interact with anyone from any part of the world at any given point. Therefore, I was surprised to see that work with the new asylum seekers looked different than with other immigrant communities. In the last year, New York City has received over 118,800 displaced asylum seekers (source: New York Times)[3], and their political reality is unique. The arrival of asylum seekers came with announcements that isolated them, and politicians made debates. The headlines also mentioned how many city and nonprofit workers were mobilized.

The New York City Administration for Children Services has been at the front lines of the work. As part of ACS, I have met with many families during this year. I have heard stories of challenges, resilience, and the complex realities of an unknown fresh start. I’ve had to intervene in the early stages of survivors making decisions, and I have also tried many times to advocate for families with other city workers. What do stories of surviving IPV sound like from someone recently entering the southern border?

Allow me for a moment to give you an example:

Two parents used every penny saved in the last two years to help her family pay Coyotes. The Coyotes met the family after miles and miles along the migrant trail that headed north through South and Central America. Passports, papers, clothing, and diapers were lost to crossing a desert and rivers. Belongings were also lost to theft. When the mother in this household tells a social worker the story, it is retold as a difficult memory. The fatigue is heard in her voice due to walking and migrating. The family also had to adjust to stopping at many different new countries and towns. There was a stop in Chile, and there, the mother had to “set up shop.” She sometimes sold products on the streets, and sometimes she cleaned houses. Her business competition was not welcomed by other local street vendors who felt more entitled to the locations. She persisted even under duress because she has three kids to feed, after all. This woman and her partner took turns working days and nights to care for their children. So many other events took place on the migrant trail, including the birth of their new child. Moments of bonding and joy in awkward, uncomfortable places. Also, moments of stress and arguments between the adult parents, but usually, it is the father who has the last say on where the money goes, if they eat, and how they deal with things. Every chapter is in a shade of gray. The family arrived in the United States and were set up in a New York City shelter. They have reporting laws the family doesn’t understand. One night, the father’s controlling behavior gets out of line; he hits her, and she ends up with the police and a social worker knocking on the door of her shelter room. After a few days, she starts self-medicating with alcohol to forget all the difficulties she has faced and still must live…

Marginalinalized Asylum Seekers

Asylum seekers are marginalized even while receiving assistance. A narrative that has been colored by the political reality is that of families having more intimate partner violence than families in other populations.

• How do you partner with a survivor with this story?
• How do you approach the person who chose to abuse?
• How will you document such a story to ensure that all three children can remain in the best care, which is most likely with the survivor?

Intersectionalities are the application of the Safe & Together Five Critical Components to this story, regardless of your worldview and the political narrative you may have listened to about a migrant population.

Applying the Safe & Together Model when working with migrant families

The Safe & Together approach is to apply the 5^th critical component as a cross-cutting theme of our work: Knowing the Role of Substance Abuse, Mental Health, Culture and Other Socio-Economic Factors. In this case, I will name specific points where the 5^th critical component will help inform the work and how asylum seekers are engaged.

To start, let us look at how addressing the subject of asylum seekers affected by domestic violence includes special challenges. These challenges are faced when collaborating with shelter workers, child welfare specialists or even advocates.

1. Interaction with colleagues from Child Welfare and Human Services: In trying to collaborate with partner agencies, various news media may create biases that make communication challenging. Political messaging and perceived or real impacts on local economies can create implicit biases that workers accept as fact.
2. Gender Double Standard exacerbated by poverty:
   • Thoughts Thinking that survivors who are receiving asylum assistance should not be “causing trouble.”
   • Having stronger opinions about survivors staying in abusive relationships or stronger reactions when survivors decline the assistance of people who want to report the abuse.
   • Thinking survivors should be overly grateful for interventions due to their asylum-seeking status. Workers with this bias may take a firmer approach when survivors do not respond to a crisis as the worker wishes (or assumes) they would. A shelter worker, child protective specialist or social worker may also act with less empathy for survivors if they have judgments or beliefs regarding parents who bring children across the border (i.e., Thinking the parents already placed their children in danger).
3. Over-criminalizing the Person Choosing Harm /Perpetrator: Believing that a person who is an asylum seeker is committing more abuse or should receive higher sanctions than a person who is a US Citizen.
4. Faster reporting to child welfare agencies: Workers who are not as trained in trauma or Domestic abuse-informed work calling in reports to avoid liability due to fear or less empathy.
5. Not identifying that part of the population faces xenophobia and racism simultaneously. Part of the population seeking asylum are of African and Haitian ethnicities. These asylum-seeking populations face more violence due to racism and hostility from residents.

Asylum Seekers and the Critical Components

Applying the lens of the 5^th critical component becomes even more essential to guiding and coaching our colleagues working with asylum seekers. Applying the 5^th critical component can also influence collaborations across systems in the form of behavior and engagement modeling.  

1. Partnering with survivors by listing their strengths: Survivors have developed incredibly creative and resilient strengths during their travel to the border and settling into new locations. Survivors have also developed a safety plan even while dealing with abuse. Some that I can name from the cases I have worked on are:
   • High motivation to seek employment and secure employment.
   • Seeking work authorization to become productive new residents.
   • Stretching dollars to budget effectively.
   • Being creative about food that is nurturing inside of shelter spaces.
   • Seeking the best enrollment and services inside of new school systems.
   • Seeking resources in communities that share their identities.
   • Forming networks in existing communities.
2. Furthermore, addressing intersectionalities for asylum seekers is partnering with a survivor, even if there are rumors that she doesn’t want to bring undue attention to her family while seeking asylum. The survivor is trying to weigh the legal and social realities of a partner’s deportation. Recanting stories may have to be framed as a strength, considering the many events of the yearlong voyage.
3. Modeling engagement with persons who cause harm:
   • Having conversations with Perpetrators/PCH beyond a criminal justice response
   • Framing conversations about preserving jobs as essential to children
   • Education on new laws and consequences, and how breaking these laws affects them as parents to the children.
   • Seeking to explain modeling behavior for children and the effects of trauma.
   • Seeking to understand a perpetrator’s own immigration trauma while listening.
   • Naming how important it is for the child to have nonviolent parenting to stabilize in a new country.
   • Not neglecting or giving less effort to a parent who is abusive just because they may be deported.
4. Meeting the needs of children equally: Focusing efforts to assess the harm to children using the multiple pathways to harm. Self-evaluating if we are addressing all the harm using culturally and age-appropriate approaches with children.
5. The 5^th critical component also applies to checking in with ourselves. Moments of self-reflection can help ground the work in the Safe & Together principles and away from outside narratives:
   • Is the scarcity mindset in the news or in the perceived economy affecting our engagement?
   • Can we reframe the behavior of survivors as strengths, or is there more impetus to see it as a bigger deficit than what we see in US Citizens? Do we make space to understand survivor strategies that do not align with engaging in DV services?
   • Do you approach the perpetrator with the investment as you would a US Citizen or someone with legal permanent residence? Do you have the same goal of accountability?
   • Unfortunately, a common perception is that there is more violence in asylum-seeking groups in contrast with the violence of US Citizens. Have you noticed if you have a stronger response to violence in shelters with asylum seekers?
   • When you approach the perpetrator, do you do so with equanimity and a dedication to culturally sensitive interventions? Are you avoiding the pitfalls of racism and overly criminalizing this person outside of his behavior? Do you still talk about his pattern, or is his pattern criminalized more than any other person with a more privileged identity?
   • Do we have judgments or beliefs about survivors who are asylum seekers? Maybe we place more pressure on survivors who are asylum seekers to leave the relationship and the abusive partner.
   • Are we giving as much attention, empathy, and motivation to our cases with asylum seekers as we do with cases from US nationals?
   • Are we taking the time to reflect on the Principles and Critical components in these cases as much as we do with cases from US Citizens?
   • Are we as dedicated to finding culturally sensitive approaches to support children as we would any child from a US Citizen or other diverse populations?

A dedicated approach

Asylum seekers need a more dedicated approach to guard from implicit bias and hostilities directed at people crossing the border. Survivors in this population already suffer the double bind of neglect or abuse from people in the country where they are arriving and abuse from within their own family. However, we can address biases by pivoting the conversation towards accountability of persons causing harm that is centered on the child’s best interest and highlights the strengths of the survivor. While these steps and points of reflection were based on NYC’s current scenario, I know that current global shifts create similar scenarios with war and climate refugees. I hope the tips above have given our partner agencies some guidance to reflect on addressing diverse asylum seekers. The Safe & Together 5^th Critical Components can help guide a worker’s focus on applying the principles of equality and equity to have a more domestic abuse-informed approach with this special population.

[1] 4-Day CORE Training Program | Safe & Together Institute (safeandtogetherinstitute.com)

[2] Kimberle W. Crenshaw | Columbia Law School

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/article/nyc-migrant-crisis-explained.html