Collectivist Cultures and Individual Empowerment: When ‘MeToo’ Does not Speak to You

August 5, 2024 |
Valor

Presenters

Co-Presenters hide

Objectives:

  • Develop cultural humility to better understand challenges unique to immigrant/minoritized survivors, and the improper coding of many barriers as “culture”
  • Discuss possible solutions through which survivors see their experiences better reflected in intervention tools/approaches
  • By narrowing in on the experience of a small community-based organization (the only organization focused on Sikh American victims of gender-based violence) participants will have an opportunity to engage at the intersections of spirituality; articles of faith; immigration status; cultural values; violence; activism.
  • This session will also locate itself in the broader, even existential, questions facing the anti-violence movement: what do community-based solutions and alternatives to the current approaches look like; how hard are these to build; how much humility is necessary before we replicate the problems of the past in new guise.

 

The mechanisms of the "Me Too" movement (as appropriated from Tarana Burke's movement) may serve some women well, but in many collectivist cultures, the same language/voice/tools may not translate well and have even further endangered survivors. When the survivors' community is visibly "different" and marginalized, where the men are often collectively marked by U.S. white supremacist forces as "dangerous," and where there are no community-specific resources for the women who do begin to identify as "survivors," how might we do better? Drawing from our experience in a community-based grassroots organization, Sikh Family Center, we will discuss combining ‘traditional’ (e.g., involving current legal systems) and ‘non-traditional’ (e.g., prioritizing grassroots interventions) responses to SA.