If I had only known...
Innovative project – funded by
Citizenship Immigration Canada
– targets newcomer communities
to deliver powerful messages around
abuse in close personal relationships
Abuse and violence within families crosses all boundaries. It knows no cultural, spiritual, economic, linguistic or age limits. It is perpetuated by the inappropriate use of power and control in relationships, and thrives on social isolation and lack of knowledge of what is right and wrong or where to turn by those who experience it. Victims can struggle with self-esteem issues, depression and feelings that they are trapped by the financial, health and family consequences they would face if they left their abuser.
These struggles can be all the more difficult if the victim is a newcomer to Canada. For a new immigrant who is abused in the home, the road to safety can be strewn with additional barriers, such as language, lack of knowledge about Canadian laws, physical isolation from community, lack of access to helpful safety information and even cultural mores.
If I Had Only Known is a groundbreaking project that reaches out to individ- uals in specific newcomer communities and provides important information and advice about abuse. In March 2011 the project will culminate in the release of a series of brochures in five languages spoken by growing numbers of newcomers.
The contents of the brochures are being created by members of the specific ethnic and linguistic communities and will reflect the experiences and knowledge gained by abuse survivors within the community. Each brochure contains culturally-relevant information to help educate readers on their options, the Canadian laws, their rights and responsibilities. The project is led by Family Service Toronto’s Violence Against Women (VAW) program, which offers support services in several languages to women who have been, or are being, abused.
“A lot of our VAW participants expressed that it’s important to have something like this,” says project co-ordinator Vinita Puri. “‘If I’d only known...’ is some- thing we hear a lot. The newcomers with whom we work expressed a need for more resources and information for their communities.”
According to the 2006 Canadian Census, recent immigrants born in Asia (including the Middle East) made up the largest proportion (58.3%) of newcomers to Canada between 2001 and 2006. Given FST’s existing networks with certain communities in Toronto, and those groups’ size and geographic distribution across the country, the Afghan, Iranian, Tamil and Somali communities were a logical starting point for the project. If I Had Only Known will reach these groups with brochures in Farsi, Pashto, Tamil, Somali and also Punjabi. Three brochures – on elder abuse, woman abuse and male perpetrators respectively – are being developed in each language, for a total of 15 brochures.
While the issue of domestic abuse isn’t unique to any specific cultural, economic or age group, the brochures are an opportunity for community members to reflect on and provide specific examples that resonate in their community. “This project is about illustrating what abuse might look like in each culture,” says Vinita. “We have the word ‘shame’ in English, for example, but the gravity of that might not be understood by a non-English speaker until you put it in the cultural context with examples that they understand.”
Reaching Out to Communities
After receiving funding in 2009 from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, FST set out to build the project’s framework.
“We asked ourselves how we would engage these communities, especially since this is such a private issue,” says Vinita.
“We decided the best approach was to hire a community leader or organization from each language group to connect with their community members.” Once the leads were selected, FST held an orientation session for them in which the mission and values that FST wanted to bring to the project were explained.
The session included outlining the brochure objectives, timeline, how participants should be engaged and a brainstorming session about how outreach could be done.
Community leads were required to hold day-long sessions on each of the brochure topics with groups of six participants. “We didn’t want the groups to be too big, because we wanted a focused discussion,” notes Vinita. During these working group sessions, the participants created a mock-up together of a brochure with information they agreed was important to share. “The mock-ups were all very interesting and different, with pictures and traditional sayings and unique
imagery and examples.”
As a federally-funded project, If I Had Only Known required a further validation phase, in which other communities, including groups in Montreal, Ottawa and
Vancouver, contributed their thoughts.
“We gave these validation groups the mock-up brochures and said, ‘This is what your community came up with in Toronto. Does this make sense to you?’ There were actually quite a few changes,” says Vinita.
Some of the issues that emerged, for example, were dialect issues and the desire for different content based on different settlement experiences. “In Vancouver, for example, the Punjabi community is quite established,” explains Vinita. “They began arriving more than 100 years ago, so the dialect they speak is very old and sounds different than what is spoken in Toronto, where the community is made up of more newcomers. Also, in Vancouver the community is more affluent and settled so the examples they wanted used were different – one group can’t relate to the other.” Vinita and the community lead then worked together to reconcile the differing opinions into one cohesive brochure.
A Diversity of Voices
As illustrated by the Punjabi experience, Canada’s new
immigrant population is not homogenous. Differing, sometimes confrontational, beliefs exist within a cultural group.
For FST, it was important that
all perspectives be heard.
“Working group leaders were instructed to get a diversity of participants, representing various ages, classes, religious and political denominations,” says Vinita.
Ultimately, this diversity proved to be a challenge as disagreements arose among participants on what should be included in the brochures. Some members expressed concern that the project would break up families or that it was trying to pass on ideas intended to westernize women and pull them away from their culture. “Some participants had difficulty with the word ‘divorce’ or mentioning shelters in the brochures. Some denied that sexual or senior abuse existed at all in their community,” says Vinita.
As a result, Vinita had to adapt the process and make difficult judgment calls along the way. “Initially we put no constraints on the discussion because the intent of the brochures is for newcomers to talk to newcomers, but in the validation phase, we had to put more structure around the discussion and the brochures’ content to ensure that important information, like the legal definition of abuse and basic resources, appear in all the brochures,” she explains.
“Initially, the whole focus of participants was on physical abuse and the consequences for the abuser, such as being arrested,” notes Vinita. “We wanted to get images for the brochures that went beyond physical abuse pictures. But emotional and verbal abuse are not necessarily understood by all community members or seen as bad. It was a balancing act to try to show that other types of abuse exist while, at the same time, not dictating the process.”
Reflecting on these challenges, Vinita feels that the process might have benefited from some public education within the communities at the outset. “Not everyone is ready to acknowledge abuse. It takes time to build trust and to have people share this very personal information.” As a result, FST is currently pursuing funding to do more public education with the brochures.
A Chance to be Heard
The multilingual nature of the project posed other challenges. “We wanted all the brochures to have a similar look and feel and the same headers. But in some languages our headers didn’t makes sense,” Vinita explains. “There is a wide range of ways people express themselves. We learned that the idea of a uniform brochure is a very western idea. A lot of the way the groups have designed their brochures is more fluid and artistic with one point flowing into the next.”
To get that flow, facilitators had to be creative in the way they engaged participants, especially given the sensitivity of the subject matter and the stigma surrounding abuse. “Some recent Bollywood movies have dealt with abuse, so one facilitator showed a clip from a movie to generate discussion,” says Vinita. “In another group, a survivor was asked to create a presentation on the experience of abuse and a senior man who was part of an elder abuse group shared a poem he wrote about his and his wife’s experience of abuse by their son.”
Artistic expressions, such as songs, pictures, proverbs and poetry, proved to be powerful tools for these discussions. Often participants didn’t talk about their own experience. “There were a lot of “a friend of a friend” scenarios,” notes Vinita, citing tight-knit communities and the ongoing stigma of abuse as possible reasons for the reluctance to self-identify. But in the evaluations, several participants noted that the opportunity to talk about the issue and, in particular, to find or create images that represented what they were feeling was very important to them.
The most valuable aspect of the brochures and the consultation process, Vinita thinks, is the focus on the Power and Control Wheel, which visually demonstrates all forms of abuse and the inappropriate use of power and control. Using this graphic wheel as a tool of engagement in the working group sessions, facilitators were able to elicit additional expressions of what these forms of abuse may look like within the specific cultural contexts of the communities involved in the project. These examples are used in each brochure.
“If I had only known…”
“If I had only known it was against the law…
if I had only known my rights as a citizen…
if I had only known I wouldn’t be deported… if I had only known it wasn’t my fault, I would have sought help sooner…”
Several of the abuse issues cited were common across all working groups. “Newcomers who are victims of abuse often don’t know their rights here and are intimidated by empty threats of being deported,” notes Vinita. “Many women also feel cultural pressures because in their community you are an outcast if you leave an abusive relationship. If there is a problem between a couple, everyone in the family/ community unit is brought together to mediate with the goal to keep the family together. It’s considered shameful to consider a divorce and/or leave the family home.”
“That said,” she adds, “different themes also emerged in each working group. Even people coming from the same place and speaking the same language may have very different needs and experiences based on their own journey. “Many newcomers, she notes, have experienced extremely traumatizing events in their home countries, which may make them susceptible to ongoing violence”, she explains.
Ultimately, the focus of If I Had Only Known project brochures is information and orientation–to educate everyone on their rights and responsibilities in Canada, to offer relevant illustrations of how abuse may manifest itself in a relationship and to provide resources for getting support, whether as a victim or a perpetrator.
The brochures are currently being finalized and will be launched at a public event in conjunction with International Women’s Day, which celebrates its 100th anniversary on March 8, 2011. FST will distribute If I Had Only Known brochures to locations where newcomers can find and make use of them, both in Toronto and other Canadian centres.
Visit FST’s website www.familyservicetoronto.org to find more details of the launch event as they become available.
355
Church St., Toronto ON M6C 1L9