When Jinat Talukder immigrated to the U.S., she lost her independence. The freedom she enjoyed as a woman in Bangladesh became a distant memory as she was forced to adhere to her husband’s expectations.
“After getting married, I was told things I had never heard before,” Talukder said in Bangla. “He would say that it’s not right for me to go out because I don’t understand the language or know how to get around, and if I go out, I’ll become negatively influenced by others and become an immoral person. I’ll be ‘ruined.’” The term ruined, or nosto/ নষ্ট in Bangla, literally means broken or destroyed.
Talukder’s husband immigrated to the U.S. in 1996. He then returned to Bangladesh in 2002, married her, and she later came to the U.S. in 2006 to accompany him. This situation is very common for working-class South Asian immigrants, and it’s a dynamic Talukder now sees often as a member of the organization Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), which organizes working-class South Asian and Indo-Caribbean youth and adults in New York City. Talukder became a member of DRUM in 2016 because she was drawn to organizing around social justice issues. She felt trapped in her home and depressed. She saw the organization as a means to strengthen her community and her own well-being.
So many members share her experiences. “In our patriarchal society, when women come to a new country and depend on their husbands, they are utterly dependent. Language issues, economic issues, new country, new environment—everything pushes her to be dependent on a man, and then she has nothing she can do for herself,” Talukder said.
This sentiment was echoed by DRUM organizer Sherry Padilla, who noted there is a similar dynamic in her Indo-Caribbean community.
“A woman’s place is in the kitchen and the house, cooking and cleaning—that’s what repeats itself and has a major impact in the South Asian and Indo-Caribbean community,” said Padilla, who is originally from Guyana.
For immigrant women across the U.S., the control exerted by their male partners only serves as the foundation for other forms of abuse—and domestic violence is an epidemic with deadly consequences. Every minute, nearly 20 people are physically abused by an intimate partner, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that for women under the age of 44, homicide is one of the leading causes of death, and nearly half of all victims are killed by men who are current or former intimate partners. Sixty-five percent of immigrant survivors have experienced some form of immigration-related abuse, according to the National Organization for Women.
Despite the dangers women face in abusive relationships with men, women are still criminalized when they defend themselves—and the consequences can be especially dire for immigrant women who potentially face family separation, detention, and deportation.
Exerting control
Some women members of DRUM cannot leave the house to attend meetings or protests. Those who can sometimes must rush home to cook a fresh meal for their husband before he returns from work, explained Padilla.
“Control is one of the major things that plays out—where the wife has to be at home, cook, clean, and take care of the children and can’t go out,” Padilla said. She added that many women who work outside the home are still expected to take on all the work within the home as well.
This is a reality Padilla knows intimately as a survivor. She met her abuser when she was 18 years old, and over the course of their 13-year relationship, she survived verbal and physical abuse while raising their three children.
“My abuser used my immigration status as a way to control me,” Padilla said. “We see that a lot of times because you feel the fact that you have no status. You can’t reach out for help because you have that fear. Who’s gonna help me?”
Immigrant women and children in mixed-status families can be particularly vulnerable to domestic violence. Abuse rates among immigrant women are as high as 49.8%, almost three times the national average. While domestic violence is largely underreported, immigrant survivors are even less likely to report abuse due to fears of detention and deportation.
In addition to intimate partner violence, Padilla also faced the Trump administration’s vehement white nationalism. Within Trump’s first 100 days in office, more than 400 immigrants were detained daily, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Padilla’s brother, Hardat Sampat, was one of those immigrants. In May 2017, Sampat was apprehended by immigration agents in unmarked cars as part of a tense encounter in front of his family. Padilla helped lead DRUM’s grassroots campaign that led to Sampat’s release from detention five months later.
In 2018, Padilla decided to leave her abuser, and organizing played a major role in her decision.
“DRUM was the door to being able to finally have the courage to speak out around what I was facing and what I was going through,” Padilla said. “It went from 13 years of being abused to the one time that I stand up for myself and defend myself, I was the one who got arrested, and I was the one who was deemed the abuser.”
Padilla’s arrest carried cascading consequences, as it often does for working-class immigrants and other people of color. She was suspended from her job with the Department of Education. The loss of income for criminalized survivors is common, according to Ny Nourn, the co-director of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, which supports criminalized survivors. Nourn said this kind of financial burden is often shouldered by survivors, and it places them at risk of homelessness, returning to their abuser, or losing custody of their children.
Padilla received financial support from DRUM to cover her basic living expenses during this time. Her immigration status heavily impacted how she handled the situation around her children.
“I was separated from my children because I was afraid to take the necessary steps to fight back because of fear of losing my immigration status,” she said. “He would always threaten to deport me, and I didn’t want that to interfere.”
The charges against Padilla were eventually dropped, and now, she’s in court fighting for custody of her children, whom she has been separated from for five years.
Fighting back and reimagining
In recent years, organizers have turned to collective defense campaigns to garner public support for criminalized survivors like Padilla. These campaigns advocate for their safety and freedom through petitions, rallies, fundraisers, and other events. According to a recent report by Survived & Punished, a group that leads campaigns for survivors, these strategies create “a powerful locus of mass support, connection, and political momentum for survivors who are isolated through incarceration and media distortions.”
These campaigns have changed many survivors’ lives. An overwhelming number of criminalized survivors are Black women. For example, Marissa Alexander was convicted in 2012 of aggravated assault charges after firing a warning shot when her estranged, abusive husband attacked her. The National Free Marissa Now campaign exerted media and political pressure, eventually helping her legal team appeal her conviction. Alexander was freed in 2017. Campaigns like Alexander’s raised national awareness around the issues facing criminalized survivors and paved the way for other survivors like Padilla.
Padilla was lucky to receive financial assistance from DRUM. Many women remain in abusive relationships due to their inability to find alternative housing or achieve any degree of financial independence. For queer and trans immigrant communities, access to basic material needs such as housing and health care are major issues.
Lavender Phoenix, a California-based grassroots group focused on transgender, nonbinary, and queer Asian Pacific Islander (API) communities, conducted a 2020 study of transgender and gender-nonconforming Asian and Pacific Islanders in the Bay Area. It found that 22% of respondents experienced homelessness, 19% experienced housing discrimination, and 23% experienced harassment or discrimination at work due to their gender identity.
“In a society that is deeply transphobic, trans folks are pushed to the margins in a lot of our systems. They are so much more likely to experience state violence, economic violence, things like that,” said Lavender Phoenix Executive Director Yuan Wang. “When we expand the definition, a lot of these kinds of violence could be understood as gender-based violence.”
Domestic violence is a prevalent form of gender-based violence and an epidemic within the U.S. at large, but immigrant communities are impacted in deeply complicated ways. Engaging in solutions requires an expansive understanding of the issue.
Glimpses of a new world
The experiences of criminalized survivors capture the limitations of the carceral system’s efficacy in addressing gender-based violence and, more broadly, the role of the state in finding solutions.
Among the groups working to combat gender-based violence, some use an organizing approach focused on fighting for the freedom of criminalized survivors or combating the roots of violence in their communities. Others offer direct services to survivors, connecting them to shelters, lawyers, and government assistance. For survivors like Padilla, organizing and direct services were vital to securing her independence.
Direct service organizations are often limited in their scope because they receive government funding, according to Amrita Doshi, the executive director of the anti-domestic violence advocacy group South Asian SOAR. Specifically, the funding comes from legislation like the Violence Against Women Act, “which defines gender-based violence as a crime and directly invests in carceral solutions as the primary solution for gender-based violence,” Doshi said.
This presents a “Catch-22” for many organizations, according to Doshi, because while they can expand with government funding, they also cannot explore alternative solutions outside of the carceral state.
Even with funding from the state and other donors, service providers across the country are struggling to meet the needs of survivors. For example, according to a national study from the National Network to End Domestic Violence, over the course of just one day in September 2023, 7,143 survivors had unmet requests for assistance from a domestic violence organization to help them find shelter, leaving them unable to find a shelter, hotel, motel, transitional housing, or any other safe option to escape abuse.
To Nourn, it’s clear that the solution lies in grassroots organizing separate from the state and service-based organizations. The Asian Prisoner Support Committee often organizes mutual aid for survivors to ease their financial burden so they can attain basic necessities while also having the financial ability to heal and grow.
“It’s really beautiful, the work that we do, looking to the leadership of criminalized survivors who have experienced these injustices and really teaching and modeling what healing looks like and what centering their voices looks like,” Nourn said.
In Nourn’s work with criminalized survivors and their loved ones, she prioritizes the needs of survivors as opposed to the interests of the state that focus on prosecution. “It’s collectively working as a community that we are able to support each other to address harm and safety, and that’s what organizers do as opposed to domestic violence, gender-based, state-funded organizations,” Nourn said.
The beauty of this work is apparent to Padilla, even as she’s confronted by the violent toll gender-based violence continues to take on the Indo-Caribbean and Punjabi communities.
“It’s very difficult to deal with and brings back a lot of what I’ve gone through and just knowing someone ended up losing their life over a situation like that,” Padilla said. “But the way I show up as an organizer is to know my strength and to be able to share that strength as a survivor, not a victim.”
Approaches outside of the carceral system have proven successful across various communities. Take for example the work of Lavender Phoenix. As a way to address anti-LGBTQIA+ and gender-based violence, the organization works to move resources away from policing and funnel them into housing and community-based solutions.
“Last year, we started a free peer counseling program led by and for queer and trans API, and that team trained more than 35 peer counselors and provided that free mental health support to more than 20 folks,” Wang explained. The group also trains individuals on how to address interpersonal violence and establish safety networks so people have alternative contacts in moments of crisis instead of calling the police. Lavender Phoenix also launched a campaign calling to redirect the police budget in San Francisco because, as Wang said, increased policing is a “temporary and false solution.”
LGBTQIA+ people are more likely than their cisgender and heterosexual peers to experience intimate partner violence at some point in their lives. LGBTQIA+ communities also face tremendous barriers to seeking help, according to the Williams Institute. For example, legal definitions of domestic violence often exclude LGBTQIA+ people, and there are few assistance resources for these communities. At the same time, violence against LGBTQIA+ people is on the rise. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), hate crimes against trans and gender-nonconforming people increased by 33% from 2021 to 2022. The Biden administration has turned to increased policing as a solution.
Organizations across the country are charting their own paths for addressing violence in their communities. For example, in Minneapolis, Man Forward is “transforming masculinity” by creating ways to hold men accountable for harmful behavior outside of the criminal legal system. The organization receives referrals for participants from workplaces, organizations, and community members and offers one-on-one coaching and healing circles. Part of the process entails identifying goals for men who cause harm based on input from survivors.
“We’ve found that it takes six months or so for a person to change habits and fight their own ego to get to a place where they can understand what it means to be responsible for what they did,” said Pheng Thao, the executive director of Man Forward.
Man Forward also creates networks for Southeast Asian men through monthly virtual spaces that seek to hold men accountable for the ways in which they participate in patriarchy, allowing them to come together to unpack their relationships with masculinity and change their behaviors. These spaces are rare for men in their everyday lives, according to Thao, because men tend to connect in very “destructive” and superficial ways to avoid intimate and vulnerable conversations.
“When we work with men guilty of domestic violence, they say, ‘She should’ve understood me; she knew that she pushed my buttons,’ but people don’t know who you are, and you don’t even know yourself,” Thao said. Citing bell hooks, he explained that the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of men is not violence toward women, but rather that men kill off the emotional parts of themselves.
“When they do that, men live very hollow lives where they don’t know who they are or what they want except through what people have told them they should want or do,” Thao said.
These alternative forms of safety offer glimpses of a new world. “It’s not just that we want people to respect queer and trans people’s pronouns,” Wang said. “We want our society’s system to reflect safety: We want queer and trans people to have safe and gainful employment, safe and stable housing, and ways to talk about being unsafe that don’t invest in punishment and incarceration.”
For survivors like DRUM’s Talukder, organizing proved to be a saving grace and a window into another possible world.
“If I don’t protest this injustice within my house, then how can I protest injustice in the streets?” she asked.
It took years for Talukder’s husband to change, but it was possible with the support of other working-class South Asian women. Now, Talukder supports other women facing similar issues in their marriages: DRUM members who’ve spent their entire lives taking care of husbands who never let them go anywhere alone and need permission to buy peppers from a nearby store. Some of those same women have now traveled outside of the city to attend pro-Palestine protests, Talukder explained, beaming with pride.
“They were able to organize and explain to their husbands,” Talukder said, noting that progress can also be slow. “Some things have changed, not everything.”
