Huma Umar
Sakhi
New York City
Since the start of June, I’ve been working with Sakhi in New York City. It has been a steep learning curve — this is the first time I’ve been involved with direct services work, which is a lot more hands-on than some of the other organizations I’ve worked with that operate at the intersection of human rights, anti-violence and gender justice by creating resources and providing more research and policy based advocacy. And while that is something that I expected, I feel that I’ve learned so much more about trauma-informed services, partly through shadowing and observing the way my colleagues worked, and partly on my own. I’m grateful to have a very supportive team that has been an anchor in helping me understand how to take care of myself as I work here.
Sakhi is not a one of the kind organization in the US: it is part of a network of similar organizations, supporting survivors identifying themselves as South Asian in their journeys against intimate partner violence and working against other forms of gender-based violence in various cities across the United States. And over the past few weeks, I’ve begun to ask myself more questions about this phenomenon: why is there such a specific need for organizations dedicated to IPV work? How does the work of these local organizations inform broader human rights struggles and mobilization? More specifically, what kinds of frameworks are organization’s like Sakhi creating, undoing or deconstructing, and strengthening, deliberately or not?
Before I started this internship, one of my colleagues shared a workshop with me to help prepare for the work I’d be doing. The workshop was about a newly curated toolkit for abolitionist safety planning, and the ways in which various feminist and advocates have put some of these principles into practice, and the ways in which safety planning work can separate itself from being incorporated into policing and carceral institutions. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been able to see how the anti-violence team puts some of the same principles into practice, and the limitations and challenges we face in doing so. I’ve become more sensitized to how entanglements with various systems —- law enforcement, immigration, courts, to name a few — carry risks and further complicate providing support and safety planning. I’m still learning the consequences of these entanglements for communities and human rights work on a broader scale, especially when it comes from organizations like Sakhi.