“I don’t want the police involved.” Since I’ve started at Sakhi, this is a phrase I’ve heard more than a handful of times now while working with survivors. A lot of the experience for survivors in the south asian community, in new york city especially, perhaps, is intertwined with broader, structural forms of injustice. For some survivors, the nature of being a migrant in an unfamiliar territory without a support system is a big factor in the decisions they make. For others, their complicated citizenship status makes them more dependent on their abuser/ spouse. Some are undocumented or asylum seekers, making their circumstances more complex and their ability to make any kind of choice more limited.
As I’ve spoken directly to clients, I’ve heard people share stories they heard from friends or loved ones who sought refuge at d.v. shelters in the city, but before doing so, were made to call the police on their abuser. What I’ve also realized is that safety planning for any form of gender-based violence, especially that which arises out of intimate relationships, involves some exposure to state infrastructure, through the legal system and orders of protection, for example. Especially in communities of south asian immigrants that enter and stay in the united states in uncertain conditions and do not receive favorable outcomes on their caste-based, racial or socio-economic status from their country of origin, it’s vital to imagine forms of gender justice for survivors that incorporate abolitionist principles. And it gets frustrating, often, because to be able to support survivors sustainably and to reimagine survivor journeys needs funding, which in itself is limited and dependent on donor or state funding.
So far at Sakhi, the nature of my work has been kind of double ended: I’ve been trying to apply what I know, about the broader context of the human rights field I’m tackling, while at the same time grappling with the real-life conditions of doing the work that are often kind of dependent, at least in the short-term, on the very structures that I feel we ought to be helping dismantle.