Huma Umar

Huma Umar
Sakhi
New York City, USA

The final few weeks of my internship have slowed down a bit as I’m working on transitioning most of the clients I was working with directly to my team members. My team had also been dealing with a backlog of new clients due to limited advocates and more and more people seeking services, so some of my time recently has been spent on establishing contact and overcoming the backlog.

Every week throughout my time at Sakhi so far, I remember thinking at some point that I could do more, that I wasn’t doing enough. Retrospectively, as I look at my spreadsheet of clients and their needs and the plan I’ve made with them going forward, I’m realizing that I’ve done a lot more work than I’ve maybe realized and acknowledged, even for myself. Quite early on I realized the right amount of professional distance I needed to maintain with the recollections of trauma that were being shared with me for my own ability to work and advocate, and honoring these boundaries for myself has allowed me to not be burnt out (along with a very supportive team), which is what I was most anxious about.

Yet, I think I wasn’t adequately prepared for other challenges that came about due to just NGO work. One of the biggest challenges was essentially that funding for gender-based violence, especially organizations that supported survivors of intimate partner violence, really increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, though, with things returning back to “normal”, this funding has really started to dry up, leaving organizations with a range of logistical issues — at Sakhi, this has meant that the amount of emergency funding we offer to clients has become quite limited.

This has been frustrating, because along with informing clients about limited mental health and housing resources, as well as limited pro bono lawyers, I have on occasion also had to inform survivors in difficult and uncertain circumstances that we can support them with only a very little amount of emergency funding. As this internship winds down, I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on the dynamics of NGO-work specifically, and the seemingly ever-present scarcity of resources related to this work. The experience at Sakhi has been very grounding in familiarizing me with the stark realities of the human rights non-profit space. At this point in time, funding seems like the biggest issue, but in an atmosphere of constant scarcity, how does one begin to try to reimagine and reinvent the ways human rights work is being done? How do we reorient the status quo in human rights work while remaining dependent on systems that are unwilling to provide holistic assistance?

“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.

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. 

My name is Huma Umar, and as part of this fellowship, I’m going to be working with Sakhi, in New York City, USA. 

Sakhi is a non-profit organization advocating for survivors of gender-based violence, particularly intimate partner violence, within the South Asian community in NYC. Sakhi uses multiple modes of advocacy, They define themselves as an “intersectional, intergenerational survivor led movement for gender justice”. Sakhi’s anti-violence program offers direct services to survivors, through trauma-informed safety planning, emotional support and legal guidance, and a range of other programs within the organization work for systemic changes through lobbying for policy changes, community mobilizing and organizing. 

Sakhi’s work models a culturally specific and attuned approach to advocating for and supporting survivors. An understanding of gender-based violence and its human rights dimensions needs to be situated within the sociopolitical, legal and cultural backgrounds it occurs within. At Sakhi, the specific human rights dimensions are doubly situated — while the focus of Sakhi’s work is within the South Asian community in New York City and its surrounding areas, it is also an organization working locally within the United States. Therefore, while their work is concerned with women’s rights, reproductive justice, economic and civil rights, protection against violence, it is also additionally concerned with a range of immigration and legal rights; therefore, much of Sakhi’s approach is also guided by ideas of transformative justice approaches that resist punitive measures and alternatives to criminal legal solutions as justice for gender-based violence. 

The past few months of this semester, and as part of this fellowship, we’ve unpacked human rights from a range of different perspectives. As I begin my work at Sakhi’s anti-violence program, I am hoping to bridge the gap between theory and praxis when it comes to advocating for victim-survivors in trauma-informed, culturally attuned ways, and the kinds of ideas about human rights that are operationalized in the process. As I prepare for the summer, my approach is grounded in questions about ideas of intersectionality and power dynamics especially, and I look forward to complicating my understanding through my work at Sakhi.

This image from a march for Sakhi’s fifth anniversay in 1994. Marchers are holding charts highlighting a range of different issues, including domestic workers’ rights and queer rights, which speaks not just to how intertwined these various issues are, but are also evidence of the much broader network of solidarity and sisterhood within the South Asian community which Sakhi is a part of. I bookmarked this image a while ago as a reminder of the ways in which specific human rights projects borrow and share from others like them and are embedded within a broader movement for justice, and as an acknowledgement that despite the many commonalities that I do hope to locate in Sakhi’s work, coming from a South Asian country myself, there is a legacy and history that their work is grounded in that I’m simply not familiar with, and that I really hope to learn about.