Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, Vol. 9, No.

3, 2000

Charting the Course: An Overview of Domestic Violence in the South Asian Community in the United States
Shamita Das Dasgupta1

In the South Asian community in the United States, domestic violence is a prevalent problem of signicant magnitude. Although the community stridently denies the existence of this horror, women have been systematically organizing antiviolenceagainst-women work for the last 15 years. At this time, it is a vibrant movement struggling with several complex issues that are perhaps less common in the dominant white community. As in the lives of immigrant women of color, much of the intricacies of domestic violence in the South Asian context emerge from the intersections of race, class, and residency status problems. Consequently, a slew of personal, institutional, and cultural barriers commingle to form roadblocks for battered South Asian women, who attempt to escape family violence. As the needs of battered South Asian rst and second generation women enlarge and become more perceptible, the community-based organizations have to ready themselves for more complicated activities in the future.
KEY WORDS: South Asia; domestic violence; immigrant women; community-based agencies; battered womens movement.

INTRODUCTION The end of the millenium is an appropriate time to trace the history of domestic violence movement in the South Asian American community.2 Although it is difcult to determine a static time as the beginning instant of the movement,
1 Correspondence

should be directed to Shamita Das Dasgupta, Manavi, Inc., P.O. Box 2131, Union, NJ 07083-2131. 2 Throughout the article I have used community as a singular term. This is not to deny the variability and differences that exist among groups that are clustered under the label South Asia, but merely an effort to generalize for the sake of expedience. Although I recognize that history and politics often place South Asians in opposing positions, here I am concentrating on the undeniable cultural commonalties among various groups. 173
1053-0789/00/0700-0173$18.00/0
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2000 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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perhaps we can assume the establishment of the rst South Asian organization focused on domestic violence as a recognizable point in time. However, to assert that the movement began with a group or agency is to minimize the resistance strategies that battered South Asian women have been deploying to survive over time. Albeit individual, each battered womans struggle to end intimate violence has fueled the collective movement that we are witnessing now. It is with this deep apperception that I embark upon an assessment of the anti-domestic violence organizing work that has proliferated in the South Asian community in the United States. In addition, I write this essay as an insider. I am fortunate enough to be one of the cofounders of the rst South Asian antiviolence-against-women organization in the United States, called Manavi. Since Manavis inception in 1985, I have been a participant/observer of the growing advocacy movement and a chronicler of it within the South Asian community. It is difcult to fathom the genesis of the South Asian domestic violence movement without a quick overview of the immigration pattern of the community. The rst wave of South Asian immigration occurred at the tail end of the 1800s from an India still under British colonial rule (Chandrasekhar, 1984). The second wave, individuals who came to the United States after the loosening of the immigration policies in 1965, comprised mainly scientists and technocrats. It is this visible group that is at the center of this analysis. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) articially structured the homogeneity of the community as it consciously selected technically trained and English educated individuals from South Asia. The quick nancial success that this group achieved in the United States is now a matter of undisputed record (Agarwal, 1991; Helweg & Helweg, 1990; Jensen, 1988). Along with its quest for nancial stability, the community also became preoccupied with maintaining its cultural integrity and consequently, established numerous linguistically and regionally specic cultural associations (Burek, 1992; Saran & Eames, 1980). It is only in the 1980s and with the help of the Family Reunication Act that the community demographics started to turn heterogeneous. Individuals, who were kin to the rst group or were displaced from other regions of the world such as Africa, began migrating to the United States. Vocationally, the later immigrants moved into blue-collar work and local businesses as shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and motel owners. The community became divided by a chasm that was formed by class differences based on education, occupation, and economics. In addition to their commitment to retaining cultural identity, the early South Asian community leaders became strongly engaged in upholding an impeccable image of the community and thus, denied the existence of social problems such as sexual assault, mental illness, homelessness, intergenerational conict, unemployment, and delinquency (Bhattacharjee, 1992; S. DasGupta & Dasgupta, 1996). Absorbed in afrming group cohesion, all social problems were relegated to peripheral concern. Although the community turned a blind eye to many troublesome issues, it denied abuse of women in particular, because it presumed that

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away from the structural oppressions of extended families and strict gender hierarchies prevalent in South Asian countries, womens independence and liberation were heightened in the United States. However, not all was well with the womens community. In the South Asian community, men were the primary immigrants, whereas women entered the country as their dependents: wives, daughters, or on a few occasions, mothers and sisters. The womens community that congregated in the United States, educationally and nancially had more in common with the later immigrants than the more prosperous early group. For instance, according to the 1990 census, although 59% of South Asian women over 16 years worked outside their families, they earned an average yearly salary of $11,746; an amount that is signicantly lower than the average salary of men in the community (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1993). However, more than nancial dependency plagued South Asian women in the United States. Underneath the fa cade of the placid and companionable family, domestic violence was silently taking its toll on South Asian women. The rst blatant sign of intimate violence emerged in 1981 when a young battered mother of two, Amita Vadlamudi, killed her abusive husband in New Jersey (East Brunswick woman arrested for murder, 1981). The community quickly dismissed the occurrence as a freak accident caused by the perverse family dynamics of the individuals involved. Although the domestic violence movement in the mainstream was in full swing by then, the South Asian immigrant community stringently held onto the belief that it was immune to such horrors because of its class and culture privileges. Contrary to this widespread conviction, South Asian womens organizations in the United States now expose domestic violence as perhaps the most serious problem facing its female community. A recent survey conducted in the Boston area indicates the alarming pervasiveness of domestic violence in South Asian homes.3 One hundred and sixty highly educated middle class South Asian women between the ages of 18 and 62 participated in this study. Nearly 35% of women claimed that they had experienced physical abuse with their current male partner, and 32.5% maintained that the abuse was as recent as in the past year. Nearly 19% asserted that they have had a history of sexual abuse with their current male partner, while 15% professed this violence had happened in the past year. In addition, the number of domestic violence homicides and attempted murder/suicides since 1990 indicate the magnitude of the problem. Between March 1990 and December 1999, community newspapers reported 43 domestic violence murders, 4 attempted murders, 11 suicides after murder, and 2 deaths of perpetrators at the hands of police, bringing the total to 60 domestic violence related deaths among South Asians in the U.S.4
3 Personal 4 The

communication with Anita Raj, Boston University, Boston, MA. author has collected the data from published newspaper reports.

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Notwithstanding such extreme evidence, there is little reliable statistical data on the incidence rate of intimate abuse in the South Asian immigrant community. The fact of this nonexistence speaks volumes of the invisibility that shrouds the topic. To a certain degree, this oversight is due to the reluctance of the South Asian community to recognize domestic violence among its members. In addition, unfamiliarity with the culture, the communitys small size and communication needs have discouraged non-South Asian academic researchers from taking an interest in the group. Such disregard has colluded to silence South Asian womens experiences and voices effectively. Yet, there is enough anecdotal and journalistic information on wife abuse in the community to warrant serious concern (Bagga, 1988; Borsellino, 1988; Cody, 1999; S. DasGupta, 1993; Dutt, 1990; Hays, 1993; Kurian, 1989; Lawrence, 1994; Melwani, 1993, 1999; Pandya, 1990; Sundaram, 1990). Regardless of such popular documentation, it is only with the emergence of indigenous womens organizations in mid-1980s that violence in South Asian immigrant families has come under some serious scrutiny. The corroboration of wife abuse within the South Asian community indicates that immigration to the United States has not enhanced womens status within the family. Although immigration provides many opportunities, it has not prompted South Asians to repudiate traditional gender asymmetries. Moreover, in their attempts to preserve culture and heritage, the community has actively endeavored to recreate and establish traditional gender relations, which inherently privilege men. This power imbalance between the genders makes the immigrant community ripe grounds for woman-abuse (Bograd, 1988; Dobash & Dobash, 1979, 1992; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). Immigration and adaptation issues complicate the dynamics of this abuse even further (Dasgupta, 1998a). THE FACE OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN THE SOUTH ASIAN CONTEXT Few doubt the statement anymore that domestic violence cuts across class, caste, race, nationality, age, and several other perimeters. As activists and academics have come to recognize the pervasiveness and commonalities in domestic violence across societies (Ending Violence Against Women, 1999; Heise, Pitanguy, & Germain, 1994), they have also started to acknowledge the subtle differences. The power and control wheel developed to understand various forms of abuse, provides a comprehensive range of behaviors utilized by a batterer to exert control over his victim (Pence & Paymar, 1993). The spokes of this wheel furnish the offenses that are common in perhaps all communities: economic control, coercion and threat, intimidation, public derogation, isolation, minimizing and denial, asserting male privilege, and so forth. Physical and sexual violence tops off this list of nancial and emotional mistreatments.

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Even though these forms of abuse may be common to all, it is expected that the content would differ according to the culture and history of a community. For example, a South Asian batterer could easily intimidate his wife by threatening to ruin her reputation, especially among her relatives in her natal country. Such a threat may have tremendous impact on the victim including the possibility of being killed by her natal family (Pakistan: Violence Against Women in the Name of Honor, 1999). Another esoteric threat that seems to have enormous power over a South Asian woman is the accusation of being a traitor to her culture and community. This indictment seems to extract compliance equally from rst and second-generation South Asian women (Dasgupta, 1998b; Dasgupta & DasGupta, 1996). The censure of betrayal may be constituted from any segment of a womans behavior: asserting independence to speaking out about domestic abuse, allowing daughters to date to being critical of community attitudes. Admittedly, other new immigrant communities that are eager to retain their traditional cultures may also have similar experiences nonetheless, the issue of culture remains a signicant excuse for abuse among South Asians. Either as a tradition to be adhered to or as a barrier to quick acculturation, batterers often use culture as a pretext for violence. At times, women are coerced to give up their traditional ways, dresses, language, and food and at other instances, they are compelled to retain traditions while appearing to be westernized. Often, spousal abuse takes the form of forcing a woman to adapt to America even to the extent of developing the ideal western body type:
Poonam5 came to Manavi half starved and emotionally devastated. She had been married nearly a year ago and had come to the U.S. six months back to join her scientist/academician husband. Although he had never physically beaten Poonam, he had been controlling her food intake as soon as she had landed in America. He told her that he loved her beautiful slim gure and did not want her to become fat like some of his friends wives. He made her weigh herself every morning and keep a chart. Even a slight increase in her weight brought down punishments in terms of forced fasting, public humiliation, silence, and withholding of affection on his part. He made a schedule of when she could eat and how much. He did not give her any money to make sure that she would not buy or eat food without his knowledge. He forced her to cut her thick long hair, speak only in English, and burn all her saris to hasten her Americanization.

Frequently, abandonment, nancial deprivation, physical and sexual violence, as well as emotional wounding is couched in cultural terms that leave victims bafed about the validity of their experiences. South Asian cultural socialization may also render women perplexed about the appropriateness of their realities. For example, South Asian victims tend to recognize physical abuse quite readily and yet, are most reluctant to acknowledge sexual coercion and/or abuse. My 15 years of work with battered South Asian women indicate that the majority are convinced that marriage denies them the right to have any sexual control. Moreover, most women believe that marital vows
5 All

names have been changed to protect individual privacy.

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confer upon the husbands the right to have unquestioned sexual access to their wives bodies. To many women, marital rape is an alien concept. Mazumdar (1998) asserts that this sentiment is a traditional South Asian cultural phenomenon. Only when physical violence, sexual perversity, and/or sexual torture compound sexual coercion do women perceive their experiences as abusive (Abraham, 1999; forthcoming in 2000). In the South Asian community, domestic abuse is not just perpetrated by the intimate partner but is often complicated by the proverbial mother-in-law abuse (Fernandez, 1997). As families gradually recongure in the United States by adding other members of a womans afnal household such as her husbands siblings and parents, the sources of abuse tend to extend also. As advocates, we often hear battered women detailing their abuse in the hands of their in-laws and not the husbands. At times, a husband may be a passive observer/participant in a womans battering, reinforcing her belief that the removal of extended family members from her household would end all violence in her life. Notwithstanding the various forms of emotional, nancial, and physical violence women suffer in their families, South Asian womens experiences of abuse are inextricably linked to their residency status in the United States (Abraham, forthcoming in 2000; Dasgupta, 1998a). The immigration policies of the United States have been universally biased against women and, since 1986, they have been playing a powerful, if unintended role in battered immigrant womens lives through the enforcing of the Marriage Fraud Act. The Marriage Fraud provision of the 1986 IRCA (Immigration Reform and Control Act) imposes a 2-year conditional residency status to alien spouses of United States Citizens (USC) and Legal Permanent Residents (LPR). The removal of the conditions depends on the couple proving to the INS that their marriage was contracted in good faith. This policy obviously left women (because in the South Asian community women tend to be the secondary immigrants) helpless to the batterers whims as most were terried of being rendered out-of-status and thus, deportable. The 1990 amendment and the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) rectify some of the problems intrinsic to the Act with the Battered Spouse Waiver, Self-petitioning, and Cancellation of Removal provisions. However, the initial support to the abusive spouse that the policy lends and the prohibitive complexities of the relief procedures are enough to intimidate and emotionally paralyze female victims already trapped in battering relationships. My experiences in Manavi indicate that the majority of immigrant battered women face some form of immigration abuse at the hands of their violent spouses.
Amina entered this country as a scientist on a J1 visa. After a year of working in a prestigious research laboratory, she met Shaukat and fell in love. Both wanted to get married as soon as possible. Shaukats only condition for marriage was that Amina quit her job and spend some time with his ailing mother. He wanted to take care of her and start a family. Amina agreed. After she had given up her research position, Shaukat began to abuse her by nancially

Domestic Violence Overview controlling and physically assaulting her. He openly told her that he would not sponsor her for residency and she could do nothing about it. The only way she could be in this country and not sent back home in ignominy was to obey him unquestioningly. Aminas status at that point was undocumented. Shaukat threatened to make her pregnant, take away the baby and then, deport her.

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Shaukats threats were not necessarily empty. We have worked with many battered undocumented women who have been threatened with deportation by the INS while their American children supposedly were to remain with the legally resident father. Undocumented battered women struggle under the constant threat of losing their childrens custody to their LPR or USC abusive spouses. Adding to this emotional injury is the practical/nancial inability of undocumented mothers to secure the services of competent attorneys and support the expensive court proceedings. Thus, immigration remains a signicant and effectual tool of abuse that subjugates South Asian women in America.6 INTERVENTION WITH SOUTH ASIAN VICTIMS Research on domestic violence in the South Asian American context is quite meager (Abraham, 1995, 1999, forthcoming in 2000; Bhattacharjee, 1992, 1997a, 1997b; Dasgupta, 1998a, 1999; K. DasGupta, 1993; Dasgupta & Warrier, 1996; Krishnan, Baig-Amin, Gilbert, El-Bassel, & Waters, 1998; Shukla, 1997; Supriya, 1995; Vaid, 1999/2000; Violence Against Women, June 1999). Furthermore, the investigations to date have focused only on limited topics. The majority of the existing studies have scrutinized two main areas: (1) delineating the prevalent types of abuse, and (2) critiquing current organizing work and standards. There is a total lack of exploration of South Asian womens help-seeking behavior and effectual intervention methods. Yet, all South Asian domestic violence organizations have been founded on the singular belief that intervention with victims of abuse can be effective only when the intervention worker understands all the factors that affect the individual. A crisis counselor needs to understand not only the victims psychological make-up, belief systems, and cultural norms but legal and social factors that inuence her such as immigration status, laws in her native country, and pressures from the community and family. In short, effective intervention should ideally emerge from the victims own community and dominant community organizations that are familiar with South Asian cultures. Although there is a lack of empirical data on South Asian womens help seeking behavior, we can partially grasp it by understanding some cultural values surrounding such conduct. Because in South Asia the family is given higher value than the individual, there is a denite prohibition regarding exposing private information to the outside world. All South Asian cultures strictly distinguish between insiders and outsiders (Dasgupta & Warrier, 1997). Generally, matters that
6 These issues are not necessarily exclusive to South Asians, but plague all battered immigrant women.

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are considered to be personal and of importance to the family are revealed only to the insiders (e.g., trusted family members) while concealed from all outsiders (all others including professionals). This code of privacy is absolute. When someone breaks the code, s/he is considered to be a traitor to the family and may be sanctioned rather severely. Thus, seeking help for domestic abuse, which is considered supremely private information, would be a cultural anathema. Although such overemphasis on condentiality might suggest that maybe a South Asian battered woman ought feel safer with help from outside the community, experiences of community-based organizations testify to the opposite. Although most mainstream or dominant community agencies report difculties with attracting South Asian clients, statistics from South Asian domestic violence organizations indicate a different reality. For example, while most domestic violence agencies in New Jersey report assisting only a handful of South Asian women; between July 1, 1996 and June 30, 1997, Manavi, the only South Asian community-based organization in the state, provided services to 160 individuals; between July 1997 and June 30, 1998, to 252 individuals, and between July 1, 1998 and June 30, 1999, to 258 South Asian battered women. Such increasing numbers hint that South Asian battered women may view the community-based organizations as insiders and thus, are less unwilling to disclose their experiences to them. In addition, the culturally familiar feel of the agencies may help outweigh any discomfort about revealing secrets that women may harbor. Seeking help from the Criminal Justice System is even more difcult for the South Asian battered woman. South Asians view the police and the legal system as sources of shame and oppression. Even when they are brutally abused, South Asian women are reluctant to call the police or seek legal help. In fact, there is evidence that not just South Asians, but all Asians underutilize American social service institutions including mental health and public assistance agencies as they are afraid of bringing shame to the family (Das & Kemp, 1997; Gim, Atkinson, & Kim, 1991; Leong, 1993; Webster & Fretz, 1978). In addition to this cultural attitude, the barriers to help seeking for South Asian women are multifarious. For South Asian battered women, immigration status, race, and class add to the common difculties that, for example, Anglo women may encounter when attempting to escape intimate violence. It is important to note here that none of these hurdles are unique to South Asian women, nor do they affect women in an universally similar way. For different groups of battered women, they obstruct in varying combinations and degrees. For South Asian women, although the impediments generally commingle to construct a complex juggernaut, we can arrange them into three discrete groups for our convenience: (1) personal, (2) institutional, and (3) cultural (Dasgupta, 1998a; Dasgupta & Warrier, 1997). Within the personal category is a battered womans fear of losing face and shaming her family and community as well as the sense of failing her marital commitments. In addition, she may be afraid of being alone and unsafe if her

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marriage dissolves. Most South Asian women have never lived alone or been allowed to make decisions on their own. By leaving the marriage, not only would a woman have to be alone in an unfamiliar country, she may also have to ensure her and her childrens safety from the abuser. The prospect of nancial insolvency, unfamiliarity with the laws of the land, and lack of a support system may also be quite daunting to her. For instance, in most South Asian households, men control money regardless of womens working status. In the event of abuse, such control may be extreme. Thus, when a South Asian woman leaves her spouse, she may also have to leave behind all nancial security. Many South Asian women when they come to Manavi are literally penniless even though they may have worked all their lives. A South Asian woman may also lack any familial support in this country. Most immigrant women enter the United States solely dependent on their husbands. Hence, the only family and friend she may know are probably his kin and acquaintances. Unfortunately, the South Asian community has not exerted itself to befriend victims of family violence. On the contrary, it has systematically been hostile toward women who have attempted to leave their marriages and reveal their experiences of spousal abuse. Thus, a battered immigrant woman may literally be without any familial/friendly support in this country and, consequently, be reluctant to leave the only haven she knows. Institutions in the United States also place obstructions in battered womens quest for violence-free lives. The immigration and public benet policies, child custody issues, nancial demands of legal procedures, as well as language barriers, all conjoin to discourage South Asian womens bids to escape abusive relationships. Moreover, many South Asian women cannot access the mainstream institutional network that has been erected in the United States to protect battered women, especially if they are undocumented. This network constituted by shelters, police, courts, and other domestic violence practitioners, do not necessarily facilitate South Asian womens ight from family violence. At each intervention point, South Asian women often meet with cultural insensitivity, racism, xenophobia, classism, and ignorance about immigration policies.7 For instance, in New Jersey, a family court judge vacated a South Asian womans temporary restraining order by commenting that the abusive behavior of her spouse may be cultural. There have been many instances where mainstream shelters have refused to accept battered South Asian women because there is no one here who speaks that language regardless of language abilities of the woman in question. Faced with
7 Although there is no systematic investigation that documents these institutional barriers, there is plenty

of anecdotal evidence. Many South Asian battered women testify to their experiences of racism, xenophobia, classism, and ethnocentrism when interacting with institutions. The recognition of this experience has led to the current campaign by immigrant womens organizations that is focused on forcing mainstream shelters to accept undocumented women by making the agencies funding contingent upon such openness.

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such institutional hindrances, many women forego the scanty services that may be open to them and their motivation to end violence in their lives. The last set of deterrents that South Asian battered women face, may be clustered under the cultural barriers category. These tend to well from the socialization patterns characteristic of South Asian cultures. It is this cultural ideology that provides individuals with a perspective on life and framework of conducting their daily activities. With South Asian women, it includes their views on marriage/divorce, family, motherhood, and human relationship. In South Asia, as in many other cultures, marriage and motherhood provide women with their primary identities. A woman is judged to have failed in her role if she cannot maintain her marriage and provide her children with a father, regardless of his conduct. An encouragement to keep ones family intact comes from the belief that single motherhood is detrimental to childrens proper development (Dasgupta & Warrier, 1996). Divorce is still an unacceptable phenomenon in the South Asian community. Thus, the main burden of keeping the family whole rests on women. An added incentive to keep the family together at all costs comes also from the cultural glorication of womens suffering (Waters, 1999). South Asian societies tend to extol women who endure violence for the sake of their families togetherness. In addition, the pervasive motif of karma may play a crucial role in intensifying womens tolerance of intimate violence. The majority of South Asian women tend to believe in karma, ones predestination or fate. Thus, they may feel that their situation in an abusive relationship is their destiny or the result of past acts. A combination of all these barriers interacting in complex ways may make South Asian women feel helpless to change their situations and accept abuse as inevitable. EMERGING ISSUES Although the South Asian domestic violence movement in the United States is nearly 15 years old, it is still struggling with many of the issues it encountered initially. Perhaps the most signicant of these is the denial of domestic violence by the community. Advocates and activists in South Asian womens agencies still chafe under the skepticism regarding the existence of domestic violence of the community and the resultant hostility toward their activities. Religious institutions, such as temples, mosques, and churches, have been especially averse to acknowledging domestic violence and the necessity of reaching out and ministering to the victims. Other community-based cultural organizations have skirted the issue equally as outside their provinces of work. Thus, the South Asian organizations focusing on domestic violence have been quite solitary in their mission. The last decade has seen a proliferation of organizations concentrating on violence in South Asian families in the United States. Most of these organizations have spontaneously emerged in response to the demands of South Asian women. That is, these are organic agencies originating from the efforts generated within

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the South Asian community itself. Thus, a common characteristic among them is their volunteer workforce. The majority of the workers of these organizations are homemakers, professionals, students, business owners, and so forth. Interests in womens issues and/or particular life experiences have spurred on the majority. However, the organizations were, and generally still are, essentially founded as grassroots groups, often running from womens homes and on shoestring budgets. The organizations have so far worked in isolationfrom their own community because of their controversial mission and from other similar organizations resulting from lack of funds to travel and meet. As a result, the workers of these organizations rarely have time or resources to avail of training to update their knowledge of various aspects of domestic violence work: contemporary intervention methods, laws that affect immigrant women, advancements in research, and available resources that may help victims and their families. Although most agencies recognize that efforts must be expended in building collaborative relationships with better-established mainstream agencies, such associations are yet to be systematic. The limited resources of the South Asian agencies in terms of time and labor force preclude the creation of any continuing connection. Such seclusion and lack of training extracts a high cost from the organizations in terms of uneven quality of services, an extremely high turnover rate among workers, and often, dissolution of the body itself (Dasgupta, 1999). In addition, the demands for services from South Asian victims are becoming more complex at an accelerated rate. As the second generation of South Asians come of age, the agencies are witnessing familial abuse by forcing/tricking young women to marry men of their parents choice, abduction to the parents natal countries for coerced marriages, imprisonment of daughters by parents as they begin to date (Dasgupta, 1998b), and threats of honor killing. Incidents of incest and child sexual abuse are also claiming greater conspicuity. As the needs of victims in the South Asian community become more visible, domestic violence organizations can no longer afford to bank on volunteers good will and eagerness. The organizations need to systematize their work and establish infrastructure to build a cohesive coalition. Furthermore, more research needs to be conducted in assessing incidence rates, forms of violence, needs of victims, and efcacy of interventions. A true collaboration between investigators and activists is a prerequisite of effectively addressing the issues surrounding domestic violence in the South Asian context. Such a coordination of efforts is still to come.

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