VIETNAMESE PERSPECTIVE ON DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Vietnamese Perspective on Domestic Violence against Women

Vietnamese Perspective on Domestic Violence against Women

Studies on domestic violence have indicated that violence against wives is a widespread phenomenon occurring in all economic, cultural, and ethnic groups and can have both physical (injuries and death) and mental health consequences (R. E. Dobash & R. P. Dobash, 1979; Heise, Pitanguy, & Germain, 1994; Levinson, 1989; Schechter, 1982). Although domestic violence has been a focus of scientific research during the last two decades, the issue of domestic violence in immigrant communities in the United States has not been comprehensively examined and discussed within the mainstream battered women's movement or in the literature on domestic violence. Family violence in immigrant communities deserves research attention because of the unique situations of immigrant women. On one hand, immigrant women have brought their traditional cultures and their experience with legal norms and social structure of their countries of origin to America. On the other hand, they have also internalized to some degree American culture as a result of resettlement and adaptation to a new life, and they and their families often experience stress related to relocation and a change in social status.

Although the Vietnamese community in the United States has grown rapidly since the 1970s, violence in Vietnamese American families has not been studied. The traditional view common to Vietnamese Americans and other groups that wife beating is a private matter often prevents battered women from talking with people outside their families about their experience of family violence. For Vietnamese Americans, the language barrier and cultural differences create further difficulties for researchers when they try to contact and communicate with victims of family violence. Therefore, there is a pressing need for exploratory research on domestic violence in the Vietnamese community, to develop a sampling strategy and data collection instrument, and to provide a basis for generating hypotheses and identifying the most important hypotheses to be tested in a broader sample. As an initial effort to understand family violence experienced by Vietnamese immigrant women, this exploratory research uses in-depth interviews (administered in Vietnamese) with a small sample and examines the effects of social structure and cultural changes on violence in Vietnamese American families.

A variety of theories have been developed to explain wife abuse. At the individual level of analysis, some scholars concluded that wife abuse was associated with personality disorders of the battered women (Gleason, 1993; Snell, Rosenwald, & Robey, 1964; Walker, 1979; Weitzman & Dreen, 1982). Others asserted that psychological and mental disorders in the batterers caused wife beating (O'Leary, 1993; Rosenbaum & O'Leary, 1981; Snell et al., 1964). Research findings on the effect of personality disorders in battered women on their victimization, however, are unclear and inconclusive. According to Gelles and Cornell (1990), it is problematic to attribute the behavior of battered women to their having a personality disorder because the personality of a battered woman could be a result of victimization. In addition, contradictory evidence has shown that only ...