Smack My B*tch Up

Introduction

Every year many immigrants enter the United States in search of a better life and more opportunities. With immigration come different issues and, consequently, legislatures in the justice system to solve those issues. Many problems that immigrants face have been addressed by different segments of the government, but many more remain to be resolved.

One of the problems that many immigrants face, especially women of color, is domestic violence. Immigrant women enter the United States with a higher risk of being a subject to domestic violence. As Dr. Philip Rhoads explains: “Most of the immigrants came from male-dominated societies, where women work out of the home and never had say in the decision-making” (Costa 1). Some immigrant men also feel their manhood is in jeopardy when their wife, or even children, find jobs and support the family or when children speak English and gain control of the household (Costa 1). Such experiences by immigrant men, along with the submissive role of women in other countries, result in a higher risk of the presence of domestic violence in many immigrant households. This risk is consistently higher than the national average among the immigrants from all regions of the world, but is especially high among Latino/a groups. The normality of domestic violence in Latino/a culture is explained in a song by Amalia Rodrigues: “He beats what is his and it is no one else’s business” (Costa 3).

The Oversight

There are many laws in place that protect women from their batterers. However, the problem with these laws is the tendency to forget the significance of women’s racial and economic subordination in relation to their vulnerability to battering (Coker 1015). To start with, there is a lack of research on Latina women when it comes to domestic violence. All the research done in this field focuses on white women and the frequent research on minorities is almost always on African American women. Also, the current laws ignore the specific needs of the colored women who face domestic violence in their lives. For example, it is obvious to everyone that the lack of shelters is a very serious problem faced by the officials who work for women’s protection. However, on top of this problem, most of these shelters operate only in English, which causes many Latina women not to attend such classes.

Another dilemma that many undocumented domestic violence victims face is the hostile nature of the government agencies that are supposed to protect women’s rights. At the present time, under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, all agencies have the capability to report every undocumented immigrant to the INS as deportable. Therefore, the fear of deportation, separation from children, and the probability of even more abuse in one’s home country is always present (Coker 1031). Many immigrant women, after a cost-benefit analysis, decide to put up with their batterer’s abusive behavior to avoid being deported to their home country. Many more women plea bargain in order to avoid jail time and are therefore sent back to their country (Coker 1048). The inefficiency of police and other governmental agencies causes men who are legal residents to use the mentioned laws to threaten their spouses and continue their abusive acts without women reporting their behavior. This problem does not stop with undocumented women. Many permanent residents also think that since they are not yet citizens; they could be deported in a case of reporting a crime to the police.

Negligence

Another serious obstacle for Latina women, in regards to domestic violence, is the unwillingness of the police to respond to these calls. As explained by Coker, “Police often believe that violence is an unremarkable event in the households of people of color and that police intervention is therefore likely to be ineffective or unnecessary” (1033).

Currently, the laws and the operation of different governmental agencies including the police are very inefficient in dealing with the problem of domestic violence among immigrants and more specifically Latina women. Many of the laws mentioned above are not only protective of the rights of women, but are in fact victimizing the victim, and should be disposed of. The issue of domestic violence is a problem that many policy makers have been trying to pay more careful attention to and it is therefore necessary to look at the broader picture and include immigrant women when making decisions about the future of our women and our society.

In this chapter, we examined some of the current policies and the operation of the different segments of the government that we believed acted unjustly towards Latina women. In the next section of this paper, we will discuss some