Strategies to Tackle Gender-Based Violence in Ethnic Minority Communities: A Toolkit
Gender-Based Violence (GBV) has remained as one of the most prevailing social problems which causes serious long- and short- term damage to the victims. The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) defines GBV as any form of violence that targets individuals and groups of individuals on the basis of their gender. It is widely accepted that GBV is a manifestation of gender inequality and serves to maintain unequal power between genders (Watts and Zimmerman, 2002).
Minority and migrant women often possess limited knowledge on GBV and low initiation in help-seeking (The Women's Health Council, 2009; Tonsing, 2014; Leung and Rainlily, 2015).
It has been found that help-seeking tendency is low for minority women in Hong Kong, due to their cultural and religious traditions, as well as financial and immigration dependency on their husbands, services generally are unfavourable for minority women (Kapai, 2015). Frontline social workers and researchers have criticised the services for their lack of cultural sensitivity. Minority women, due to their limited language proficiency in both Chinese and English languages, have less understanding towards the services available (Association for Concern for Legal Rights of Victims of Domestic Violence, 2015). Police, in general, possess limited cultural sensitivity; and discriminatory treatment has been experienced by minority victims in police stations.
According to the Census and Statistics Department, there was a total of 580 000 ethnic minorities in Hong Kong in 2016. For Hong Kong policy formulation purpose, the term 'ethnic minority' in fact only refers minorities with Indian, Pakistani and Nepalese ethnic backgrounds, as they face most challenges in terms of economic and social integration in Hong Kong (HKSAR Legislative Council, 2006; Baig, 2012). For this reason, this toolkit focuses on South Asian women's experiences of GBV.
Due to the lack of tried and tested resources to tackle GBV in Hong Kong's EM communities, we turned to overseas expertise and partnered with UK-based organisation Maslaha to produce this toolkit. Some of the examples used in this toolkit are from the UK, to provide a guide and model for best practice which we can adapt to the HK context.
We must be very careful not to fall into thinking that violence against women should not be reproached because it is somehow legitimised by religion or culture. This toolkit introduces a range of perspectives from Islam. The aim of this is to delineate cultural practices from religion, which are so often confused with one another. It is important to highlight that GBV has, and continues to, exist in many cultures (including Chinese and European). We included an exploration on some of the perspectives from Islam due to constraints on time and resources, and access to appropriate expertise such as Maslaha.
Learn more about Maslaha: maslaha.org.
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