Cultural defenses in domestic violence cases use politically expedient stereotypes of culture, forwarded by attorneys on behalf of defendants, to play into already existing negative depictions of culture. This raises difficult questions:
- Can we balance the strong tension between helping an individual person and the broader effects of employing stereotypes?
- Could this mean we are actually creating frozen descriptions of what someone from a particular culture is, and therefore, others who come along may not benefit from those frozen descriptions?
- Is it ever correct to use stereotypes? When we use cultural terms to explain a particular individual’s behavior, what falls out of the picture?
- What narratives or descriptions about culture work? What do people believe?
- What do we do about the fact that stereotyping cultural practices are not just mainstream assumptions, but th
Related Resources
From Gender Violence to Gender Democracy: What Will It Take? 2011
How do we go from cultures of power and control to cultures of equality?
Lifetime Spiral of Gender Violence
The Lifetime Spiral reveals patterns of victimization by enumerating the types of violence, vulnerabilities, and harms women and girls face.
Engendering Change: Transforming Gender Roles in Asian & Pacific Islander Communities, 2007
This report asks and analyzes some critical questions, forcing us to take a hard look at all the factors that have to come together to effect transformation.
Lifecourse Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence and Help-Seeking among Filipina, Indian, and Pakistani Women, 2010
IPV often recurs over the lifecourse and survivors’ decisions to seek help are shaped by their history of positive and negative experiences of help-seeking, and because their preferred and actual sources of help change over time. Using the Life History Calendar to interview 143 Filipina, Indian and Pakistani domestic violence survivors, this research enhances our understanding of help-seeking over the lifecourse and makes recommendations for system responses to domestic violence in Asian communities.
by Leti Volpp
2002