Rhetoric v. reality: the effect of ‘multiculturalism’ on doctors’ responses to battered South Asian women in the United States and Britain

ABSTRACT

Puri explores the consequences of multiculturalism-based relativism in health care delivery to battered South Asian immigrnat women in England and the United States. Using ethnographic methods, her case study seeks to highlight the ways in which ‘cultural difference’ is essentialized in clinical settings in ways that result in unequal treatment of battered South Asian women by physicians. Even though loosely defined ‘South Asian cultures’ are conceptualized and politicized differently in the United States and United Kingdom, similar notions of ‘cultural sensitivity’ practised in both countries’ medical sectors result in similar inequities faced by South Asian women, raising questions about the rhetoric versus the reality of multiculturalism as an approach to health care provision. Puri questions how far ‘difference’—be it cultural, racial, religious or ethnic—should matter clinically, particularly when questions of women's health and safety are at stake.

Keywords:

• battered women
• domestic violence
• health care
• multiculturalism
• social medicine
• South Asian health
• South Asian immigrant women

The author wishes to thank Professor Linda-Anne Rebhun, Professor Patricia Pessar and Professor Mridu Rai of Yale University for their guidance and academic support of this project. She also wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Davenport College Class of 1956 Fellowship and the Bates Travelling Fellowship.

The author wishes to thank Professor Linda-Anne Rebhun, Professor Patricia Pessar and Professor Mridu Rai of Yale University for their guidance and academic support of this project. She also wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Davenport College Class of 1956 Fellowship and the Bates Travelling Fellowship.

Notes

The author wishes to thank Professor Linda-Anne Rebhun, Professor Patricia Pessar and Professor Mridu Rai of Yale University for their guidance and academic support of this project. She also wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Davenport College Class of 1956 Fellowship and the Bates Travelling Fellowship.

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3 Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000).

4 Sujata B. Barai, ‘Beyond the Rhetoric: Negative Implications of “Multiculturalism” for the Anti-Domestic Violence Work of Asian Women's Centres in London’, M.Sc. dissertation, London School of Economics, 1999, 5.

5 Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Ethnicity, gender relations, and multiculturalism’, in Pnina Werbner and Tariq Madood (eds), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism (London: Zed Books 1997), 206.

6 Susan Moller-Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1999).

7 Clara Connolly, 1990, quoted in Barai, ‘Beyond the Rhetoric’, 8.

8 Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk.

9 Newham Asian Women's Project, Growing Up Young, Asian, and Female in Britain: A Report on Self Harm and Suicide (London: Adept Press 1998).