Psychosocial barriers to, and enablers of, intimate partner violence disclosure among Asian-American immigrant women

Abstract

Although Asian women immigrants to the USA rarely disclose intimate partner violence, local research indicates that among them domestic abuse is prevalent. This study aimed to determine the main psychosocial barriers and enablers to disclosure among Asian-American women in California, and whether barriers outweighed benefits. We used a novel qualitative methodology of indirect and direct questioning with sixty married women from four ethnicities (Korean, Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese). Overall, barriers to disclosure were more compelling and tangible than enablers, particularly among Mandarin Chinese and Korean speakers. Five main barriers were found: victim-blaming, beliefs in female inferiority and male dominance, familial shame, individual shame and fear of undesirable consequences. Only extreme violence and the need to protect children from harm were seen as warranting disclosure. As a result, health and other providers’ encouragement of disclosure is unlikely to be sufficient to achieve behavioural change. Abused Asian immigrant women need anonymous ways of obtaining professional counselling, information and resources. In addition, community-level awareness programmes in Asian languages are needed to reduce victim-blaming and misinformation.

Keywords:

• Barriers
• disclosure
• intimate partner violence
• cross-cultural comparisons
• women

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the participants for sharing their perspectives.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1 For each quote, we provide the ethnicity (e.g., C = Chinese) and the participant’s transcript number (e.g., 4).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by a community partnership grant from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.