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Journal of Asian American Studies 4.1 (2001) 90-92



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Book Review

Battered Women in Korean Immigrant Families: The Silent Scream


Battered Women in Korean Immigrant Families: The Silent Scream. By Young I. Song. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.

In the past three decades considerable attention has been given to the study of domestic violence in the United States. Focus on domestic violence in minority communities, however, is relatively recent and much needed. Young I. Song's book [End Page 90] is one such study that contributes to this new, growing body of empirical studies on minority groups.

Based on purposeful snowball sampling of 150 Korean immigrants residing in Chicago, Illinois, Song's study examines the socio-cultural factors that pertain to the battering of Korean immigrant women living in the United States. Divided into seven chapters, the first four provide the historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts for the study, with the latter three chapters focusing on the study itself, its findings, and conclusions.

Song begins her book by providing a historical overview of traditional Korean society and the cultural origins that shape gender identities, women's subordinate status in Korean society, and the cultural justification for this subordinate status. Drawing upon theories of domestic violence, she goes on to show how Korean women's experiences of battering in the United States must also be understood in the context of the cultural conflict that affects immigrant families. Explaining how cultural conflict affects wife abuse, Song points to the important differences between American and Korean cultures with regard to ideas and values about social relationships, rights and duties, gender expectations, marriage, and attitudes toward problem solving.

While wife abuse involves a range of factors, the author deliberately confines the term in this study to refer to physical abuse only. It is worth noting such a deliberate choice by the author is an outcome of the overall consensus among respondents that verbal abuse was not really wife abuse. Despite this slight limitation, this book provides sociological insights for explaining the relationship between cultural conflict and wife abuse. Drawing upon the data, Song finds that rather than demographic variables, it is adjusting to the new culture in America and factors such as attitudes toward Korean traditionalism, sex-role performance, and the stress-evoking environment that play a more important role in Korean women's experiences of wife abuse. The results of Song's data indicate that Korean immigrant women with more traditional attitudes, whose husbands or who themselves adhered to rigid Korean sex-role performance were more likely to experience battering.

An important aspect of Song's study are what she calls "stress evoking factors" such as the frustrations some Korean immigrants experience due to status inconsistencies, language barriers, isolation, and lack of sociability. All these factors Song's findings show were related to episodes of battering. She demonstrates how the language barrier is a factor preventing Korean immigrant's adjustment to life in the United States. It is such factors, she argues, that lead to further social isolation and less social accountability on the batterer's part. [End Page 91]

Throughout the book, Song provides the reader with examples of how traditional culture and the internalization of traditional cultural values associated with the acceptance of a woman's subordinate status have major consequences on Korean women's experiences of battering. One must be careful however not to interpret the findings of this study as if it were cultural factors alone that determined wife abuse but rather to understand that cultural conflict plays an important role. Song clearly provides important cultural insights, but one is at times left with the thought that there could have been a little more attention devoted to the linkages between the cultural and structural factors as they impact Korean women's experiences of battering. Similarly, while Song mentions the lack of utilization of formal resources by battered Korean immigrant women and the need for appropriate services, a larger discussion of some of these issues in the last chapter, particularly the ways they impact marginalized communities...

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