Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence Among South Asian Immigrants in the U.S. (review)

Speaking the Unspeakable is a most welcome addition to the literature on domestic violence. It fills a surprisingly large gap. There are few systematic sociological studies of marital or family violence among immigrant communities in the US. And while there is a larger literature documenting the incidence, antecedents, consequences, and programmatic issues of domestic violence in the US and other countries from medical, public health, social work, or legal perspectives, this literature deals very little with issues pertaining to ethnic minority or immigrant groups. And particularly noticeable is the paucity of studies on Asian populations in the US. Speaking the Unspeakable thus represents a groundbreaking contribution which will hopefully spark further research and writing. The volume is also of interest to scholars in Women's Studies as well as community activists involved in efforts to end violence against women.

Abraham's study is grounded in detailed interviews with 25 women who are survivors of marital violence. These women had sought the help of a South Asian women's organization and also contacted Abraham after being informed about her study and were invited by the author to participate in her study. There are nine chapters in the book and each chapter takes up a range of sociological issues underpinning domestic violence which are then elucidated with evidence garnered from the women's experiences. The interviews were conducted between 1991 and 1994.

The social and economic backgrounds of the women vary widely. Although all are first-generation immigrants, they represent the heterogeneity of the South Asian community and also illustrate that marital violence is not confined to any specific class, region, religion, or cultural group. Abraham uses the term "marital violence" rather than the broader term "domestic violence" (which encompasses violence towards other members of the family) or the more focused term "wife abuse" which does not fully take into account the complex familial relations created by the institution of marriage in South Asian cultures. The respondents range from highly educated professionals with substantial salaries to low-income women subsisting on public assistance, showing once again that class is no delimiter of violence. The circumstances of the marriages of the women also vary, underscoring the important point that the risk of marital violence exists irrespective of whether the marriage is arranged or based on individual choice.

The first two chapters of the book lay out the aims of the study, and an exploration of the "ethno gender" theoretical perspective within which this book is framed. Abraham points to the deficiencies of most existing Western sociological theoretical approaches to violence against women. For example, the family violence perspective takes the family as its unit of analysis, viewing violence as the result of character flaws in individuals, and violent acts as a reaction to immediate stress. In contrast, the feminist perspective takes the individual women as the unit of analysis, and sees abuse as the result of women's position in the patriarchal social structure. Violence, therefore, is not a random outburst but is an integral mechanism reinforcing gender inequality. While the feminist approach has rightly pointed out the structural basis of gender violence, Abraham is also critical of its tendency to ignore the concerns of ethnic minority and immigrant women.

Abraham develops a theoretical approach that situates domestic violence in the intersection of culture and structure while emphasizing the importance of class and legal status in the immigrant context. Within these multiple intersections, she gives special emphasis to ethnicity and gender as the primary markers of differentiation that shape immigrant women's experience. She shows how the "model minority" label, widely applied in the US to all the Asian ethnic groups and to South Asians in particular, has in many ways been internalized by the communities and is used to counter the "unassimilable alien" image that had been used to exclude the Asian immigrants from mainstream America. The "model minority" image, however, Abraham argues, is problematic. It denies...