The External and the Interpersonal: IPV in the Tamil Community
Content warning:
This article mentions intimate partner violence and domestic violence.
Image: Pixabay
It is April 2013, exam season, to be exact. My friend and I are at the University of Toronto's Scarborough Campus (UTSC), trying to memorize information from classes we rarely attended, with a small portable heater by our feet. We spent most of the time we were supposed to dedicate to studying crying instead. At the time, we felt silly for crying over the trials and tribulations of our dating lives. Although we didn't have the words to describe, let alone acknowledge the abuse we were experiencing at the time, we are grateful to have had each other to confide in. Courage to Act: Developing a National Framework to Prevent and Address Gender-Based Violence at Post-Secondary Institutions, a report by Possibility Seeds Consulting, states that four out of five undergraduate students reported experiencing dating violence.
Speaking about intimate partner violence (IPV) in the Tamil community is difficult and scary. My younger self had a more challenging time understanding the multifaceted ways the external can play out in the interpersonal. Years later, conversations with my friends about past abusive romantic relationships now revolve around the complexity of our multiple identities. How do we address the violence that manifests in our community as a by-product of the trauma from decades-long war and genocide coupled with the challenges of navigating racism and poverty in a country we now call "home?" How do we continue to raise consciousness about the impact of state violence- by way of our host countries and Sri Lanka- on our community as it seeps into our most intimate relationships? How do we form new and build on existing community-led initiatives to keep our community safe?
I reflected on these questions as I attended a webinar last week on Intimate Partner Violence held by The Wellness Project, a youth-led mental health awareness organization. The event highlighted several important issues surrounding IPV within the Tamil and other marginalized communities, including the tensions around speaking about this issue to our parents, the numerous ways in which abuse can show up in intimate relationships, and the worsening of the problem due to the global pandemic. The event's guest speaker, mental health case manager, MSW candidate and co-founder of ISEE INITIATIVE, Cajaani Velautham emphasized the significance of acknowledging the issue as a place to start the conversation: "We can't begin to talk about justice for survivors until there is an acknowledgement of the existing intimate partner violence and domestic violence in Tamil communities."
Cajaani also confirmed my thoughts about state interventions' ineffectiveness in intimate partner relationships and domestic violence. "If someone calls 911, until they say that their partner has physically hurt them, the police won't do anything about it. Even if someone calls to say that they're being stalked or threatened by their partner, until something happens, they won't respond." Cajaani echoed what anti-carceral feminists and abolitionists have been saying for decades: the police do little to nothing to prevent violence and keep people safe.
"Racialized women are often neglected because of systemic racism and othering the problem to racialized community problems," Cajaani continued. I was reminded, during the aforementioned event, of Angela Davis' call on The We That Sets Us Free to "begin to think about the state as a perpetrator of violence against women, and understand the connection between intimate violence, private violence, state violence, prison violence, and military violence." The compounded violence faced by marginalized communities has informed organizing efforts that led to building community-led initiatives to address harm as an alternative to state interventions.
According to Stats Canada, women in their early to mid-20s experience the highest rates of IPV in the country, followed by women in their mid to late 20s. However, these statistics only reflect the number of reports of IPV made to the police. It is safe to assume that these numbers are inaccurate considering the multiple factors contributing to the underreporting of IPV due to how unreliable state interventions can be and how the police can exacerbate harm in marginalized, primarily Black and Indigenous, communities. In Beyond Survival: Transformative (TJ): Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, long time TJ practitioners and community organizers Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, write: "So many people experiencing violence or other emergencies don't want to call the police—or in some cases understand that they should not—but have no idea of what to do instead." Within the Tamil community, there are several reasons for why people may choose not to contact the police when experiencing IPV. Cajaani outlined a few of these reasons, including social stigmas, often attached to upholding family honour and the fear associated with the state's role in separating children from their families. The latter occurs at higher rates among racialized families, particularly Indigenous communities, in Canada.
"I had a client whose husband and not just my client but other Tamil women who have stated that their ex-partner or current abuser have threatened to murder them the same way Tharshika was murdered if the survivor went to the police," Cajaani shared with me after the event. Tharshika Jeganathan's ex-husband brutally murdered her on September 11th, 2019. The community rallied around her death and called for more education and awareness on IPV and domestic violence in the Tamil community. Tharshika's death brought forward questions about avoiding and addressing the escalation of violence by alerting the police. Since Tharshika's passing, conversations in our community continue to explore the need for alternatives to state interventions for IPV and domestic violence.
In early September, scholars and activists across Turtle Island participated in a two-day Scholar Strike. Several academics and organizers spoke on abolition and reimagining a future without cages and other forms of violent state interventions. During the digital teach-in Policing Black and Indigenous Lives in Canada, El Jones, a poet, professor, and activist based in Nova Scotia shared the following:
"We have to stay focused on state violence. We can't allow the fight to be narrowed down too well you just wanted to defund, you wanted to move money around. No we didn't want to move capitalist money around, we want abolition. We want punishment gone, we want prisons gone, we want people to have their land, we want clean water, we want housing, we want security, we want to rethink what security means so that it doesn't mean policing and it means keeping people safe in our hearts and homes and in real ways."
It is encouraging to see the increased support for and practice of abolitionist feminism, informed by intersectional feminism and revolutionary Black feminist thinkers and organizers before us. I return to the questions I posed earlier in the article with another question: How can we, as non-Black racialized people and settlers on this land, urge our community to practise solidarity by actively challenging colonial state violence in our every day? These are conversations that need to take priority in private and public spaces within our community.
The Revolution Starts at Home, in addition to being one of the most life changing vines I have ever read, is a reminder to myself and other organizers when movement spaces catapult into overwhelming pockets of heightened tension, often due to interpersonal and lateral violence. To my younger self, who often found herself in moments of despair, I say this: Continue.
