 I'm Liza Mundi, the Director of the Bread, Winning and Caregiving Program at New America. For those of you who are new to New America, it's a think tank that's much more than a think tank. New America is an organization committed to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the digital age. We're simultaneously a technology laboratory, a media platform, and a public forum. Indeed, this event today is part of our commitment to providing a platform and forum to enable collaboration among the public, private, and civic sectors in order to find solutions to some of our most difficult public problems. The Bread, Winning and Caregiving Program, which I direct, reframes the conversation about work, family, and gender issues at a pivotal time in our nation's discourse. We tackle issues around women's leadership, work-family balance, changing gender roles, caregiving, and today, violence against women. The Violence Against Women Act is a critical piece of legislation that has had huge impact on the lives of women in America and on the growth of organizations dedicated to working in communities to end domestic violence. VAWA must be reauthorized every five years, and each time it has grown more inclusive and responsive. For example, in 2013, policymakers added a provision to give tribal nations the right to prosecute non-tribal members who abuse women on tribal land. The LGBTQ community also successfully secured additions to the Act, for instance, making it illegal to turn away someone from a shelter based on their gender identity or sexual orientation. But as we approach the reauthorization of the Act in 2018, it's clear that there is still much that policymakers can do to improve on this progress, learn from past successes, and ultimately create an Act that better responds to the needs of immigrant women of color, a rapidly growing population in this country. Today I'm very pleased to welcome representatives from South Asian women's organizations from across the country to discuss how the Violence Against Women Act has both supported and ignored survivors of domestic violence from their communities, and to explore how an updated version of VAWA might better serve them. Given that Asian Americans have recently overtaken Latinos as the largest new group of immigrants to the United States, it's increasingly important to consider how this community should be addressed in U.S. policy-making at large, even beyond the VAWA authorization in 2018. With that, I'm very happy to introduce the moderator of today's conversation, Taloma Jayasinga, who is the former Executive Director of SOCKE, a nonprofit that works to end violence against women in South Asian communities. She has also worked for the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, and as a staff attorney for the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Please welcome Taloma, who will introduce the rest of our terrific panelists today. I'll also mention that the event is being streamed, and it will be podcasted, and if you'd like to tweet, you can tweet at the hashtag VAWA for all, and F4 is spelled out, F-O-R. Thanks so much. Welcome. Thank you. Oh, good. I'm mic'd. I don't need to go to the podium. I wanted this to be more of a conversation, and so I'm going to be seated here the entire time. So good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for coming at the coffee hour, and for being awake and alert, I see. I'm so glad we're all gathered here to kick off a week-long work of worth of activities, I think, around the White House Initiative, API Summit, and API Heritage Month. I'm going to give a quick sense for Asian and Pacific Islander communities, to those of us who don't know. And we're kicking it off with a panel focused on gender, so I really want to thank the New America Foundation for hosting us and being so welcoming and supportive of these critical conversations as we come to a deeper understanding of how the changing demographics of the US will shift conversations and power. So I'm going to start off with a lot of introductions, because I'm going to introduce our panelists, and I'm also going to introduce the community a little bit. So in the middle, I wrote notes without knowing how it would be seated. So in the middle is Manju Kulkarni, who's the executive director of the South Asian network in California. She has dedicated her career to the public interest. She was a senior attorney at N-Help, and she's received numerous accolades for her public service from the South Asian Bar Association. She was also a woman's policy institute fellow as part of the project of the Women's Foundation of California, and she's just a wonderful person, a brilliant advocate, and we're so happy to have her here. And she took a red eye, and so she's awake, which is amazing. To her left, a little dyslexic, is a part of Batacharya. She's the executive director of Raksha, which is another South Asian women's organization, which is based in Georgia. And she's been active in the movement and gender-based violence since she could talk, it seems. She's been the executive director since 1998, and she's also on the board of the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She too has received numerous accolades, including the White House champion of change for her extraordinary work in inspiring and empowering her community, which she so richly deserves. If you want to know more about our panelists, you should go online. I'm giving the succinct version, because they're just brilliant, brilliant people and advocates. And to my left is Sharon Staples, not a South Asian woman. She's the executive doctor of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, which is the largest organization dedicated to ending hate violence, sexual violence, and domestic violence affecting LGBTQ and HIV affected communities. She began her career as a staff attorney. And actually, I don't know this, you created legal aids for a dedicated DV project, she's so brilliant. And in any of her roles, whether it's being an adjunct professor at CUNY Law or Hunter, or on committees advising the NYPD or even national task forces, she is a champion for the LGBTQ community. And for similarly placed communities on the margins of national policy. We'll have another panelist coming. She's trying to be two people at once. She's the senior director of the Women's Initiative, the Center for American Progress, and so she's going to join us later. Her focus of work is on economic security, on work, family balance, and pay equity, and women's leadership. And prior to that, she was with the White House as a special assistant to the president for cabinet affairs. And she's an accomplished policy advisor and strategist. And being that accomplished, she gets invited to many places. But she's going to make it here. So we'll mic her up and she'll join us later on in the conversation. So as I give introductions, I want to also introduce this, who we are. So South Asians are now 4.2 million of us in the US. Indians are the largest, 80% followed by Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nepalis, and Sri Lankans. But there are more that make up this community. Bhutanese, Indo-Caribbean who live in the West Indies. And so we're a large community and we're growing. And so, as was alluded earlier, the growth rate for the South Asian population is exceeding that of the Asian Pacific Islander community. And also, for perspective, it's now increasing the Hispanic, exceeding that of the Hispanic population. And I got all these lovely citations from SALT, South Asian Americans leading together. They're based here, they're a national organization, but they're based in DC. So they give you all the facts you need to know about our community. And Aparna and Manju are executive directors of South Asian women's organizations. And we call ourselves, and Saki is one of those too. SAWOS is the acronym. And there are about, there are more than 30 of us across the US. We're in nearly every state. And we are about 30, some of us are like 35 years old and some of us are pretty new. But we work in our communities. We're the only organizations in our community that have a gender lens explicitly. And we've all been formed around domestic violence, to combat domestic violence in our communities, but we've grown to address broader needs. Because if there's a question of gender and how it interplays in our community, we usually step up to the plate. So we've been around for a while, and we're trying to grow our power as representatives of women and girls in our community. And also, trying to work in allyship. Cuz we work locally in our community. We provide services, techies based in New York. We have helplines, but we also realize that we're a strong coalition, and we're trying to build that power. So our conversation today will start off with VAWA, but it's not the end and whole of our conversation as we talk about, what does it mean to build community power and be the new Americans and also address our community's needs from a national perspective. I also want to allude to, we couldn't do our work cuz we're so small without working in partnership and in allyship with strong allies. Sharon and I have worked together in New York. One time she asked me to participate on a, what was it? It was Vera Institute for Justice, as a mainstream organization. For little South Asian women's organization to be perceived of as mainstream, I was very, I was like, whew. And now she's the token non-South Asian on the panel. But we work with our respective communities and we see the parallels between when you work on the margins, how you're trying to build it more into the center. So, she's part of that coalition of trying to talk about unpopular issues in our community and bring it more to the forefront of whenever we talk about what it means to progress in our community. Okay, so enough with the introductions and now let's get into the meat of why you are all here. So as we grow our power, how do we build more towards gender justice issues in our community? So what I alluded to earlier was like one good test of how our community grows is how present you are at the table when big things get discussed. So we'd like to move towards being present at the next reauthorization for the Violence Against Women Act, VAWA, which gets reauthorized every five years. And it's next up in 2018. That would be a good indicator of how we've muscled up a little bit more than what we are now and to speak with one national voice. But it is not the whole or the sum of what our community needs. It is the starting point of our conversation tonight. And my first question, I'm hoping in panelists, I know they're all chatterboxes, so I'm gonna try not to lead too much. But I will have some questions if we just kind of start rambling. So my first question is to Aparna, you've been in this movement for a long time, and what had VAWA done for our community both in terms of addressing domestic violence issues, but also how it helped build this community? I think one thing is, in VAWA 2005, well, number one, Violence Against Women Act, self petitions, creating self petitions, which is a form of immigration relief for survivors who are married to citizens or green card holders was one of the big things that has helped our community. Because a lot of times immigration is a huge issue. We'd have a lot of survivors who are married to green cards and citizens and they would not apply for them and use immigration as a tool of abuse. So that's one thing the original VAWA gave us, right? Was a way for us to apply for many survivors. In VAWA 2005, they added a provision which added an opportunity or a form of relief for work authorization for South Asian survivors. So in a way, it was there, and they included that aspect, but we still don't have a way to apply for that, which is a later conversation. The other thing is funding. We've gotten a lot of funding. A lot of SAWOs have gotten funding to be able to support our work and grow. And there's many of us are in the room that we've been able to get some of the culturally specific funding to support our domestic violence and sexual violence work. So that's helped us grow, whether it's at the state level or at the national level, it's helped us grow our program, it's helped us have a stronger voice. So it's been important increasing number one access for survivors who have immigration issues, but also increasing funding for our organizations to grow. I'm trying to keep it short and simple. Unless you want to say more. I'm so sorry. Pray, pray. Well, okay, well, Manju, well, I'll pardon and Manju, but Manju, do you want to take a first crack at like, Bawu has been critical in helping us grow and addressing some of the particular needs that survivors of violence from our community face. But there are, despite these huge strides in every authorization that's expanded its protections, but how have been some of the gaps? What are some of the gaps that still exist today for the women we work with? Sure, thank you. So, so I would say one of the main gaps that our community faces as a result of the limitations of VAWA is really, I think the focus on law enforcement and law enforcement as a necessity in terms of moving forward on U-Visas, for example. U-Visas require reporting to law enforcement. And that's just difficult for a lot of women in our community. There's fear of deportation for both themselves as well as their spouses. There have been a number of cases, not just in the South Asian community, where women have called the police and under the federal secure communities have themselves been deported just by calling the police and then being included in some of the federal databases. There's also, of course, fears because the battering spouse is the breadwinner. And so if you call the police and your husband is put in prison, then where are you going to get any money to feed your family? It takes many months often for individuals to get public benefits. And in some of our states, there are no public benefits even to be had if you look in the health care realm and some of the food stamps and other public benefits. Additionally, because of over-surveillance of the Muslim community, we see a lot of concerns about reporting because people already are living in fear of law enforcement. And the last one I'll mention is just also in terms of what is required of reporting, which is showing the proof of a bona fide marriage. And in some cases in immigrant families, that's actually very difficult. If you are married back in the homeland and say your husband has all the bank accounts in his name, he has all the land, the mortgages, the apartment leases, whatever it is. If they're all in his name, there's almost nothing for women to show that they're actually in a marriage. And so that becomes difficult. One other thing I want to mention, too, though, is a limitation, when you only look at law enforcement, is then is law enforcement fully prepared to deal with our community? And in a lot of situations, they just, frankly, are not. There's very, very limited cultural competency. There's, at least in California, very limited use of the language line. And so when you're talking about women who are limited English speakers, they don't have any way of communicating what's happened to them, and they often get co-opted because the husband can actually speak English. And then finally, if they go through the court system, are there interpreters available? And how strong are their interpretation skills? We actually had a client who knew the interpreter. He was sort of an older uncle in the community, and he knew the perpetrator and was friends with the perpetrator. And so, of course, when he's interpreting in the court, he uses all language that would be favorable to the perpetrator and language that's not favorable or even understood by her. So, for example, he said, in Hindi, do you have a restraining order using the English word restraining order? And she doesn't know what a restraining order is, so she said yes. And that actually wasn't even true, and so it detrimentally affected her case. So I would say these are the gaps that still need to be filled after Fawa. From what I understand, in 2013, a lot of the immigration provisions were not addressed that needed to be addressed, and they were put off for immigration reform, and we haven't had a lot of any of the immigration reform or any of the immigration laws pass. And so there's a lot of immigrant stuff that we needed to work on that was not addressed in Fawa 2013, so increasing the numbers are U-Visas. If anybody knows anything about U-Visas, which is the crime victim visa, we are already in 2016 fiscal year numbers. And what happens is you can get approved to get a U-Visa, but in that time you're in deferred action. So until your priority date comes up, which would be in 2016 or maybe even 2017, if you get it, then what do you do? You're in this kind of state of flux, and I'm from the South, and so we have a lot of anti-immigrant laws. And so what happens is our legislator tries to pass laws that says that if you're in deferred action, we don't want you to get a driver's license because they're thinking you're going after all the DACA students, but there's actually victims of domestic and sexual violence who would be impacted in not being able to get a driver's license. And so luckily that didn't pass because we didn't do a lot of advocacy at the state level, but people are trying to pass a lot of anti-immigrant laws that would impact a lot of survivors. And so with having to wait two to three years just to get a U-Visa, it's daunting. And then how do you support yourself? The wait time to even get approved for the visa can be about a year. So imagine being undocumented, not being able to support yourself. You're only in shelter for, what, three to six months if you're lucky? How do you survive? You have no source of income to support yourself, so then you become vulnerable to victimization by potential employers or community members who know that situation. So it's not working for our communities. And it's not just folks on U-Visas because a lot of survivors who are on H-4 visas, which a lot of South Asians are on, which is a dependent spouse of an H-1B worker, they're not allowed to work either. They're legally in this country. They have permission to be here. But if they're a victim of domestic violence, they don't have access to supporting themselves and their children. And they're in this very precarious situation. And so part of, again, my frustration is this law passed in 2005 where H-4 survivors were supposed to get some type of path to apply for temporary work authorization. Well, we still don't have that on the books yet. 10 years later, nothing has been, there's not a way to apply for this relief. And so that's an important piece that I think there's still a gap where certain survivors are not having access. The other piece about U-Visas is discretionary. So that means a department in one county can sign off. But if this department in the county right next to it doesn't, something will access to this relief. So some communities, depending on their government and their officials, can access it and some can't. And to me, that's really unfair that we have to rely on the discretion and the whims of certain politicians to access this special relief for victims of crime. And to me, that's not good. Not good at all. So you're highlighting how doing work on gender-based violence. So people think it's interpersonal. You're talking about shelter and stuff. It really, in our community, involves working on a lot of immigration issues. So we have to sit in what would be, if we were siloed, different movements. So immigration reform is going on one path, vows on another, but you have to sit on both. And at the same time, our struggles are not just our own. A lot of what you were saying about over-policing and lack of cultural competency, I feel, resonates a lot with other communities. And I think with Sharon, with the LGBTQ community, it's another similarly over-policed community. Is that resonating with you as well? And was that one of the motivating factors for kind of, we'll get there in later conversations, but why you decided to build towards making sure VABA was inclusive of your community, or was it just that was not the primary thing? I'm not sure that was the primary thing, but yes, absolutely, those things resonated. In fact, I wrote them down because I was like, yeah. We have the same, I think we're talking about marginalized communities, generally, and what their engagement with law enforcement is. But I also think we're talking about intersecting communities, right? Because there are South Asian queer communities as well, right? And I think really what motivated us to, well, what motivated us to think about getting involved with VABA was basically what you laid out in terms of what VABA meant for the movement, in terms of the relief, the remedies, the funding, the ability to provide services. And we'll talk about this, I think, a little bit later. It turned into something that was sort of much greater than that and much more complex than that in terms of the strategy and going about it. But certainly I think some of the themes I'm hearing here, which is there are a lot of intersections, there are a lot of ways that we need to be in different worlds in order to be able to move work forward, was a, is a resonant sort of theme for the way we got into the work as well. Thank you. Just to shift a little bit, Manju, when you were preparing for this panel, Manju actually had mentioned that, what is the line that you said? It takes more than lawmaking to build community power. And so I think we've talked a lot about VABA, like as one particular law, but yet as representatives of a growing community and a community that still doesn't always put gender issues at the forefront, we're working even within our community to make sure that there is awareness of how if you're working towards immigration reform that you don't forget the gendered aspect of it. When you're working on economic security that you don't forget the gendered aspect of it. When you're working on a whole host of issues that we have to step up to the plate. And what have you learned by that? Like, what did you mean when you said that? Like, what would it take? Well, one thing, I think what I was primarily thinking about when I said that was the changes that we need to see in our community culturally. So I wanna just give an example of that. And a client of ours who actually in some ways has been aided by VABA has in fact been abandoned in other ways by the community. So this is a young Bangladeshi mother who called the police when her husband was beating her and the police came, they took him away. And then she was left in an apartment complex with a lot of single men who were interested in her. She was a very attractive young woman. She felt nervous about her own safety when she told members of the community whether they were religious leaders or even her physician. One, every single person said you should not have called the police. Even, you know, literally it may cause your death but you should not call the police. And so when you have a community that's saying that to you, then of course you have self-doubts and you wonder like, oh, maybe I shouldn't. And then your kids, you know, also are, you know, where is dad? They have their own issues and concerns. And so I think for us at San, what we've tried to do then is really to talk about this in terms of framing an appropriate community response. And so some of the tactics or strategies we've used are actually to even start earlier, talk about sun preference in the community. What does that mean? That's something that in the South Asian community we see quite a bit. What are the ramifications of that? Then we talk about with college age women in Los Angeles, sexual assault in the community, and also their reproductivity. When we've had those workshops, almost every single woman has said to us, all my parents care about is getting married. And so when you're in an environment where the parents only are concerned about that, of course you're gonna have many women who then are either in forced marriage situations or in situations where they're married to batterers because the only important thing is to be married and then to have children, right? So then we get into the issue of reproductive justice. So for us it's really a much bigger issue than it is about lawmaking. It's about changing the way our community looks at gender and the way that we as women, because we are a women led organization and women staffed organization really thinking about how we want to instill progressive values around gender within the community and within all the work that we do. So how do you talk about unpopular issues in our community? Like how do you do that? You're saying like, okay, we've got to talk to community. And we as workers, even as workers of our organizations get stigmatized for doing this work. So how do you talk about the unpopular issue? Like the South Asian community, the API community in general is this quote unquote at one point model minority and we're talking about the dark underbelly of it. So how do you go out? And this is open to all of the panelists because all of you are addressing the unpopular issues in your communities, but you can start. Well, how does that mean? So we've done a couple of different things. So we have done, we've used opportunities either that have come through events that have happened around the world. For example, the series of workshops we did for college age women came after the gang rape that happened in Delhi in 2012, or yeah, 2012. And then we've had conversations about son preference with women who are my age, who are mothers, who are in their late 30s or early 40s. So a number of these conversations we've started with are with women themselves. We actually had a fabulous conversation that even involved talking about romantic relationships and sex with older women, with women who were caregivers in our community. And they were surprisingly really honest about their own relationships and what they had been told about sex by their own mothers and by other women in the community. So that's one avenue. The other avenue is actually using our work in health and civil rights to have those conversations. And I'll just share with you one example, which was in an individual conversation is when we went out to do Obamacare outreach as we're an outreach and enrollment entity in California, our staff member was literally knocking on doors in little Bangladesh. And when she saw one door we knocked on a woman said, you know, I have a lock going on. And that was essentially code for domestic violence. And so here we had an entree using health as a way to get in. And actually in other cases, very similar to that, we have had couples come in to get enrolled in healthcare. And because our staff is so well trained, they know when they see it. And so have been able to call those women afterwards and say, you know, is something going on? Is there something you wanna talk about? But we also have used it when we go out to mosques, to temples, and Gurdwara's. When we talk about health, we also talk about sexual assault and domestic violence. When we go out to talk about citizenship and try to enroll people in our citizenship clinics, we mention it and we use every opportunity that we have in those sort of benign realms to talk about gender violence. And you'd be surprised how many people open up. And sometimes come to us under the guise of something else and really what they're coming for is help with domestic violence. I think that's the benefit of your organization because it's South Asian network, there's not a stigma. Anybody could come to you for any reason without worrying about the stigma of, oh, they seem to be coming to Zand. Do they, you know what I mean? Whereas it's different, I think it's a little bit different than some of the other organizations where like, sometimes if we have a booth, we have to kind of step away so people can get the information. And not feel like folks are being watched or people are stereotyping. Cause I think like many communities we're a small but big community and people will find out and they notice and they'll know your business and they'll look at you. So I think that's something to keep in mind. And I know when we started we did a lot of immigration workshops and that's how we got people to the table. So you would talk about immigration, then you would talk about immigration relief for folks who are victims of domestic violence. So you'd weave it in and you find those ways to kind of talk about it. And I think for us being in the South, like being in Georgia we're the only organization that does the work that we do. So we kind of have to keep an open framework of being able to address multiple issues that intersect our community and that's how we get kind of access to our community. So if it's talking about victim compensation because there's been a number of home invasions in Georgia we would go in and at least talk about that and that way the community sees us and sees us as a resource to where they could come and talk about the other issues impacting them. Because talking about domestic and sexual violence at least in the beginning, I mean we're in a much better place now but in the beginning it was really difficult and people just didn't want that associated with our community. It was too difficult and too hard to talk about. So you have to have kind of the kind of safer areas where you can intersect and create that space to have those conversations so people can approach you. Which is why we've got to be in the community a lot more. Welcome. Thank you. That's all I do. I just wanted to... So community is broader than our community. I mean we are... Terri Devers. And but our community is more than just the South Asian community. Like you have been, like I think when they see you coming in Georgia they know that you are like you are the voice of not just in the South Asian community but of the domestic violence issue when you're with organizations or government officials not talking about the South Asian community or domestic violence. Like our community is broader than that. And I feel like you've been in different shoes that you've sat, different guys as you've had either you're bringing up, oh don't forget the South Asians or in other movements, don't forget domestic violence survivors. So how have you navigated that? Because I think a lot of times when you have to fight to have your voices heard you can't rely on other people just speaking for you. So you've spoken like when I mean community can you uplift that a little bit and talk about broader sense? Yeah, there's many communities we have. So like being on the Georgia Coalition against domestic violence like having to remind them about immigrant issues. So like the deferred action and drivers license issue that we face in Georgia as a domestic violence organization they're not gonna think about that impact on immigrant survivors. So I'm not just going in for South Asians I'm going in for any immigrant survivor or even the students who are you know the DACA students the deferred action for childhood arrivals is like if we have policies like this we're putting so many people in danger and using the domestic violence lens as a way that we can I guess build more allyship to make sure these negative policies don't impact the larger immigrant community overall. So in that realm I'm always reminding and then of course in the immigrant when we're doing immigrant related advocacy work I'm always bringing up the gender lens and trying to make sure. So our communities are multiple right? There's South Asian community but then there's the state of Georgia and reminding our state of the impact of anti-immigrant laws and how it impacts us but then tying in the domestic violence and the immigrant. So there's many multiple hats that I have to wear but it's just to make sure that the unintended consequences don't impact the larger group. I don't know if I... No, no thank you. Yeah, thank you. Shilpa we were talking about what are we talking about? Talking to our community and actually this conversation originally started taking more than lawmaking to build power and so like what does it take to build that power and how we can learn from allied movements and so did you wanna add something up for now? I did, because I think part of what I wanna talk was the H4 issue a little bit more of like while we have a lot of advocacy going on around immigration and we did a lot we were really great in getting the UVSA regs out pretty quickly because it impacted all undocumented immigrant communities but with the H4 provision it's still we're still waiting on it and part of that is most when I've been in even larger Asian forums people have forgotten about this provision because it doesn't impact the larger API community it just impacts the South Asian community so even within our own API immigrant community I have to remind people about this legislation and lawyers will be like really? We have that and I'm like yes we do it's been on there for a while so even within our own realms reminding the folks about the South Asian community because the larger API community this is not an important issue they don't see it as an urgency because they don't deal with this but yet the South Asian community voices have to deal with it quite a bit so having to be that nag in the room about this one provision but the thing is nothing it's still kind of stagnant I mean I know they made one more step and they had regulations but you know they still have forgotten about this and we're still having to remind people that we're still waiting for something What's been your experience about talking about an unpopular issue in your community? Well timing is everything right so we decided to look at LGBT folks inclusion in the Violence Against Women Act sometime in 2008-2009 when all anybody wanted to talk about was marriage right so we were the folks that were like yeah marriage is awesome if you want to be married but there's also this intimate partner violence thing going on and we need to sexual violence we need to address it and so the timing sucked for the conversation right like we nobody wanted to talk about domestic violence while we were talking about why we should get married just like straight people and we're just as good as straight people and we're you know we have the station wagons and the dogs and we don't beat each other you know kind of thing so that was really really difficult and I think it's really difficult just generally to talk to communities about the interpersonal violence right and I mean to this day I still have LGBT folks tell me that domestic violence doesn't exist in LGBT communities because we're so persecuted as a community like why would we beat each other up you know and that makes some degree of logic but it's really really difficult to sort of get past those ideas and so I think framing is so critical and I think what you all are talking about in terms of like how do you talk about it as a health issue how do you talk about it as a civil rights issue for us talking about it as a non-discrimination issue was really helpful because people could talk about marriage and talk about non-discrimination in the same sentence right and so that was something that we could really get entree into but I'll be honest with you we were not you know I joked that for you know two or three years I couldn't get invited to the opening of an envelope right because everything was about marriage and I was like beating the like well no pun intended no no no you know I was the one talking about intimate partner sexual violence and so I do think you have to be creative I do think you have to think what are folks motivations what are their interests and how can we get them in a room to talk about it and as soon as you're in the room you know you know what the issues are and you can start to build community to try and figure out what some of the solutions are VAWA being one but not necessarily all so I want to bring in Shilpa and just to update so we were talking about how as you can hear if you talk about the issue you can't forget the community if you talk about the community you can't forget about an issue so as you work on economic security and justice issues how do you bring in a gender lens like what's have been your experience as you know a related movement for social justice and not forgetting that you got to include gender I think the most important thing well there's two pieces of it and as we think about the violence angle I think especially in our community the question is how do you what do those conversations look like but even more importantly how do you get people to have those conversations so I think that piece about just getting in the room and starting the conversation and maybe it doesn't go where you want but at least you're starting a level of awareness of an issue and I find a way to do that across kind of progressive movements is really storytelling and so you know I think often you know I think about a conversation I would have with my parents we would never talk about domestic abuse right it's just such a topic that is so uncomfortable for them but if you happen to mention oh you read this article or a friend of a friend or then all of a sudden it becomes a little bit more personal and real and so I think across kind of issue areas the power of stories and personalization tend to help and I think that's kind of one of the hardest things but I think in a lot of these spaces with this community our community the challenge is just getting people comfortable about issues that they're not comfortable with and that level of awareness I think is really challenging and to get them let alone to get them politically motivated to do something about it do you find the same things that we do we meaning organizations that work on gender specifically like violence against women but also the broader gender justice stuff for us to I feel like we're always saying don't forget about women and anything and where you're sitting where your main focus is on economic justice but as part of like the women's initiative right is it easier in different conversations or is it cause violence is so stigmatized in our in our communities harder but I mean I think there's different parts so our work at CAB is really focused around working family economic issues so affordable childcare and paid leave and sick days which are things that most people you know can sort of attest to are good things that especially if they've lived in other parts of the world you know the system we have here seems challenging but some of the same kind of stigmas exist right which is what do you mean you're gonna go back to work right as an under liar I think in the community as opposed to you know of course you'll stay home with your child but I think you know something that would be interesting to kind of think through is how these perceptions are changing and what kind of AAPI or South Asian millennial views are on some of these issues and how that you know could be another bridge as we talk about conversations you know one of the things I think we learned a lot in the healthcare debate was children asking their parents about healthcare do you know and it'd be interesting to see kind of the intergenerational piece on some of these issues and how that kind of introduced the stories one thing Deloma if I could add to is that I think it's important that the focus not only be on physical violence but also on other forms of you know gender violence and I think that's something that we try to do at San through these conversations sometimes about other things and I'll just bring up two examples one you know that we see regularly in domestic violence situations is you know financial or economic control or domination even right and we had a client a couple that came in for citizenship and the husband would hold all the documents he would never let his wife touch anything and so we knew that in that situation that there was more going on right now there may not have been physical violence but there was something you know there was a strong amount of control and so we trained our staff member to be able to to shift that dynamic a little bit just in the using citizenship so for example we had her say oh uncle I know that you're very very good at this and you have everything but you know you're not gonna be in the interview when your wife is there so you need to give her the documents and for right now you have to be quiet and I'm going to ask her all of the questions and you can't say anything and so then it's just in like small conversations like that there was another example too in the healthcare context with Obamacare where a husband was being very loud and abusive to his wife and our staff member said to him look I will not allow you to talk to her that way in my presence and and he was very surprised she actually there were tears that came out of her eyes because nobody had ever and she said that to us later nobody had ever stood up for her so I think it's important that while we're often focusing on domestic violence as it pertains to physical violence that we start to have those conversations in our community about gender justice that are about allowing women or demanding that women have control over their finances and their documents about demanding that women understand their healthcare decisions and be an active part of that so I think there are all of these things I mean those two examples are individual but I think we can take them on a broader scale as well and use those two avenues and also immigration and so many others to start that conversation one of the things I think we need to also kind of work on is addressing the fact that we ask a lot of our community but we're not giving our community tools we talk about having healthy relationships we talk about how we raise boys but we don't really have a curriculum in a way to kind of do that and so I think we have a large expectation of our community on how to do certain things and how to talk to your kids about sexual assault and sex and healthy sexuality but yet there aren't a lot of tools out there for us to do it within our community context and part of the, you know, this is where the storytelling and the conversations with our community may not always go the way we want it but, you know, like we engage in some conversations with young women in our community and some were somewhat close, some were volunteers just to see how they looked at sexual assault would they even go to their parents if they were assaulted? Would they know what to do and where they're getting information? And of course that kind of led us into having some conversation with parents of like, have you talked to your kids about assault? Like what they would do have you talked to your kids about sex and some haven't, some haven't but some just don't know where to start and so part of our work has to look at giving our community tools to create the community we wanna see, right? We want it, we put it out there but we don't give folks tools on how to do it and I think that's also part of our conversation of like, are we creating spaces for people that have these conversations and giving them what they need to be able to act on it? If we grew our community's power to take on gender justice more centrally. I have two parts all of you can answer but the first part is I don't want to so one of them is let's say we built our community power to the extent that our community wanted to be very active in VAWA 2018. And they made you be the point person in recompense for all your struggles. What would be, so I wanna ask the two leaders of the South Asian women's organizations what would a VAWA look like that would resonate for you and then I'd like our allied partners on this panel to talk about what were your experiences as you decided that you wanted a VAWA that resonated with yours and what's it like doing this stuff inside the beltway because we, us three, don't have that and I'd like you all to kind of have a conversation I don't wanna moderate too much but I want you guys to start and then. Oh goodness, okay, I think I said some of my stuff before was like the UVs that we- You couldn't wait to, yes. Increasing the UV says, increasing who signs UV says who certifies it so that way there's more options for survivors to access it so if you have a police department that won't sign off can you get somebody else to sign off that you're working with and I know there are some folks that you can but really explaining who can sign off on it and making or some other type of relief including relief for spouses on student visas. So there's many different, I think looking at immigration at a deeper level and providing more options and economic viability for survivors while they're waiting for the immigration status to come in is really important. Increased language access, I mean we say law enforcement if you do X, Y, Z but do we really have the funding for the interpreters? Like in parts of rural Georgia you're not gonna have access to interpretation, there's not the funding to do it so how do we have the funding back up what we want? If we want more language access we want more bilingual mental health service providers and case workers then we have to fund it then we have to prioritize that, that's really important. I think redefining the definition of what abuse is, I think we, you know, Mandra had mentioned forced marriage so being able to have that definition in and provide some remedies for us to include that interpret protective orders or accessing legal services. So like having access to custody, I mean the post custody if it's not part of a divorce and the TPO having access to kind of go back and do custody stuff is very difficult to get those legal services. So being able to have that available along with adding some of the forced marriage like legal services around for survivors of forced marriage or folks who are potential survivors of forced marriage. Well I know that's a big sticking point amongst our community, the South Asian women's organizations community because we're scared of having it brought up at tables that we're not there and then you legislate and criminalize against a definition of forced marriage that isn't something that resonates with us and then people in our community are afraid of it going underground and afraid of it actually hurting our community. Exactly. And so that's been a real internal conversation that we've been having about like what's our stance. So it's also the loaded question of like you want to be have everything, certain things included but not unless you can make sure that it's. That we do it responsibly like the unintended consequences. Like you know, I don't think we intended for survivors like with some of the immigration stuff we intended for survivors to end up in immigration. Right. These memos to protect them. So there's a lot of unintended consequences where survivors end up in immigration and deportation proceedings and et cetera, et cetera. So really thinking about can we do this work with community? And again, it's building our power. If we inform people and provide them with education can we make a difference? Right. As opposed to criminalizing folks putting them in jail and the consequences for many of our communities with criminalizing stuff is deportation. So then we're hurting families yet again. So really being able to do a thoughtful process of how we do this work and create safety in our communities that you know, it's different. I mean what I would just add to that is the issues around increasing civil legal remedies and really having more resources put toward legal services especially around custody, visitation. For a number of our clients that's how they continue to get abused. Even in situations where they have gotten a divorce. It doesn't end with that. Sometimes it's just the beginning even, right? Because we had one client whose ex-husband she had moved to Florida with her children and her husband was in California and he kept bringing different motions related to visitation and custody and he had a judge who was a pro dads and really favorable judge on his side. And so he elongated that process quite a bit and it was difficult for her to keep flying out from Florida to be at the various hearings and no legal aid office would touch the case. Similarly around child support and some of those issues. It's very, very difficult for legal aid organizations to take on some of those cases and even some of the divorce cases as well. So I would say really as we're looking forward to the reauthorization of VAWA looking at putting more resources toward that assistance. And the abandonment, we've had so many survivors who've been abandoned back home where their children have been kidnapped back home and being able to add those pieces because a lot of times they'll just go home for a visit and then the paperwork wasn't re-signed and then they can't come back to the United States and then how did they fund that and they might be separated from their children. So adding in some of those international components would be really powerful and helpful for a lot of survivors we work with. So I'm sure you've heard similar conversations in back five years before the last reauthorization which is I think the starting point for where you guys decided to make VAWA resonate for you. Yeah, I mean it's interesting because so where I'm listening I'm thinking like, oh yeah and then I could do this and then I could do that and I realized the first question we had to ask ourselves is what's our target here? And VAWA was one of the first things that came to mind because it's sort of the most obvious response nationally to intimate partner and sexual violence but it is very heavily dependent on law enforcement and for all of the reasons that we've sort of talked about that's not necessarily the response that we need in LGBT communities and I think in many marginalized communities and so it wasn't an automatic decision for us that it was VAWA but my organization runs a national coalition of anti-violence programs who went to all of the members and said what would you want us to work on and I frankly think because it was one of the more recognizable already sort of out there pieces of legislation folks felt like that was a good place to put our energy but we first had to have that discussion as is this where we put our energy and then I think we had to look around and see where our allies were and frankly within the LGBT movement some of the national LGBT orgs really didn't want to have anything to do with us for the first couple of years because again we were talking about an unpopular issue that was flying in the face of marriage equality and it was really difficult and we had to look, we live in that sort of we are the domestic violence, sexual violence people in the LGBT world and we are the LGBT people in the domestic violence sexual violence world so we looked to the IPV SV world and there is this task force there are some folks in the room from it the national task force and sexual and domestic violence against women and these are the folks who have moved policy in DC for years and years I mean since before VAWA was VAWA and we weren't in the belt way we weren't in DC so we had to assess our capacity and who we could work with and how we could help out and once we decided it was VAWA once we saw that we weren't going to get as much help from the national LGBT orgs that are in DC that we thought that we needed and once we saw that the national task force was really the force moving forward we started to make alliances with folks in the national task force and really starting to talk about how LGBT issues are violence against women issues despite the misnomer in the title for our communities and it's not an easy conversation and it's certainly not easy when you're not we're not a predominantly we're not a DC organization we're not predominantly legislative advocacy organization you know it's sort of me going down to DC on Amtrak three times a week to try and figure it out that's a lot of capacity and a lot of resources and I think you have to know that you have those things for a few years before you can even start the conversation with folks right and for us our goal was to raise awareness around LGBT issues for the 2010 reauthorization which is when VAWA was supposed to be reauthorized we didn't expect to have any sort of legislative victories or even really have any have even a lot of traction we just thought let's build relationships let's get to know people let's assess the issue let's get familiar with the culture and then let's see what happens in 2015 and you know for a number of reasons that are too complex to go into here 2010 turned into 11 turned into 12 turned into 13 and we ended up getting the kind of traction and in large part because our allies in the National Task Force decided LGBT issues were their issues and they were willing to say the words everywhere they went even if we weren't in the room with them and that made a huge difference but it you know we didn't wake up one morning and think like oh VAWA is the panacea for all that is wrong in the LGBT anti-violence movement like it just it became sort of one foot after another kind of strategy if that makes sense in fact I think during that last reauthorization at least for marginalized communities of women of color like there were iterations of VAWA that were very hostile that tried to erode protections and so you managed to do that with the help of allies in the face of all that well yeah and I mean if you listen to the sort of rhetoric of VAWA especially in 12 and the very very beginnings of 13 people would talk about the violence against women act and the house was the house version and Ron forgive me for calling out the house on this was for I can't remember the language they use it was like regular victims or real victims or something like that real victims right which were not people of color were not LGBT people were not immigrants were not native people right so real victims were you know so we had a very clear and close alliance with native groups with immigrant groups with communities of color not just because LGBT folks are also native of color and immigrants but because we were facing similar attacks from the more conservative places in in Congress and and because we knew that we wouldn't we were only as strong as we were together right like the divide and conquer tactic is a very effective one and so we constantly had to sort of gird against that and have conversations with each other like they you know this this person just called me did they call you because if they didn't call you they're calling me because they're gonna try and get me to trade something for you and so you were doing that overlay on top of all of your sort of you know strategy just to get regular you know legislation path it was really we all needed each other I think although certainly we needed the LGBT communities some folks more than they needed us for sure right yeah how do you get Congress to listen how do you get how do you get this what's your perspective hard I think there's a couple things I mean one is just looking for opportunities and being in you know being nimble enough to react quickly when there's a new cycle or you know using an issue to piggyback on another issue right we know a cap we've done work more recently talking about the connection with VAWA and gun safety and guns and in sort of tying things together and marrying them up in a way that maybe gets it a whole new group of people that are interested to an issue it's it's a lot of work I mean I think that a lot happens at the grassroots and creating demand for these issues in you know a member in the house in their district and making it really personal and really local and visiting their ed boards and you know hanging out at their churches or congregations and that I think puts a different type of pressure on lawmakers and so I don't know I think it's kind of there's there's lots of ways to do it but I think if you are you see opportunities in the news and you're kind of nimble reacting to them you can tie things together with members you know what they feel in DC they're hearing about it at home and then just the you know which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about but you know the grassroots effort on some of these issues and how you know leveraging different groups and in different kind of surrogates to really move things at the state and local and the state and local level and I think that you know I think for for some of these really hard issues there's not a natural kind of sparkly surrogate that's out there talking about these things every day and that you know can sometimes bring visibility and so I think there's you know a use of surrogates and messengers even unlikely messengers you know men talking about this right just the different folks that can they can help move things at a local level yes sorry no like I know like within the South Asian many of the South Asian women's organizations like there was a fear in talking to our politicians because it would be seen as lobbying and so a lot of the boards and stuff were kind of like nervous about like if you do this and you educate on this and this is that considered lobbying and so there's a lot of fear within organizations to do this work based on that fear and I know that's been something that a lot I've heard within the South Asian women's organization is that fear of like how do we build that power how do we create a voice is it going to be considered lobbying and is it going to have a negative impact on our nonprofit and so I think that's just right and figuring out what the what the educational level is and what you know the non-partisan bipartisan way to go about it yeah right Sharon you said that you know and this is like obvious so you have queer people who are native who are of color who are immigrant what but yet you wanted to be at the table as explicitly LGBT right why was it so important because I feel like a lot of times we get South Asian women's organizations get that well you're immigrant of color we're adjusting women of color just just and immigration issues just just let just let it you know you're already you're already involved so why why do you want to have a why are you advocating or why are you saying that there's more that needs to be done you need to listen to us and what what was it so important for you to be there well I mean I think part of it was the way that this country creates an illegal status for LGBT folks right so we can't get married we don't have relationships with our kids or those can be threatened really easily we can be fired just for being gay or lesbian bisexual transgender we could lose our housing you know there's so many reasons that it is unlawful to be LGBT in this country that you know being an immigrant or being native or being of color and if there are protections in those identities they don't trump the unlawfulness of being LGBT right in this country and so and remember like 2008 this was you know sort of before marriage happened in most places and marriage P.S. is not also not a panacea like it doesn't solve all of our problems what is it? shockingly yeah but it does start to turn the tide of are you a lawful person in this country or are you an unlawful person in this country right and so I think we needed to be there because we saw very specific issues one of the things that we heard about because it wasn't like we said oh we're LGBT communities we would like to be a part of AWA everyone said oh great come on in right I mean we had to like negotiate that and you know and we were talking earlier like part of that is there is sometimes a perception that the pie is only so big and if you add another community the pie doesn't can't support it but part of it too is like oh no don't worry we got you we got you you know and there was some strength to that argument the Obama administration had indicated it would be more LGBT friendly than the Bush administration and there might be administrative remedies and there might be things that we could do that weren't legislative and this congress was going to be a really hostile congress for LGBT folks and so we said okay great we're going to do that too right so we pursued an administrative path and a legislative path at exactly the same time because we couldn't trust that either one was going to be enough for us and we happened to get lucky again for reasons that had to do with our advocacy and didn't have to do with our advocacy but we saw a very specific place where our identities were not only not protected but in some cases state administrators were telling us like we can't fund LGBT programs because our state doesn't allow us to fund LGBT programs generally and so we can't use VAWA so the fact that like VAWA was silent as to LGBT issues was helpful in states where they wanted to fund LGBT programs and it was unhelpful in states where they didn't want to and so we really saw the need to have to clarify that in order to protect LGBT folks yeah so there was thank you, no that's great so before I open it for questioning this has been at least so this is API Heritage Month and this is actually the first time that a group of the South Asian women's organizations have worked together in an official coalition and we developed where we are developing shared statements, position statements on where we stand on certain issues so it's a watershed moment really and so I just wanted to allow the panel to close with the two representatives of that coalition of what gender justice means and we're here this week for a whole bunch of activities and we're working with allies like NKAPA and SALD and KPAC and the White House Initiative to get our voices more heard what's your vision for the future and for gender justice it's been a long road, right where do you see it going? hold on a minute, a second where do I see it going, wow increased funding so all of SALOs are not executive directors it's gonna be like money aspirational that's enough funding so that we can continue to do the work the way we want to do it not based on guidelines but we can do the work in our community so we can build that power change attitudes and really kind of like shift how we're doing our work so our community owns this work I mean if you're talking aspirational you know that's how I'd love to see it go is that we're all owning this issue we're talking about it we're not afraid we're creating tools that are like groundbreaking and you know and that we have the immigration relief that we need and that we're also looking at the economics that we're tying in all the intersections I mean because like the passing of DOMA and adding LGBT has benefited so many of my friends so that we're looking at the entire intersections so that any survivor can access what they need and not be fear and not feel like there's an unlevel I mean that there's a level playing field for them to access because right now it's not a level playing field for survivors depending on how you identify so that's my aspirational goal thank you so I would say my aspirational goal is about really engaging members of the community and I think as we're talking about South Asian women's organizations engaging women and for us that also means young women and we recently started a leadership development program for young professional women in the South Asian community whom by the way a number of them are themselves survivors of domestic violence because their fathers their uncles other people in their family have been batterers and so they've seen it up close and personal and so you know it makes it even more challenging for them to then play a leadership role in their communities whatever community it might be it might be a community of physicians or lawyers it may be in their community at the mosque or the temple it may be their ethnic community but we started that in part because we want it to not just be about reacting to what's happening and just providing direct services I mean for us at San it really is in addition to the advocacy that we're all doing is to build that power and to claim the power that we have as a community a shout out to Salt and to Suman back there but and there is so much leadership potential I think in the community once we start to address whether it's sexual assault, domestic violence some of these other gender issues son preference you know coerced marriage even if it's not forced marriage and I think you know we're doing it you know eight to ten women at a time but I think our hope is that we are then developing that next group of leaders and so that women are standing in line ready to serve hopefully we'll also have some that are in Congress that are in their local PTAs in the city council as well and so that to me is the aspirational goal and why we're here this week is because we want to create that foundation for them thank you well I am going to conclude this panel thank you everyone for sharing your perspectives and thoughts and I'm going to open up to questions from the audience and if you have any questions questions coffee needed yes I'm pleased to wait for the mic because we're live streaming this so good afternoon everyone one of the things that I'm going to ask is that you know too often for the last four or five years as I've worked on Bawa and Sharon knows I just retired from the House Judiciary Committee I've been the only man in the room that has to change okay it really has to change are you the only one no no you're not all right but this conversation this issue is not a woman's issue it's everybody's issue and we need to change that perception we talked about grassroots and that's very important I would tell the folks I met with I would remind them that all politics is local and you've got to start grassroots you want to walk the halls of the House of Congress that's great but also make sure that their constituents know what they're doing that you educate their constituents so that their constituents can tell their members their representatives what needs to be done great example I'll give you in the one hundred and twelve congress the House Republican bill was named after freshman congresswoman Sandy Adams from Orlando she allowed the Republicans to use her name and yet a Catholic nun from her district wrote a scathing op-ed Sharon I don't know if you remember that that just criticized sandy Adams said how could you do this you yourself or a victim of domestic violence you yourself or police officer who responded to domestic violence calls how could you allow your name to be placed on this bill sandy Adams lost her reelection bit because her constituents learned what she was doing so we've got to do this we've got to educate the community on immigration we are woefully ignorant on issues of immigration we don't get it we don't understand it and it's incumbent upon us to educate not just the elected officials but the community at large because they don't know and if they don't know they can't be your supporters Sharon was absolutely right everybody advocated for VAWA 2013 came on board supporting LGBT supporting uh... tribal women supporting the refusal to roll back protections for immigrant women and everyone refused to be divided and trust me the Republicans they made numerous attempts but they failed because there was that commitment thank you thank you does anyone want to say anything? other than thank you well said we agree the panel agree hi i'm actually here on behalf of the asian-american pacific allender uh... commission presidential commission and you know it looks like you guys have well i say you but it's really all of us in my real life i'm the executive director of asian family support services in austin and what you guys have brought up earlier about these three levels of if you want to call it access to power whether it's the legislative route the administrative route or even within your own state administration so a lot of things that you've said are very wonderful things that i'll bring back to you the commission but one thought i had while you're speaking about being in georgia and me being in texas you know i do you think that when it comes to the state coalitions there's something needs to happen within the department of justice during the time when we're allocating funds to state coalitions that there needs to be a strong emphasis to include our culturally specific programs in there and i'd love to continue that conversation because it happens on the local level we can have wonderful legislative stuff put in there but if our states are stopping it uh... it definitely doesn't help us because you talked earlier about legal recourses and that's all state statutes so i think there's some some conversations we had around how can we get that ovw funding to either put in some teeth around state coalitions and how they conduct their activities and and i don't think it's just the state coalitions it's also our state administrators and and our i'm gonna say our politicians who are elected who make those decisions because we've had our administrators try to do really good stuff and our politicians have actually over i guess overpowered it and and taking money away from certain groups you know like lgbt groups or even some immigrant groups so it's challenging so we can try and build that power but there's also repercussions to our daily work that sometimes happens and i think working in the south there's a different reality of how that impacts us and how it you know when you're the only organization doing that work in your community like you can try and push it but there's also when you've seen the repercussions where people's funding gets cut because they're taking a stand it's pretty scary because that means your voice could totally go away like that you know so i think it's also understanding our communities like what you can do in dc what is not the same thing that we can do in georgia or in texas or even some of the carolinas or in the south so really keeping that in mind so it's easy to say build up that power people are going to care but some of these folks elected these politicians who have like really had some serious repercussions i mean have taken revenge out on certain organizations when they've taken that stand but on the flip side with linda also saying is that those are places for us to be in right and we have to have the teeth like the thing is we can complain about it and and i've seen our coalition bring in georgia but there's not a lot of teeth and there's not a lot of ways to kind of push some stuff we try but there's not as much teeth as we would really need to make sure that there's that accountability that our communities need and deserve any more questions hi i represent asha it's asha for women we are in the local area with the person from asha i have a question regarding the stigma attached to the men so when you do the community outreach do you have many men come in and help the male of the species and just the domestic violence because we find that to be a really hot thing to get the male to take part in any kind of an outreach uh... as our organization we've always had men active in our community and have been willing to help out and volunteer in some some shape or form we've had men on our board of directors so we've actually had men that have been engaged that have wanted to do the work so we i mean i think there's this whole thing of like also making sure they have the training that they do it because sometimes they think they already know everything they don't have to go to the training and that's part of where we have to do some work but there's also some men who come in with open hearts and open minds and wanting to really make change and so it's more us having support but we have had men that have helped out and we have men who are engaged what i'd like to add is two things uh... actually sima could get the mic over there so she could answer on behalf of san but one thing i want to say also she's our deputy director it's just in addition to having men work with the organization i think it's important that i feel like we've seen a real shift in men in the audience and their responses and i want to bring raise that too which is i think that a lot of times now we are having very supportive men we've had and actually sima can speak to this too we've had trainings for imams for religious leaders in the hindu temples at the grove wires and so getting them to help champion what we do is important and also their congregants so sima if you could really address some of that key work that we've been doing yeah i mean i can try i mean so i mean i think you're right like it is it is difficult and you know this is something that san's been working on for you know twenty odd years and and and it's changed right so so i guess one tip is just to keep doing it right and to keep having those difficult conversations that the panel has been talking about um... but you know something that we've really tried to do over the years is really have partnerships with each of the religious spaces and to really partner with the religious leaders at the grove wires of the churches the temples at the um... mosques i mean that means sort of reading up on our religion right it means you know like sort of being a quote-unquote like pseudo expert on uh... on some of those things it means partnering with researchers who can give us a lot of that data so that when we go to the temple i can say the right things right like um i can use their language and sort of get them to buy in uh... you know but i think uh... i think it's changing uh... we've had more and more sort of success with the religious leaders and and just you know uh... other men in the community in general especially uh... strange you know not strangely but perhaps surprisingly you know so many of the older sort of grandad's and uncles are bringing in survivors uh... not necessarily their daughters their friends daughters or their cousins you know their nieces and things like that and so so really looking out for i mean i think that's also you know unfortunately sometimes it takes that individual and personal impact to get people to see what's been happening for years uh... they might not notice that domestic violence has been happening you know for years and then what happens someone close to them and so so it's really about when that happens also how can we build those relationships with those men and really you know have them be leaders and spokes folks in our community to keep having that relationship with them not just to bring that one person in but to keep having a long-term relationship with them right so the year no they're not necessarily the so they're they're bringing in uh... a survivor first up for help and support you know so yeah and and of course the other leaders are sort of broader sort of community and religious leaders in the community i'm not sure if i misunderstood your question but one of the things we talk a lot about in the lgbt communities is how to work with people who are abusive right because if if we are already marginalized as a community and if we for lots and lots of different reasons don't want to call the police or use law enforcement the solution can't be like okay i guess we'll just live with the fact that some people are violent right like that that can't be so so then you have to start to look at what is community accountability right and and what does it mean to hold people accountable outside of uh... sort of traditional law enforcement system but i don't think we've gotten there yet as as the lgbt communities i'm not sure that i've seen any community actually get there but certainly i think marginalized communities have done a lot more work to try and get there because it's in our interests to be there right i think part of what we're finding is that it's hard to have the language to have the conversation about how you're trying to do this without being sort of a trader to the and you know the anti-domestic violence movement because how dare you and you know all of that and and really trying to find community to have that conversation to then try and figure out and it means being nuanced about things right like there are different types of violence there are different motivations for being violent there are different ways that you can reach people and there are some people you will never reach and they will just be the violent people in your communities and i think that's where i would say so i'm not sure if i was like the perfect response to that right it's not what the legislation is set up to do the legislation was set up to bring in the law enforcement community and to raise awareness because thirty years ago we didn't do that right and and so that was really important but i i we're we're starting to have this like but what's next conversation and we don't we don't it's not we don't have the language we certainly don't have the legislation or the funding or we have some political will and there are some people who are really interested in having these conversations in places that you wouldn't expect like in in new york city the manhattan da's office is interested in having this conversation which is like the oddest sort of partnership that you would think about but also there have been marginalized communities for years that have been having these conversations and developing these strategies and we're making alliances with folks who have been doing that so i think that's a different that's also like i love this idea that like there are men in the community who will bring in survivors because they're in a place where they can do that and i i actually leaned over to teloma and i was like so that's a strategy right but but then they're also like to a certain extent you can't eat your own right like you can't just kick everybody out of the community because then you don't have a community anymore and so what are the alternatives and and i don't have any answers i just am asking a lot of the those questions but i feel like bawa has adapted it's not just law enforcement i mean the culturally specific funding does allow for us to do a lot more community work and adapt based on our community and the same with the engaging men work right so there there is funding and bawa has been adapting to address community related stuff it's not just law enforcement you know that there are pieces that are about engaging men and engaging boys and you know so also keeping in mind that there are community aspects of it i mean i'm not it's not the end i'll be all it is not but i'm really proud of how it's shifting and looking at community and knowing that some of our communities are going to address this issue in a very different way um but also we have to keep being in our community we have to keep having those conversations we have to include and come up with strategies that are true and real for our own communities and providing that space for men to actually be able to be active and provide that training and mentorship you know and having more men that come in and mentor that like i have uncles who told me a story of like there was a situation in their own community where they actually went and addressed the abuse of husband themselves they're very proud of this they tell me the story they're like we did our own little piece and we haven't heard of any abuse you know so i mean being able to give tools to our community so we can come up with a solution so we're not always having because we know not everybody's going to use a criminal justice system i think that's key of like engaging men and working in community is making sure people realize that gender-based violence in our communities is not just this women's issue that women's work and women's time on the side that it's centered and that whether you're an organization working on civil liberties or an economic justice that there's that gender piece to it and that our work is your work as well and that we work across movements and across our lives and we'll all benefit from each other so like you know you said and then no republicans can divide us when it comes down to that that time new america foundation is non-partisan probably non-partisan i just feel like i should say that um thank you all for your time and for your attention and thank you so much to our brilliant panelists for your time and your attention um this concludes this session thank you everyone