Youth as victims of DV

When we think about DV, we generally think about women and children as victims; it is not often that we take into account the experiences of adolescents and young adults, and when we do, we include them under the umbrella of ‘children’. Unlike children, who are generally victims, however, youth can be both victims and perpetrators of DV.

In this article, which is based upon the experiences of the children of post-1965 immigrants from South Asia, Purkayastha discusses the experience of DV in youth. She suggests that these youth exist in a liminal space, where they are neither American nor South Asian, neither adults nor children. She frames their experiences within the race and gender hierarchies of the dominant U.S. society. Purkayastha focuses on youth who are victims and perpetrators of violence, not witnesses.

Youth as victims:

The author begins by describing the difficulty of conceptualizing youth and violence. In U.S. mainstream society, youth (a broad term that encompasses adolescents and young adults, those in their late teens and early twenties) are in the process of becoming independent and separating from their natal families. SA youth, however, are often still financially dependent on their parents and often stay at home. Parents assume that they will remain involved in their child’s life decisions. For SA youth who wish to acculturate into the larger, dominant culture, this divergence in societal and parental expectations may lead to arguments over legitimate parental control, and pressure to conform to parental expectations may be perceived as coercion. Although most adults would not consider parental control and coercion as abusive behavior, many adolescents may do so.

This conflict between the dominant culture and parental expectations is further complicated by gender. The author writes, “South Asian youth are caught between parental directives about the ‘right’ gender relations and the peer culture expectations of what is cool/acceptable and uncool/unacceptable among ‘real’ men or women.” SA youth are expected to be polite, modest, and soft-spoken, in contrast to the dominant culture of masculinity (which demands competitiveness and aggressiveness) and femininity (which demands sexuality). Many youth view the unwillingness of their parents to accommodate prevailing U. S. standards as unreasonable and a source of distress.

There is also some ambiguity about what constitutes psychological or physical DV with youth. For instance, while most people would agree that curtailing a woman’s right to use the phone would be considered abusive, does the same standard hold true for an adolescent who routinely overuses the phone? In many cultures, spanking a child is normative disciplinary behavior; is hitting an adolescent normative? While the author does not provide any easy answers to these questions, it is necessary to reflect on these issues when considering the full range of abusive behaviors from coercion and control to physical and psychological violence.

Next week, we shall discuss the experience of DV in SA youth as perpetrators rather than victims.

[For more information, see: Purkayastha, B. (2000). Liminal Lives: South Asian Youth and Domestic Violence. Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 9(3), 201-219.]