This workshop will explore the challenges, barriers, and strategies of South Asian survivors of community violence, specifically violence against women and children, seeking aternate and community-based responses to violence. Participants will get a complex sense of the intersections between community violence and state violence and strategies to build power across these divisive lines. The workshop will provide a framework that showcases the need to politicize violence against women and children while challenging anti-immigrant practices that disempower us and separate us from other targeted communities of color. We will explore this through the lens of an alternate, feminist/womanist libratory, violence prevention and intervention system that focuses on the voices of immigrant women at the intersection of state and community violence. We also want participants to walk away with stories of immigrant mothers and daughters in our community that help anchor the historical impact of colonization and our current immigration crisis along with the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Some thoughts on the challenges, learning and strategies that participants can walk away with as informed by South Asian women at this intersection:

➢ We know that many women and children in our community will not call on state intervention for fear of possible deportation and the fragmentation of their families. Detention and deportation proceedings are already splitting apart South Asian families, leaving women and children without the primary bread-winner, struggling economically, and disenfranchised from their own communities. We have seen this in the devastating impact of the sting called “Operation Meth Merchant” (OMM) in northwest Georgia, as well as the continued incarceration and racial profiling of Arabs and South Asians under the “War on Terror.”
➢ In many communities women are also the direct targets of the state. While the men were incarcerated in state detention facilities, many of the women targeted by OMM were put on house arrest. They live in rural communities where many are 30 miles or more apart from their families and other community spaces. State violence tactics are isolating, devastating, as well as strategically developed to separate people from each other and their collective power.
➢ South Asian women risk a “spiral of violence” that may lead to death or final subjugation with attempt to “escape” from the violence within her family. Our current response systems provide limited options for her safety within communal networks and oftentimes pathologize her inability to leave a batterer and the extended family as something she implicitly deserves for “staying in the relationship,” as a mark of her “subservient South Asian gender identity,” and/or karmic retribution.
➢ South Asian women working in the anti-violence field must also deal with the “feminization” of their work to end violence against women – a pattern of paternalistic attitudes that places limited value on ”social work” and trivializes it as “family drama,” minimizing the political nature of women’s efforts against violence in the home and workplace. Our current response systems must centralize the role mothers and daughters play in challenging violence within their families, while they carry the burdens of emotionally and economically supporting those affected by racist and anti-immigrant sentiments, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror.
➢ Those of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian decent are under surveillance. The post-9/11 Patriot ACT and the creation of Homeland Security with the dissolution of a civil immigration process and its placement under a Criminal Justice System further complicates our relationship with law enforcement and the justice systems. Where do we draw the line in our “services” for community? How are we colluding with the surveillance tactics and intrusion into our communities as we continue to rely on State intervention resources? We need to critque our reliance on State interventions and education, as this State is the same one that targets us as well.
➢ Our advocates and healing practitioners must deal with conflicting direct service legalities, such as mandated reporting, that oftentimes limit their anti-violence and healing work with women. Reporting child abuse oftentimes creates distrust, separates the family from their first line of support, and invariably leads to limited safety for the child and mother when public systems find little to no “evidence” of violence. We “lose” the family.

USSF Crosscutting Themes
The Breaking the Silence Collective has stories that politicize gender-based violence across the intersection of oppressions as immigrant women, first and second generation. The theme most reflected in this collective’s work to call for alternate violence intervention models has been the continued intrusion of the state into our communities through direct racial targeting, surveillance, and the cooptation of the battered women’s movement by the state. This workshop will connect the long history of this country’s use of immigrant populations to further white supremacy under imperialism as well as the use of government-sponsored wars, such as the war on drugs and the war on terror to continue militarization across the globe and furthering the reach of the prison-industrial complex in communities of color.

Engaging Participants
We will use testimonials from community members affected by family violence as well as state violence as a launching pad to have interactive discussions and the use of Image Theatre tools from Augusto Boal to explore the intersection of intimate and state violence. The discussion will be framed by the following defined positions and strategies:
➢ Redefine safety that includes a communal and libratory response to violence against women and children.
➢ Practice intervention models that present women and children with choices that do not only revolve around leaving and breaking the silence.
➢ Constructively resist the way our family’s suffering is seen as “collateral damage” by State powers orchestrating a racist war against our community’s working class and poor.
➢ Hold accountable those privileged and collusive within the South Asian community who use the framework of the model minority to distance themselves from those targeted by the State while targeting women who speak out against State and community violence.
➢ Find ways to use our experiences to help us build across class and color lines, specifically with other communities of color that continue to face, en masse, incarceration, ICE raids, and continued criminalization here in Georgia.
➢ Develop creative and transformative educational tools that will continue to cut across language and cultural boundaries, break though the divisive and deadening racial targeting, and help us frame a reconnecting vision despite the paralysis and fear.

Language, interpretation, handouts: We will have Bengali and Gujarati interpreters. We’ll take care of any handouts.

Workshop Breakdown:
• Introduction & Position -- Intersections of Community & State Violence (BSP Team)
Presentations & Testimonials - Share Raksha’s Breaking the Silence challenges, framework, and opportunities – specifically the voices of mothers and daughters who have been directly affected by community violence and state violence.

• Map out History and Community Relationships with State
Include learning from RJC and the Legal Justice Fund to flesh out connections.
Place racial profiling within the long history of this country’s control over communities of color and their labor, skill, & resources. Potential tools - Image Theatre exercises that involve participants in a critical dialogue about violence in and against out communities.

• Next Steps – Building Local Strategies -- Share next steps to support families on the ground, challenge myth of the model minority, build a stronger base, and continue allying with Transformative Justice work