Culture Destructiveness is the conscious denial of another's culture, and/or the belief that one's own belief system is superior to all others.

Culture Incapacity understands that there are differences among cultures but refuses or does not do anything to change.

Culture Blindness overlooks differences as though they do not exist.

Culture Pre-competence begins to realize that there is a world outside of oneself.

Culture Competence values others and their differences; diversity is recognized and accepted.

Culture Proficiency occurs when diversity works together.

COMPASSION AND SINCERITY

Most minorities have developed a sharp sense for detecting condescension, manipulation, and insincerity. There is no substitute for compassion as the foundation, and sincerity as its expression, for carrying out victim services equally and fairly. Although it is not possible to feel the same compassion for all victims, providers have the responsibility to provide the same compassionate service to every victim. Compassionate and sincere advocacy knows no borders.

The plight of undocumented residents or illegal aliens, for example, involves complex issues of personal prejudices and international politics. Sentiments among Americans regarding the clandestine migration of those who seek a better life here, mostly from Mexico and Central America, range from compassion for the safety and dignity of those fleeing poverty and war to border vigilante hunts and savage beatings. Once in the United States, undocumented aliens become easy prey for employment exploitation, consumer fraud, housing discrimination, and criminal victimization because assistance from government authorities is attached to the fear of deportation. There is an epidemic of sexual assaults, for example, committed upon undocumented Latinas. Their immigration status, however, does not mean that they should receive less protection under America's criminal laws or less right to victim services.

RESPECT

Respect includes withholding ethnocentric judgments about the cultural practices of others. A place of remembrance for a deceased person, for example, is often found in an Asian home.

After my father died, my mother placed his photograph on the hutch in the dining area of her home. She offers the best of the fruit she buys at the market and the first plate of anything she cooks is placed next to the photograph. It is her way of honoring the over 55 years of married life they shared. This custom may be strange to most Westerners, but it is a Japanese and Buddhist tradition to have an ancestral altar (Ogawa 1990).

Respect also means not minimizing the experience of others. In the inner city of Los Angeles, gang and drug-related homicides are common. When one particular slaying occurred, the newspaper headline routinely announced, "Just Another Day in South Central." The familiar scenario of young African-American males seeking reprisal for a cocaine buy gone awry was presented. The alarming difference in this case was that the victims were two mistakenly killed teenage girls. For their parents, loved ones, and friends, this was not just another day.

As one of the girl's mothers stated, gang violence and the fear it brought to her neighborhood were never acceptable. There was never a "tolerance of crime" merely because it was an everyday occurrence. The day her daughter died was not and can never be "ordinary." It is the deepest tragedy that will never leave her.

DELIVERY OF SERVICES

Translating standard materials. A frequent method of outreach to non-English speaking victims is to provide translated materials with portrayals of racially diverse people. When the translation explains how to seek a restraining order, to locate the courthouse and prosecutor's office, to apply for criminal injuries compensation, or to complete forms, such multilingual brochures and handbooks improve accessibility to the criminal justice system. Key words in English should also be included to enhance recognition and familiarity. However, several points are important to consider:

• When counseling about the effects of victimization or when self-help suggestions are being provided, these must be evaluated as to whether or not they actually give needed assistance or merely bestow readable materials upon those literate in a language.
  
  
• All crisis intervention and counseling modalities are based upon specific philosophies of suffering and healing. Approaches that are derived from conventional Western theories are most prevalent in victim services.
  
  
• Approaches and methods that incorporate the perceptions, beliefs, values, and experience of diverse cultures must also be made available to crime victims.

Agency organization and outreach. The manner in which victim service providers organize their agencies may unknowingly deny or hinder entry to various groups. The responsibility for delivery of services rests with the providers and not with (potential) recipients. It is simplistic to bemoan the scarcity of certain groups utilizing services by attributing this primarily to their lack of education or awareness. Minorities, in fact, often view prevailing services as unresponsive to their needs and uninformed of their preferred practices and beliefs.

Therefore, the methods for reaching culturally diverse victims must include traditional resources within the various communities as well as the inauguration of victim-specific ones. For example, the historical role of African-American churches, the reliance upon Mexican curanderas and Native American shamans, and the social constructs of Asian life must be understood and incorporated. Establishing some type of presence in ethnic neighborhoods, whether store-front offices, mobile crisis units, outreach to homes, or coordination with community-based organizations, is essential.

All victim service agencies need to look inward and examine their internal voice about diversity. In order for agencies to move from rhetoric to the implementation of sound policies and procedures, the following process can be particularly instructive:

• Spend time researching the composition of your community. What is its racial and ethnic composition?

• Look at your agency. Does it reflect, proportionately, the composition of the community? Examine the following components:
  • Board of Directors. Persons of diverse cultures and from different backgrounds should sit at the policy making table. The Board or group of advisors should reflect the composition of the community. Those persons should have a grasp of their community's problems and should be willing to actively help address these difficulties. Don't look for participants in the usual ways; be creative! Many times those who are "appointed" may not be the "anointed" community leaders.

  • Staff. Understanding that it may not be possible to mirror every aspect of the community, it is important that in the hiring practices ethnic/cultural applicants be given utmost consideration. Staff members must not be tokens to meet some guidelines or quotas; their professional competence, compassion, and all other important elements that makeup the qualifications for the position, must be taken into account. In addition, agencies should carefully note whether or not persons of ethnic and diverse cultures are a part of agency management. This can be a real statement of empowerment and commitment to inclusiveness.

  • Clients. Do the persons who use victim services, such as crime victims, family members, and significant others, represent the diverse population of the community? If so, how? For example, if clients in a rape crisis center avail themselves of medical treatment but are reluctant to participate in counseling, the agency should examine this pattern and the reasons for it, and proactively address it by making the necessary paradigm shifts.

Initial contact. The first contact minorities have with the criminal justice system will either confirm or dispel suspicion as to how they will be treated. Proper pronunciation of a person's surname is an excellent place to start. Surnames also have histories and meaning that allow conversation beyond introduction. In working with immigrant, refugee, or native populations, it is also helpful to learn a few words of greeting from that culture.

• Be careful, however, of your intonation and loudness. The Native Hawaiian word "aloha," for example, has been frequently corrupted. The root "ha" refers to the "breath of life," the giving (exhaling) and receiving (inhaling) of life itself. As a greeting, it means the imparting of life to others and the acknowledgment of accepting life from others. When the "ha" is crudely enunciated, it collapses the spiritual essence of this meaning.

• The willingness to go beyond what is comfortable and usual conveys your intent to communicate. A community service law enforcement officer approached a Laotian home to speak to community members gathered there. He saw a large number of shoes on the porch. He slipped off his own shoes and entered the home. Immediately, the Laotians saw the officer without footwear. They knew he would listen to them because he had already indicated, by this simple act, a willingness to respect their cultural customs and family home.

• Victim service providers who are observant and attentive will be able to notice proper forms of greeting and welcome. South Texans, for example, may prefer a very firm handshake. Native Americans usually prefer the placing of a hand upon the outstretched offer of a hand. For some Asians, a slight bow would be appropriate.

  The Asian home is a sanctuary wherein various rules and proprieties are followed. A victim service provider should be observant and alert to cues as to appropriate words and actions rather than be consumed by anxiety about committing mistakes.

Appraise your prejudices. Darnell Hawkins, a sociologist in the Black Studies Department at the University of Illinois-Chicago, observed that "Black victims of crime in general are not treated seriously, particularly if the offender is also black."

Attitudes toward African-American women especially are rooted in the long period of legalized slavery in America and proliferated by current prejudices. African-American women were the sexual property of white slave masters. Since they had no rights to resist or protest, there was no definition of rape to protect them and thus no legal recourse.

Today, many African-American women assume they will be treated unfairly by police and prosecutors when they do report rape. Any rape case where there is little corroborating evidence, such as eyewitnesses or physical injuries to substantiate the charges against a defendant, presents obstacles. When a female rape victim is African-American, there appears to be greater reluctance by legal authorities to proceed beyond preliminary investigation.

• Lafree studied thirty-eight jury trials of sexual assault cases in Indiana, and found that jurors were less likely to believe in a defendant's guilt when the victim was African-American (1989, 290). Interviews with jurors suggested that stereotypes regarding the sexual behavior of African-American women influenced some jurors (McKean 1994).

When racism invades criminal proceedings, it subverts the concept of justice being blind.

• In a California prosecutor's office, for example, an assistant district attorney was heard to make this comment about a young white woman who had been beaten by her African-American husband: "She deserved it because she married a "n-----." In the mind of this prosecutor, any white woman who is in an intimate relationship with a African-American male (and perhaps any minority male) has somehow abrogated her rights to ordinary sympathy and legal protection. His attitude universally degrades women and marks any African-American male as a dangerous partner.

Responding to hate crimes. Recently, our country has been replete with stories of horrific displays of violence based on hate crime:

• In June 1998 in Jasper, Texas, James Byrd, Jr. was decapitated when after being severely beaten, he was chained to the back of a truck by three white men and his body dragged for several miles.

• In October 1998, Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten in Wyoming by two men with a history of harassing gay men. He later died of his massive injuries.

• In Fayetteville, North Carolina, in December 1995, Jackie Burden and Michael James were shot to death by three Army soldiers who decided to kill them because they were African-American.

Resistance to current, rapid ethnographic changes due to large-scale immigration has joined with long-standing racial bigotry to produce a climate of racial tension. Whether or not this constitutes an adjustment period to form a more pluralistic society or the brewing of polarization is unknown. With the incidents of ethnoviolence spreading, the signs are not encouraging.

In 1995, there were 7,947 incidents of hate crimes reported to the FBI. Sixty-one percent were motivated by racial basis and 10 percent by ethnicity/national origin bias. There were 10,469 victims, including twenty murder victims (FBI 1997). KLANWATCH, however, estimates the number of hate crimes to be five times the FBI's numbers (APA 1995, 1).

The following are key questions to consider in responding to hate or bias crimes:

• How seriously do we regard bias crimes and respond to hate violence?
  
  
• Do we understand how being targeted because of race and ethnicity affects these victims?

Developing a Cross-Cultural Style

AVOID MISUSE AND DISTORTION OF CULTURAL VALUES

On April 14, 1989, Ramon Salcido, a Mexican vineyard worker in California, murdered his daughters, his wife, his mother-in-law, his sister-in-law, and an employer. Alcohol and jealousy fueled Salcido's "journey of destruction," which resulted in the worst mass homicide in the history of Sonoma County. The media accounts portrayed Salcido as a "hot-blooded Latin who gloried in machismo." This implied that his gruesome acts were somehow culturally-based in the characteristic way Latino men treat their wives.

• Some Latino abusers claim a "cultural birthright" to (brutally) dominate their spouses, but their argument is not legally acceptable nor true to the proper meaning of machismo.

• Insensitive representations by the American media and negative stereotypes of the Mexican culture in general have contributed to a distortion of traditional male/female roles governed by machismo.

• The term "macho" often is assigned to the male who is over-aggressive, controlling, temperamental, and boastful.

• The essence of machismo, notwithstanding, is, in the words of Rodriquez and Casaus, "a man who meets his family responsibilities by providing food, shelter, and protection for his wife, children and, in some cases, other relatives living with the family."

• Mexican family life is based upon mutual respect and interdependence. Husbands are reminded not to disrupt the well-being of the family by selfish and outrageous acts.

Mexican culture, in other words, is not pathological as has been assumed by those who have regarded machismo as promoting wife-battering. Indeed, it is the balance of relationships in Latino families which provides the safeguards preventing domestic strife. Ramon Salcido is an aberration of his cultural heritage, as is any criminal is of any culture. His savage act was a failure to achieve machismo, not a fated demonstration of it.

• The lesson for victim service providers is that misinterpreting and exaggerating elements of a culture may be extremely detrimental to understanding the dynamics of victimization experienced by a person of that culture.

• Condemning or disparaging cultural patterns stemming from false and stereotypical generalizations also denies victims the ability and right to draw natural strength from their cultures.

Renee Candalaria-Brent, a Puerto Rican woman and the Community Educator for Rape Crisis Volunteers of Cumberland County in Fayetteville, North Carolina, says: "I'm not sure if victim service providers know or understand that one problem that Hispanic victims face is the fact that not all have the same status in the United States. Puerto Ricans are one of the few Hispanic groups who are automatically U.S. citizens, regardless if they are born in Puerto Rico or the U.S. They have the same rights and privileges as U.S. citizens."

She goes on to point out that individuals who are born in other Latin American countries or on Caribbean Islands such as the Dominican Republic are not U.S. citizens and have to apply for citizenship. This lack of citizenship may keep individuals from coming forward when they are victims of crime because they fear deportation.

It is also a challenge for agencies to provide services for victims who are sponsored in this country by their abusers.

Case example of the crucial importance of mental health terms. A therapist told "Kim" that she needed to "heal the child within her." Kim, a Southeast Asian refugee, listened in astonishment and became very nervous and agitated. She wondered how this Caucasian woman could know that she was pregnant when Kim herself was unaware of this. More so, she did not want another child by her abusive husband. Noticing the look of anguish in her client's face, the therapist hurriedly explained that the term "child within" was not to be taken literally. It was merely an expression from a popular Western therapy that meant the "spirit" of a child within someone. Hearing this explanation, Kim fled the room.

Upon returning to the shelter where she was staying, Kim tearfully announced to a staff member that the spirit of the child she had lost through miscarriage several months earlier was distressed and trapped inside of her! It was many hours before Kim could be assured that her fears were needless.

• Evaluate mental health concepts. For Southeast Asians, the notion of mental health or psychological well-being is novel. Individual insight to benefit the "self" is incomprehensible to cultures that assign identity and worth to harmonious relationships.

  A critical need for Kim and other battered Asian immigrant or refugee women is therefore to regain a sense of belonging. Without her traditional family ties through her husband, Kim became an oddity in the Southeast Asian community. Her isolation needed to be ameliorated by a strong base of support provided by other women in the shelter.

  Rather than individual therapy, Kim needed to learn how to maintain and broaden her linkages to others, including gaining sufficient proficiency in English to secure employment and networking with other single parents. Western views of normality should also be carefully applied.