2015 Association for Women in Psychology Conference

There are intersections of identities that may appear to be a contradiction. Occasionally these intersections lead to cognitive dissonance whereby accepting one identity indicates the denial of another. This structured discussion will focus on two specific identities, identifying as a feminist and identifying with a culture that is patriarchal. Patriarchal cultures typically have values that are viewed as oppressive to women. Take for example the Hmong culture where daughters are traditionally raised under the notion that they will one day marry and no longer belong with their birth family. Upon marriage, Hmong daughters will be a part of their husband’s family instead. This belief traditionally privileges Hmong sons and men over Hmong daughter or women. Another example is when Hmong women get out of abusive marriages and experience shaming and rejection from their own community. Some Hmong women believe their culture or even their birth parents have betrayed them. Feeling rejected by other Hmong people, divorced Hmong women often feel as though they cannot go back to their cultural community. The current structured discussion will provide some cultural contexts to the examples provided above. The goal of the discussion is to compile ideas for women who feel like they have been wronged by their culture so they may have restorative justice. This discussion gives women in psychology a chance to voice stories, opinions, and ideas on how to be a feminist within a patriarchal culture.

Many of us have been trained as change agents in psychology. Women of Color of diverse Asian ethnicities raised at the intersections of gender and ethnic socialization have challenged dominant discourses of the quiet, subservient Asian female worker bee (Okubo, 2013). This panel of women of Japanese, Korean and Filipina descent, trained as counseling psychologists early and mid-career academics but working in non-counseling graduate programs as faculty members and in senior administration will facilitate a discussion on issues related to race, gender, power and privilege and strategies to leverage privileges we have to disrupt oppressive practices in the academia. Counseling Psychologists have unique training that allow us to be aware of power, privilege, and oppression at individual, cultural, institutional, and societal levels, and we are equipped to facilitating dialogues and concerted effort to instigating positive, meaningful changes. By critically examining our positionalities and missed opportunities from the past, we would like to engage with the discussion attendees to generate action plans as social change agents. We would like to facilitate the structured discussion using the following questions: How can we leverage our positionalities to be more effective allies considering our interactionality of privileged and marginalized identities? What have been the missed opportunities? How are we unwittingly serving as what Kivel calls the buffer class between the 1% and the lowest earning 80%? By identifying such instances and learning from them, we aim to facilitate discussion of how we can instigate meaningful changes as social change agents.

Restorative justice approaches to sexual assault and intimate partner violence move us away from a primarily punitive criminal justice model toward a more holistic focus on survivors, the community, and society. This structured discussion seeks to engage participants in conversations about the many ways that a restorative justice model could be applied to sexual assault and intimate partner violence in the US and abroad. Four guiding questions will be used to promote discussion: 1) What does restorative justice mean in the context of sexual assault and intimate partner violence?; 2) How do restorative justice approaches align with survivor-centric, trauma-informed models of intervention?; 3) What are the implications of a restorative justice approach for prevention efforts?; and 4) How can we ensure that prevention and intervention efforts are culturally informed and appropriate? Three speakers will lead the discussion by sharing lessons learned from their own work in the field. The first speaker will describe culturally responsive approaches to therapy and intervention for survivors of sexual assault and sex trafficking. The second speaker will consider the benefits of a public health perspective for framing prevention and intervention efforts for sexual assault and intimate partner violence. The third speaker will offer insights into community-based intervention, prevention, and research models to address sexual assault and intimate partner violence. Throughout the discussion, participants will be encouraged to address the root causes of violence; consider survivor-centric, trauma-informed, and culturally appropriate models of prevention and intervention; and discuss the myriad ways that we, as feminists, can be involved in restoring justice for those affected by sexual assault and intimate partner violence both at home and abroad.