Settling Disputes under Resettlement
Ascertaining exact and concrete facts about the nature of domestic violence—among Nuer refugees and the wider American community—is frequently difficult. Whether the frequency and severity of domestic violence actually differs between Nuer in the United States and Nuer in Sudan is impossible to determine given the frequent reluctance of individuals to speak openly.
While refugees maintain that the problems are largely driven by the stresses of life in the United States, domestic violence is certainly prominent in contemporary Nuer life in Sudan (Hutchinson 1996). Conversely it is unclear to what extent women have used “dialing 911,” or the ability to flee to women's shelters, as threats against men in instances in which circumstances have not warranted it, particularly given the different perceptions of men and women.What does invite a greater degree of precision are the ways in which the nature of domestic violence and conflict resolution have been reshaped through the processes of social transformation concomitant with the refugee experience. First, regardless of whether domestic conflict and associated violence exceeds that found in Sudan, the conflict that arises is derived from very different sources, as gender roles and relationships are recast in the context of the resettlement process. Second, the extrication of the conjugal relationship from the wider kinship network has reshaped the meaning of marriage and its significance in the wider community. This has most significantly affected processes of domestic violence and conflict resolution by removing the medium through which issues are most readily resolved.
Finally, the role of the state in reshaping the nature of domestic violence and conflict resolution should be emphasized. This is the case both in rather straightforward ways, through both education and active involvement in domestic conflict, as well as in more subtle ways involving the interplay of Nuer and American social institutions.
I have shown, for instance, that while similar modes of argumentation continue to be used within the context of domestic conflict, the meanings become very different when these invoke the state, rather than the kinship network.The processes described in this paper are ongoing, and the means to address the issue of domestic violence is a point of continued interest within both the Nuer refugee community and agencies involved with resettlement. Men have, for instance, become more sensitive to the legal context of domestic violence in the United States, while both men and women have become more active in discouraging women from going to women's shelters, or staying there if they have gone, and rather encourage them to resolve the problem within the home. Given the early stage of resettlement which the Nuer are still in, it should be expected, further, that gender relations will continue to be transformed, as other normative patterns emerge and as women gain greater linguistic competence in English, allowing them a wider range of interactions with the local community. As such, it will be intriguing to see how these factors affect the continued development of new means of conflict resolution in the American context.
References
Erlich, Vera St. (1966). Family in Transition: A Study of300 Yugoslav Villages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1940). The Nuer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
-----. (1951). Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gelles, Richard, and Claire Cornell. (1983). International Perspectives on Family Violence. Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Co.
Holtzman, Jon D. (2000). Nuer Journeys, Nuer Lives: Sudanese Refugees in Minnesota. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
-----. (2001). Dialing 911 in Nuer: Gender transformations and domestic violence in a Midwestern Sudanese refugee community. In Immigration Research for the Next Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Nancy Foner, Ruben Rumbaut, and Stephen Gold. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Hutchinson, Sharon. (1996). Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with War, Money and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Levinson, David. (1989). Family Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications.
Morley, Rebecca. (1994). Wife beating and modernization: The case of Papua New Guinea. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 25.1: 25-52.
Savishinsky, Joel S. (1976). Stress and Mobility in an Arctic Community: The Hare Indians of Colville Lake, Northwest Territories. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.