NAWHO interviewed Dr. Yoshioka to talk to her about her work in domestic violence wtihin Asian communities and her insights to working together as a community. Dr. Yoshioka has published several articles in these areas, and was the lead author of the often-cited report, Asian Family Violence: A Study of the Chinese, Cambodian, Korean, South Asian, and Vietnamese Communities in Massachusetts from the Asian Task Force on Domestic Violence. As Assistant Dean at Columbia, Dr. Yoshioka heads the Office of Professional Excellence in addition to providing administrative leadership on academic affairs within the School of Social Work.

Would you please share with us some of your personal history?

I am a third generation Japanese Canadian and grew up in Toronto. At that time, there were maybe only a million people in Toronto, so it was common for everyone in my parents’ generation to know each other in the small Japanese community. 

 My parents are originally from Vancouver, which has a larger Japanese Canadian community, and they were very active when I was growing up. But they never talked about it as “serving,” they just did it. My father is 84 and was a physician - an anesthesiologist - and he would help out in medical camps in different countries. He and my mother also volunteered with a mobile unit for 1-2 weeks a year. 

When I was a teenager, about 16 or 17, I started to get involved in these types of programs, which were run through the hospital where my father worked. I volunteered at the eye clinic, which was in a very rustic environment. They were more commonly called “medical camps,” and we slept in barracks, and I was there by myself with other teen volunteers. My job was to work the machine that would take old donated glasses and change the prescription for the people who came. 

It was a very rural community with a lot of poverty. I remember it being so noisy. As far as you could see, there was a line of people waiting to get in. People would line up for two days before it opened. It was noisy because people where laughing, singing, talking, and cooking in line. It was an incredible experience.

I went to the University of Toronto, and after I graduated, I worked on a teen pregnancy project as an interviewer. I was 21 years old, and found myself struck by the fine line between my life and the lives of the women in the project. Some of them had become pregnant through consensual sex, some through rape, and some through incest. I could see how these women were not much different from me, and how this event completely changed their lives. It was not always negative, but it was always difficult, because most of them were isolated. 

I got married when I was very young. My husband was American, but raised in Canada. We moved to the United States when he was accepted to the University of Michigan for his doctorate. I worked in a publishing house while I waited for my green card, and decided to get my masters in social work.

I took a job in an addiction program run by the university, where I worked a lot with the spouses of the drinkers. For five to six years I did this, and saw that intertwined in their stories was abuse, and it was something that we had to deal with constantly.

We then went to Florida State, where my husband was hired as a professor. I went to school as a doctoral student and got an externship at a family clinic. I worked in South Florida on the clinic’s HIV prevention program. I had to recruit women who had few resources as participants in the program. These women dealt with poverty, health, and violence everyday. I worked for two years with these groups.

How did you get involved with domestic violence in Asian communities?

When I graduated from Florida State, we both got jobs at Columbia University, where I became an assistant professor in social work. As I was getting on my feet professionally, I went to an Asian Festival where I first met the New York Asian Women’s Center. 

I was very familiar with mainstream and local community agencies that worked on violence, but less familiar with Asian-specific violence agencies. I was really curious, so I got to know them. The Center was very small then, and of course there was hesitation about research because they were very protective of the women. So I became more of a “friendly observer,” and later began to talk about research and how it could help their work.

I got more involved in domestic violence with other Asian agencies. I was getting a huge amount of data, and began to look at cultural differences among women and how it affected the way they disclose. It was at this time that I also got involved with the Boston group, the Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence.

With pan-Asian focused agencies, I had huge admiration for how much they could accomplish with so little. They were often the only resource available for Asian immigrant women. It was not just about language translation, but the cultural translation of the services. They could only do all this through sheer dedication.

In working with these agencies and a big shelter in the Bronx where I also had a couple of projects, I found that the women themselves are hugely inspiring. There is such generosity of spirit with the women. When you talk to them, there was always one person who was pivotal, who helped them to see what is beyond the violence. Of course, some are very angry, and this is what social workers find so challenging. You have to understand that they want safety, but they are not asking you to take control. They don’t want you to dictate their life. The goal of the system is different from the women’s goal. They want safety and not to be hit; we want them to leave.

It takes so much courage for the women to keep moving forward, to do what they want for the children. To actually leave, there is real danger in that. We often don’t appreciate what a woman has to sacrifice, and there is significant loss. There may be moments that she treasures from her relationship, and it is difficult to lose that. When women go back, it’s so difficult for the social worker, but that is that woman’s journey, and we can’t infantilize her. The best social workers provide the safe space and support for a woman to make her own journey. 

Could you describe a "typical" day at work? 

As the Assistant Dean, I am in charge of Academic Affairs and everything that has to do with the Masters program. I look at the content of courses and ensure the profession is responsive to the field. I work a lot with students, especially because there is now an unprecedented push for individualized curricula. 

I also work with the faculty on their teaching load, and work with doctoral students as well as the continuing education program for international students. I also recruit members of the community to teach in the schools. I support and advise the five offices under mine, and of course, I also deal with any problems. 

So a typical day is lots and lots of meetings. I usually act as the facilitator, bringing people to the table, creating the work agenda, primarily on how to deepen the content and diversity in our curriculum. This means we are constantly critiquing and reviewing.

My vision for the program is to have a big, bustling, vibrant program with lots of activity. It would have the top presenters so that students and faculty are exposed to new ideas and ways of doing things. The curriculum should always be fresh, with lots of room for innovation. We need to deliver the best with the resources we have. This means linking people and ideas together, because you can’t just stay in your office and expect to be innovative.

I do much less research because of these responsibilities. Basically I do work with the New York Asian Women’s Center when they still need it, and currently we are working on a child welfare training. We are also trying to work on a peer intervention program to train older women to do peer support, but it’s hard. They don’t see themselves as being in the position to give advice.  So we are trying to work with that culturally.

What is the best part about working in the domestic violence field?

I would say my colleagues, and just being so impressed with the agencies. I’ve never been in an agency where I wasn’t completely overwhelmed by the dedication and passion of the workers. Even in despair, there is a well of hopefulness. These are very smart people, and they know that everybody plays a role and can make a contribution. They help a woman by seeing her as a person. They understand women are engaged in a struggle where it is so hard to ask for help and they are so mad that they needed to ask for help. They understand that even if a woman goes back, that woman had an experience, one where her self-worth was affected, and where she saw the possibilities of a life beyond violence.

What is your vision for the Asian American community?

I would like to see Asian Americans become more politically active nationally. I think there is power in numbers, and Asians collectively could be better mobilized. If there is anti-Asian marketing, or negative events, we should be able to respond better. 

What do you love about New York?

I love New York. Sometimes I want to move, but my husband says I wouldn’t function outside the city. New York is so amazing. Everything is here, every group is here. There is such tolerance for difference – not necessarily borne of a higher moral stand – it just is, because we are surrounded by difference all the time. When you say “we”, it’s unclear what you mean. Do you mean lifestyle, preferences, belief systems?

When my kids were little, we went to the mermaid parade on Coney Island. If you have kids in New York, you know you have to go to an event early and leave early. So we were there and people were walking around in mermaid costumes, and it’s not what you are thinking, like Ariel from Little Mermaid. 

So when we were going to leave, my 7 year-old son asked why we had to go so early. I told him it’s because of the parade, and he said, “What parade?”  I guess he hadn’t heard me talking about it in the car, so I said, ‘the mermaid parade, didn’t you notice all the people walking around in costumes?” He shrugged and replied, “Well…yeah. But I thought they just wanted to do that.” To me, that is so New York.

I’m so glad that my kids grew up here. The tolerance, the range of diversity, it was the biggest gift the city gave them, teaching them to benefit from difference.

What advice would you like to give young Asian Americans?

I would say to work together. Be a mentor, and have a mentor. It’s about letting yourself be helped and help others. 

Also, the demographics of the city are changing, but no one really knows what that means yet. It’s confused the whole idea of what it means to be in a majority or to be in a minority. This means a lot for social services and what they should look like. For example, we are seeing more first generation Asian families in family court. The judges know now that legal recourses are not the answer; in fact, it’s very clear to them that standard legal solutions will not work. The families just say, “take our son – he’s bad, he brings us shame,” and they are not familiar with going to family therapy. We have to figure out a way to improve the system to meet these changing needs, and we need our Asian American students to help make that possible. 

For more information about Columbia’s School of Social Work, please visit their website at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ssw. To learn more about violence prevention, including sexual violence and intimate partner violence, please visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s site at http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/index.html

Organizations for Asian Women

The New York Asian Women’s Center:  www.nyawc.org

Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence (Boston): www.atask.org

Asian Women’s Shelter (San Francisco): www.sfaws.org

Center for the Pacific Asian Family (Los Angeles): www.cpaf.info