Enhancing services for immigrant survivors

Immigrant victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and trafficking often face additional challenges and barriers when seeking assistance and safety. This document discusses the importance of continuously enhancing outreach and access to services in order to provide a pathway to safety and well-being for immigrant survivors and their children.

This document answers common questions about providing shelter and other program services to undocumented victims, describes the law and federal policy, and proposes best practices for programs.

The A-Z Advocacy Model captures a do-everything-it-takes approach by undertaking an inventory of practices and analyzing their underlying principles in API-serving programs. 

This brief tipsheet provides guidance on working with survivors from various cultures in a culturally relevant manner.

This handbook highlights the importance of culture and provides guidance to develop cultural competency at the individual and organizational levels.

This document suggests service providers to become familiar with the laws that affect immigrant women, to develop multi-lingual and multi-cultural staff and develop contacts with people from diverse cultures in their communities.

This applied research paper provides an overview of the methodological issues in research used to generate knowledge of the nature and dynamics of domestic violence in immigrant communities, the research findings that help us understand the broad contexts within which immigrant women experience domestic violence, and provides some considerations for culturally competent services.

This document presents information on the importance of collaborating with other agencies to improve culturally competent services to immigrant survivors, on how to collaborate with different agencies, and on how to address problems when working with collaboration.

This manual provides information to immigrant, migrant and refugees living in rural communities about their rights, legal options and public assistance available, and safety planning tips. The manual also includes strategies for improving services for migrant and immigrant survivors of domestic violence women in rural communities.

This pamphlet provides tips for community programs to expand services to immigrant women who are in abusive relationships.

This document suggests culturally competent approaches that advocates and attorneys could use to communicate with immigrant survivors and help them plan their safety.

The following document contains questions that can be used to assess a client for potential signs that she/he has been a victim of human trafficking.

This brochure provides information about VAWA, U visa, and T visa, including information about eligibility criteria and which forms to file for U or T nonimmigrant visa.

The Self-Assessment Guide is a tool kit for doing the "inside work" within programs to strengthen and expand services for immigrant survivors.

This manual addresses the dynamics of domestic violence in immigrant families; ways to create agency-wide cultural competency training programs; multicultural approaches to shelter protocol development; recruiting and hiring multicultural staff; foreign language needs and helpful interviewing techniques for client intake sessions and meetings; ways to do outreach and collaboration with immigrant communities; and, descriptions of model programs.

This Manual focuses on legal rights and options for immigrant survivors of domestic violence including intimate partner violence, child abuse, elder abuse and abuse perpetrated by other family members or persons that are covered by your state's protection order statute. Breaking Barriers is a comprehensive tool that provides information that will be useful to advocates, attorneys, justice, and social services professionals working with and assisting immigrant survivors of domestic and family violence.

This curriculum is designed to help domestic violence programs reach out to underserved communities in order to address the issues of diversity and of the limited access to quality services for battered women from those communities.

The article suggests that programs evaluate their effectiveness in addressing specific Latino community needs, recognize and address barriers to serving Latino communities, and learn about diversity within Latino communities. The article also suggests eliminating stereotypes, developing organization wide language competency, and ensuring that all staff have a duty to serve all members of the community.

Available in both English and Spanish.

This manual includes useful start-up tools such as a sample agenda, sample skits, a Power & Control Wheel, and a sample budget.

This project recruited and trained bicultural-bilingual advocates from area ethnic communities to provide assistance to victims and initiate outreach and awareness activities in their communities. Assistance to 6 provide

The Community Engagement Continuum documents a range of innovative community based approaches in the anti-violence movement and clarifies the goals of engagement. This model encourages a more strategic approach to all four levels and offers tools towards realistic step-by-step implementation.

This resource includes recommendations to improve services to battered Asian women, a one-pager on Prejudice/Privilege/Oppression and Domestic Violence and a National Directory for Queer Asian Resources.

Innovative strategies have been crafted out of necessity and by vision and intentionality. The ideas listed in this document have been compiled from the brilliant and hard work done by Asian and Pacific Islander advocates and organizations across the country.