Leslye Orloff, Director of Legal Momentum's Immigrant Women Program, highlights the potentially devastating impact of Arizona SB 1070 on immigrant victims of domestic violence in On a Border Near Arizona: How Police Can Protect Immigrant Women, from Truthout.org.
From the article:
According to Leslye Orloff, the vice president and director of the Immigrant Women Program at Legal Momentum, immigrant women are more likely than U.S. born women to experience domestic violence and, when they do, it is likely to be more severe.
Immigrant women “tend to have fewer resources, stay longer in the relationship, and sustain more severe physical and emotional consequences as a result of the abuse and the duration of the abuse than other battered women in the United States,” according to a 2006 paper by Orloff and her colleagues at Legal Momentum. “In particular, research studies have found that abusers of immigrant domestic violence victims actively use their power to control their wife’s and children’s immigration status.”
Orloff calls the new law in Arizona “chilling” for victims of domestic violence living in the country without permission. “A proportion may have had the courage to call the police before, but that will disappear,” she said. “This is essentially a field day for crime perpetrators.” The impact of Arizona’s new law, then, is to push back into the shadows victims whom Orloff and her colleagues have been trying to bring forward for decades.
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