Des problèmes linguistiques rendent difficile l'intégration des juifs éthiopiens


Haaretz Last update - 02:10 18/05/2006
Lack of Amharic speakers harms efforts to curb violence
By Amiram Barkat
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=717180

The shortage of Amharic-speaking social workers is preventing effective action to reduce domestic violence among new immigrants from Ethiopia.

Last Friday, five days after Immigrantion Absorption Minister Ze'ev Boim entered office, an immigrant from Ethiopia tried to murder his wife with a knife and then to commit suicide. The next day a student from Ethiopia was murdered in Afula, apparently by her partner.

Social welfare workers assigned to Ethiopian immigrants say the acute lack of experienced personnel, resources and public awareness are preventing treatment that could reduce the violence.

One of the main problems is the absence of Amharic-speaking social workers, especially men, who can communicate better with Ethiopian immigrants. Among the 30 social workers assigned to some 8,000 immigrants in absorption centers, there are only three men who speak Amharic.

The Absorption Ministry's program to prevent domestic violence allocates only three positions to Amharic-speaking social workers throughout the country. Due to budget restrictions the program, operated in 17 local authorities, does not include some of the Ethiopian immigrants' main trouble spots, such as Kiryat Malakhi. The police also report a shortage of Amharic-speaking officers.

MK Colette Avital, chair of the previous Knesset's Immigration and Absorption Committee, says that an annual NIS 10 million could bring about a turning point.

"It would be most effective to train 30 to 40 Amharic-speaking social workers. The number of social arbitrators in domestic disputes should also be increased. I'm sure it would not be hard to find Amharic-speakers among the thousands of university graduates from Ethiopia who are looking for work," she says.

Following the previous spate of violence a year and a half ago, an inter-ministerial forum was formed to deal with the problem.

Zipi Nahshon-Glick, a domestic violence inspector for the Social Affairs Ministry, says most violent incidents among Ethiopian immigrants "derive from a feeling of humiliation and inferiority in view of the women's faster integration into Israeli society."

She believes the solution lies in understanding the immigrants' different cultural background. This would increase the willingness of immigrants to take part in programs and deal with their violent urges, she says.



Haaretz Last update - 09:38 15/05/2006
25% of women murdered by their partners are Ethiopian
By Ruth Sinai
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=715793

A little over a month ago, a few days before Ilu Beja murdered his wife Adelu in Or Akiva and then committed suicide, Channel 2 broadcast the weekly Educational Television program "Through our eyes." The magazine, which is the only program in Amharic broadcast in Israel and is viewed by 87 percent of immigrants from Ethiopia, dared for the first time to bring up a topic that is considered taboo in this traditional society: domestic violence.

The report, which dealt with how to identify violence in the family, was the opening shot in a campaign by the Absorption Ministry, which has defined domestic violence in the Ethiopian community as a key focus of attention in 2006. The information campaign is slated to continue until the end of the year, alongside other programs, including workshops to prevent domestic violence under the guidance of social workers and others from the community.

On Friday morning, Mulat Kasia, 48, a new immigrant from Ethiopia, stabbed his wife Kasaiya, 35, and then tried to commit suicide. The murder attempt occurred in the couple's apartment at the Nurit Absorption Center in Be'er Sheva. The couple's eldest son saw what was happening and tried to stop his father. Afterward, the father tried to kill himself by stabbing himself in the abdomen.

On average, about one quarter of the cases of women murdered by their partners over the past decade were women from Ethiopia. In 2004, there was actually not a single such case, but in 2005, three of the 10 spousal murders involved immigrants from Ethiopia. In some of the cases, the man committed suicide following the murder.

Mira Kedar, director of the welfare department of the Jewish Agency's absorption program, says that apart from one woman, all the members of the Ethiopian community who committed suicide in recent years have been men. According to her, all of those who killed themselves were embroiled in serious quarrels with their wives.

"The violence in this community is the result of abysmal distress," says Dr. Lea Kacen of the social work department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, who has researched the problem of domestic violence in the Beita Yisrael (Ethiopian) community and recently submitted a report on the issue to the Welfare Ministry. "The men have come from a world in which using force against a woman whom they think is not behaving properly is part of the culture. There, they called this 'educating.' Here, the behavior that was considered so positive has become something negative."

"The entire social system in Ethiopia was run by and for men," she continues. "Here, everything is turned upside down. Here, it is a country of women and children. Men are in last place. Add to this the crowded conditions in which they live and the economic distress, and you get violence."

"It is necessary to understand that the man comes from a place where the whole world was his," agrees Taztar Garmai of the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews. "In certain terms, he was the king."

In an article published about half a year ago in the journal Eretz Acheret under the headline, "Men are from Ethiopia, women are from Israel," Kacen and another researcher, Malka Shabtai, described the social and cultural hierarchy that prevailed in Ethiopia. "A woman was forbidden to say 'no' to her husband ... Dialogue between a man and his wife was not customary, even when disputes arose. It was expected that a woman would greet her husband upon his return home by walking toward him, kissing his knee and washing his feet, as well as with a prepared meal, all while lowering her eyes submissively."

According to several researchers, women were considered inferior to men and the younger they were, the lower their status. Many were married off very young, at the age of 12 or even less, so that often, the age gap between them and their husbands was considerable. According to Brookdale Institute data, a large proportion of the children in the Ethiopian community have fathers aged 65 and more.

When the Ethiopian Jews came to Israel, a sharp change occurred in the ways of life to which they had been accustomed. The women learned the language, went out to work and were the link to the welfare and education systems. As a result, they started to demand equality in decisions concerning the family. Kacen and Shabtai relate that a study they did among immigrants from Ethiopia discovered that some of the women even started to refuse their husbands' demands for sexual relations against their will.

Women, the researchers sum up, were the spearhead of social and cultural change in the community - but also the victim. Everyone wanted to help them. The welfare and absorption systems, the Joint Distribution Committee, associations, organizations - all of them formulated empowerment programs for the women. A lot of money was invested in these programs, but often they acted as boomerangs.

"The moment there is a conflict between a husband and a wife, it must be dealt with very delicately, and not in a way that says to the woman, 'insist on your rights, learn to say no, contact the authorities,'" says Garmai. She believes that the treatment needs to be family-oriented. It is not enough to pay attention only to the woman; it is necessary also to pay attention to the man's distress.

Kacen agrees. "There is a lack of cultural sensitivity in most of the welfare agencies. We tend to forget that the men who have come from Ethiopia are not accustomed to taking orders from women, who run the welfare services and tell them what to do. They are in distress, and we are not offering them solutions. They are told that they must not beat their wives, but we don't give them other tools for resolving their conflicts with their wives."

Kedar believes that this is the reason for the suicides. "Men know that they must not beat their wives, and they direct the violence and the frustration inward," she says.
http://www.minorites.org/article.php?IDA=16288