Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2000 Liminal Lives: South Asian Youth and Domestic Violence Bandana Purkayastha1 This article examines domestic violence experiences among South Asian youth in the United States. The paper uses a broad definition of violence, a continuum which includes aggression, coercion, control, intimidation, assault, to accommodate the meanings suggested by the youth. The main argument of this paper is that the youth's experiences cannot be adequately explained with reference to individual deviance or traditional cultural norms of ethnic groups. Based on a sociologi- cal perspective of gender, this paper argues that these youth are placed between mainstream and ethnic gender regimes and their experience of domestic violence depends on how these regimes work in relation to each other. Thus their liminal social structural position emerges as a significant factor in their experiences of violence. KEY WORDS: South Asian youth; violence; gender. INTRODUCTION Compared to women and children, youth are an invisible group in the liter- ature on domestic violence. Most of the research on youth and violence focuses on public arenas and brutalities associated with gangs, guns, hate crimes, or sub- stance abuse (e.g., Watts, 1998). Indeed, if youth are mentioned in the domestic violence literature at all, their experiences are treated as a subcategory of child abuse (e.g., Barnett, Miller-Perrin, & Perrin, 1997). Yet, unlike younger children, youth are both victims and perpetrators of violence. Youth are expected to live un- der some degree of parental control, but they are also expected to start separating from their families and establish independent identities of their own (Skolnick, 1 Correspondence should be directed to Bandana Purkayastha, Assistant Professor, Sociology/Asian American Studies, U-68, Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-2068. 201 1053-0789/00/0700-0201$18.00/0? 2000 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
202 Purkayastha 1991). This contradictory social position presents an interesting set of dynamics for understanding their experiences of domestic violence. This paper focuses on the domestic violence experiences of the children of post-1965 immigrants from countries such as Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. The domestic violence experience of these South Asian youth is described in terms of their social structural position in the United States. They are in a liminal position- as children of nonwhite immigrants, they are not fully assimilated as "Americans" nor are they wholly "South Asian." In common with other youth in the United States, they are not considered to be adults nor are they children. Their experiences of violence-aggression, control, coercion, intimidation, or assault-cannot be explained solely with reference to South Asian cultures, nor dismissed as acts perpetuated by deviant individuals. Instead, their experiences can be understood as the effects of race/gender hierarchies in U.S. society, which construct relations of domination and subordination between males and females of different races, ages, classes, and sexual preference relative to the hegemonic white, middle class, heterosexual male group (Connell, 1994). South Asian youth are placed between two-ethnic and mainstream-scripts for "doing gender" (West & Fenstermaker, 1995) and whether they feel victimized depends on how