Author’s note and content warning: The following is an abbreviated version of my 4/16/24 acceptance speech on being honored with the NYS Bar Association Haywood Burns Award. It contains information that may be difficult for some people to read. Please know that my experience is not shared by all Indian women. At the same time, please know that my experience is shared by others from different countries, races, religions, cultures, gender identities, sexual orientations, and abilities.
Although a few close friends know of my history, the award ceremony was the first time I publicly shared why I got into the field of domestic violence and sexual abuse. Afterwards my colleague and friend, Tim Baran, stated that in my speech I told my origin story. He was right. This is my origin story: Why I am who I am. I would be remiss if I failed to mention that I would not be who I am without the steadfast love and support of my parents, Sarasa & Dr. K.L. Parthasarathy.
I’d love to hear the origin story of other crime victim advocates. Write me: RParthasarathy@empirejustice.org
I was born in India and came to the United States when I was 18-months old. The summer before middle school, when I was 10, my parents sent me back to India to live with my paternal grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins in our family home. My parents did this because as first-generation immigrants they had been told that kids in the United States started dating in middle school, and unbeknownst to me, I was to eventually have an arranged marriage so they didn’t want me exposed to the whole dating scene.
My home in India was one of privilege. But I was surrounded by poverty the likes of which I had never known. However, in some ways, I was somehow prepared for the poverty. What I hadn’t been prepared for was the treatment of women and girls.
Irony is too light of a word, but it is ironic to me that I was sent away to prevent the possibility of my consensually engaging in romantic or sexual interactions but then I was placed in an environment where women and girls were sexually harassed, abused, molested, or assaulted and that was commonplace.
Additionally, at the time I was in India, bride burning and dowry deaths were beginning to be a trend. Dowry, which was illegalized in 1961, is a custom where as part of an arranged marriage the bride’s family gives money, jewelry or goods to the groom’s family. But if that amount is insufficient or if the promises of subsequent payments are delayed or don’t come, the bride, who lives with her in-laws, bears the brunt of this. Brides may be emotionally or psychologically tormented or bullied, physically beaten, or on occasion, killed. Although this was not happening in my extended community or in my family, I knew this was happening around me. With all that going on, you can imagine at 16, when given the opportunity to escape India and come back to live in the US, I grabbed it. And you may also be able to imagine my shock, my horror, my dismay when coming back here I realized that things weren’t all that great for women and girls in the United States either.
It was in the early 1980s. Sexism was overt. Sexual harassment was commonplace. Domestic violence wasn’t a crime, it was a shame, and it was the punchline of many jokes. Jokes of dating violence and spousal abuse could be heard regularly on TV, in movies, on the radio, at parties, in neighborhoods, in schoolyards. Marital rape was at that time still legal in New York State as it was in many other states across the country. But it wasn’t only something that happened “out there.” One of the first friends I made in high school here in the US, a white girl born and raised in Buffalo NY, disclosed to me that her father raped her regularly and that her older brother had begun imitating their father, so her home was no longer a safe place for her to be.
I share all this with you to say: How could I not do this work? I had no choice but to do this work: To help make people safer in their own homes.
Even now decades later, there are millions of people who are not safe in their own homes because they are afraid of the very people who purport to love them. They can be your neighbors, your friends, someone you know. Yet family violence and domestic violence still get overlooked and ignored.
This work is not glamorous. It does not attract fame or fortune or glory. It is not necessarily the kind of work that gets much attention, admiration, or respect. Although domestic violence violates a person’s right to safety, autonomy and life, most people don’t consider it a human rights violation. But in my heart, in the center of my being, I know that this is one of the most important, worthwhile things that we can do in our profession. So though I don’t feel personally important or worthy of this award, by presenting me with this honor, the NYS Bar Association, is recognizing the value of this work, and for that I am tremendously grateful.
Before I leave, I’d like to invoke the names of some of the women I’ve had the honor of calling mentors & role models – all of whom are great leaders in the field:
• Katey Joyce, one of the first Executive Directors of one of the first Domestic Violence shelters in NYS.
• Prof. Suzanne Tomkins, who co-founded the Domestic Violence Clinic at SUNY Buffalo Law School 32 years ago.
• Prof. Isabel Marcus, who taught the seminar “Terrorism in the Home” in the early ‘90s, and whose international work has made an undeniable impact.
• Amy Schwartz-Wallace, whose work at the intersection of Domestic Violence and LGBTQ+ rights is at the forefront.
These women, and so many other people who identify as being part of the Domestic Violence Movement, do this work with the same passion, commitment, and sense of purpose that I hope that I bring to this profession.
I share this award with them, and with my daughter and the next generation who know that Safe Homes, make Safe Communities, which can – I hope – lead to A Safe World. Thank you.