The Shakti Women’s Refuge Trust held their 2024 Cultural proficiency Summit yesterday at Dunedin’s Edgar Centre, aimed at improving cultural understanding to better support women from Africa, Middle Eastern and Asian backgrounds suffering from domestic abuse.
Shakti Women’s Refuge Trust founder Farida Sultana said demand for the summit was so high they had to shut registrations early.
Ms Sultana said people had begun to take notice that even for those with the best of intentions, if you did not understand a person’s background, attempts to help could do more harm than good.
Topics the workshop focused on were the impact a person’s culture and background had on them accessing justice and immigration rights, religion and culture being no excuse for abuse, employment and education and navigating cultural proficiency.
Ms Sultana said members of migrant and refugee communities could easily become lost within the system.
"They are used to different justice system back in their home countries and without knowing how to properly navigate the New Zealand system, they get lost within it.
"Focusing on how culture and religion can intersect with family violence is also an ongoing thing because a lot of those practices have become sanctioned within ethnic communities."
More than 110 people from all over the South Island and from a range of industries attended the summit, Ms Sultana said.
"Over 20 NGOs are here — we weren’t even aware there were that many in Otago — government agencies such as the Ministry of Justice and MSD [the Ministry of Social Development] were also here."
