In our series What It’s Like, we chat with people from different backgrounds about how their life has changed as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic. In this installment, we speak with Neha Gill, the executive director of Apna Ghar, a Chicago-based organization working to end gender-based violence, about how she and her colleagues are supporting domestic violence survivors during the current health crisis. Her answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.
SELF: Can you tell me a little bit about the work Apna Ghar does?
N.G.: Our mission is to try to end gender-based violence. That may seem like a lot to ask from one organization, but we really believe in it. Our focus for the last 30 years has been on serving immigrant and refugee survivors of violence, particularly from South Asia and other underserved communities. We have a shelter, train medical personnel at a hospital here in Chicago on how to ask about and address signs of violence, and have offices in three parts of the city where we connect the community with services.
We also have a 24-hour crisis line for emergency support (773-334-4663 or 800-717-0757), along with 12 apartments to house the families we serve. We provide rental assistance for many others. We offer counseling and legal advocacy, run economic empowerment programming, and do public awareness and advocacy work to make sure that people understand the root causes of gender-based violence and what they can do to affect larger change.
How does working in an immigrant community inform your work?
A lot of times, violence is attributed to culture. I want to be clear that it has nothing to do with culture. It cuts across all cultures. But one of the unique ways in which many South Asians experience violence is it can be multigenerational because whole families often live together. You might experience abuse from multiple people. It’s not just your partner; it could be your partner and their parents. You may have also experienced it from your own parents or father and brothers, and then also experience it again after marriage. That’s not unique to South Asia or other immigrant groups that we've worked with, but it does add another layer to the situation.
Another thing is the issue of actual immigration status. If you’re an immigrant who is married to somebody who has a visa or citizenship, then your abuser may tell you that if you call for help, you’ll get deported, or if you don’t know the language, they’re not going to understand you and they're not going to respond. Keeping people away from the legal system and legal recourse is very, very much part of the abuse and manipulation.
There’s also the fact that accurate, comprehensive information doesn’t always reach immigrant communities. When something like this health issue happens, there's misinformation, or there can be a tendency to ignore it. So we have also made sure that people understand what is happening and have provided information in different languages about the current health crisis to people who need it.
Have you seen the need for your services change over the course of the pandemic?
We're seeing an increase in the frequency and severity of abuse to partners, to children, and to elders, as well as an increase in sexual violence.
Right before the actual stay-at-home orders, we saw an increase in people calling about making arrangements to leave an abusive situation if they had already been thinking about leaving. They were calling to say they needed, with some urgency, to make those arrangements. Then once things were set in place with the stay-at-home orders, calls declined. When people are stuck in an abusive home, they don't have the privacy or the ability to make a phone call to get help. Instead, we saw an increase in people reaching out over text (773-899-1041), social media, or email (help@apnaghar.org).
We’ve also been seeing an increase in first-time callers, not because they're experiencing abuse for the first time, but because Illinois has streamlined some support efforts and has a statewide helpline. So if someone calls the statewide helpline but they live in our area, they can connect them to us. In some ways, the capacity of systems including the legal or the medical system is reduced because all of our focus is on COVID-19. But in others, the whole state, city, and area have come together to respond more efficiently.
How has your team at Apna Ghar adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic?
We're providing the services that we were already offering, but in a different way, and then adding on new services around addressing these health concerns and the anxiety that this new situation causes.
We’ve cleared out the shelter, which was at capacity, and moved some survivors to transitional housing apartments. We were also able to work with the city, the state, and our own resources to provide hotel and Airbnb options for other survivors. In the beginning, we funded this kind of lodging ourselves because we had to react so quickly, but now we’ve been able to utilize this great new partnership. We also reached out to our board members and donors to put together hotel suite options with things like kitchenettes so no services are interrupted.
We’ve also just been a lot more proactive in making sure the people that we serve know we're available, even for things that they may not have typically relied on us for before. For example, some of the people that we serve now need to focus on childcare and have lost employment because they're their child’s sole caretaker. So we’re making sure that they have groceries and household items. We’ve made deliveries of masks, hand sanitizer, and are trying to make sure everybody has internet access and all of that.
Staffers are still working 24/7 to answer calls on our crisis line. If someone needs a video teletherapy session, we can provide that as well. We’ve also stepped up our advocacy to make sure that policymakers, legislators, and people in various systems including health care are aware of the needs of the survivors that we serve and then are able to respond effectively.
Has your work gone completely remote?
Pretty much. The shelter is closed right now. We're getting ready to reopen at a reduced capacity soon, but we have to put a lot of safety protocols in place. The shelter has private bedrooms, but some spaces like our kitchen and some of the bathrooms are shared.
Our 30 staffers are working remotely, but none of the services are on pause. Even in the best of times, gender-based violence is a huge issue of pandemic proportions. With this public health crisis and the need to stay at home, it has just exacerbated all the things people were already experiencing.
What is the biggest challenge of taking your work virtual?
As people who are used to working closely with the people we serve, working from home is very, very challenging. It's so important for us and for the people that we serve to be literally close to them. The body language, the eye contact, all of those things are crucial to being able to express that we're here for you, and we are here for the long haul.
We also really pride ourselves on the fact that, normally, people can walk right into Apna Ghar and seek service. We realize that sometimes people just leave; there's not enough time to make a phone call and schedule an appointment. Or sometimes someone happens to be in the neighborhood, and someone had told them about Apna Ghar a while ago and they think, Let me just go see what they have to offer. We're not really able to provide that right now. Even though we're still available 24/7, people can't just walk in. They have to figure out, “Okay, what's their number, how do I get access to a phone, how do I text them?” That's challenging.
In addition to the risks of people not having the privacy to seek help, what else are you concerned about?
We're very concerned about domestic violence–related homicides. During the pandemic, there has been an increase in firearm sales, and firearms are often used to abuse someone in the home. The statistics of women being killed as a result of firearms when it comes to domestic violence are staggering.
Personally, what’s been hard for you with this new reality?
I always relied on my family and my friends to decompress from work. I’m married, so I’m with my husband at home right now, but my brother, his wife, and their little baby live not too far from us, and it's hard not to be able to see them. My dad is actually stuck in India right now due to the travel restrictions, so we’re trying to find ways to stay connected while we're still physically distant. Not being able to be together with them is tough. It's a surreal experience because virtually, it’s like you are connected, but you're not really.
And there's still so much to keep doing, to keep the staff motivated, to keep the organization going, to make sure that we're connecting with the people that we serve, but also making sure that we're informing the people who need to know about what's happening. That’s very important—that our communities don't get forgotten about and that their needs are top of mind for people who are making decisions.
What would you want someone to know if they’re in a situation where they're experiencing violence and might feel it's really hard to get out of that situation, especially during the pandemic?
For us, it’s very important to come at this from a strength-based perspective, which is to acknowledge the strength and sacrifice, the courage and resilience, it takes to survive these relationships, to navigate something as hard as this and deal with that trauma. It takes an additional kind of courage to then reach out and ask for help. So I think the message really is that they know their own situations best, and we’re here to make sure that they can achieve their goals and get to the next level that they want for themselves and their children.
For more information on Apna Ghar’s services, visit their website here.
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