a cultural challenge to psychologists

I was recently reading a post about domestic violence in Syria and the article it links caught my eye. The article states,

"Muna Al Assad, a lawyer volunteering at Good Shepherd, says its counseling--for both Muslim and Christian women--often focuses on reconciliation because divorce has such negative consequences in Syrian society. Few battered women, she said, choose to take their cases to court.

"Even if the woman considered going to the legal system, where she might get partial fairness, people around her will resent her if she is strong enough to do it," Al Assad says. "They will outcast her because normally the person who committed the violence is her husband, father or brother."

Al Assad has worked on 13 domestic violence cases in 17 months. Of these, only one resulted in divorce. In that case the victim's family supported her."

Women's shelters in the States often focus on empowering the victim to leave the abuser but in this case it seems that the situation would render that approach ineffective. On the other hand, I could not imagine anyone who handles these cases ever recommending that the victim returns to the abuser to try to reconcile with them. Although I'm sure there are plenty of psychologists here in the States who would love for nothing more to go to Syria and impose American methods for dealing with domestic violence, I'm sure that that would cause more harm than good in the end as it sometimes does in situations when help is forced on people whether they ask for it or not.

So are there any alternative ways to deal with this? Or is this another situation where only two mutually-exclusive choices exist (i.e. American methods or Syrian methods)? I've thought about it a lot but I'm just not sure. What do you think?

Home and out to Dry

So I've been home for 11 days running around throwing my resumes at various universities while hanging around the house. Unfortunately the prospects of finding something to do in cross-cultural psychology over the next six months seems to get slimmer every time I log online. I've gotten to the point of writing random professors in the field of cross-cultural psychology asking for what to do next. My senior psychology capstone was focused more with the feel good talk on values instead of giving us direction and goals. Really though its not so bad aside from the fact that I'm not really doing anything with the Middle East or psychology.

I've been starting to catch some flak from some friends of mine about the whole job thing because they face greater obstacles than I do when finding one. When I was in Lebanon, many people were really preoccupied with the idea of moving to the U.S. and making money. The idea became this grand fantasy and was put on a pedestal. Then enter me, this twenty-something American kid who is really close to a B.A. in psychology who choices to come to Lebanon when I could easily stay in American and have a decent job. Needless to say it blew a lot of people's minds. Even my good friends were at first trying everything in their power to persuade me to go back to the States and finish my studies there before coming back many years down the road. Although the more they got to know me, the more they supported my desire to stay in Lebanon. However, what I was doing was destroying a lot of people's fantasies. After all, if America has everything, then why is someone like me trying to go to great lengths to stay in Lebanon?

Of course fantasy isn't reality. Sooner or later everyone will have to face up to the fact that their fantasy isn't what they made it out to be during the long time they spent pursuing it. Though many of my friends thought they would just want to live in American, some of them would probably get sick of the differences and miss their friends and family back home. Even in America you still have to pay for stuff, you have to deal with rude people, you still get rejected by the opposite sex sometimes, you still have to deal with violent crime, there are still generally bad days, stupid people, and the list goes on. The real problem is that over time problems become externalized and projected onto these fantasies while the root of the problem is not dealt with. Fortunately, most people realize this sooner or later.