Wounded Healers International | Community Health
Fear and silence are not character flaws. In immigrant and refugee communities, they are survival strategies — learned responses to real danger, accumulated over years of navigating systems that were not designed with safety in mind.
At Wounded Healers International, we work with immigrant and refugee women and youth in Maine. What we see, consistently, is that the barriers to healing are not just internal. They are structural, cultural, historical, and increasingly, political.
For many immigrants and refugees, silence is not a choice freely made — it is a protection. Speaking about trauma, mental health, or family difficulty can carry serious consequences: fear of immigration enforcement, fear of being seen as unstable or unfit, fear of losing employment, fear of community judgment, or fear of being separated from children.
In many cultures of origin, mental health struggles are not discussed openly. Suffering is expected to be managed privately, often within the family. Seeking outside help can feel like a betrayal of family loyalty or an admission of weakness. These norms do not disappear upon arrival in a new country. They travel with people, and they interact with new stressors — isolation, language barriers, economic precarity, and racism — in ways that compound silence further.
By the numbers — Alliance for Immigrant Survivors, 2025
76%
of advocates report survivors fear contacting police to report abuse
50%
of advocates had survivors drop civil or criminal cases out of fear
70%
of advocates report survivors have concerns about going to court
The barriers described above are not new. What is new is how significantly the current federal policy environment is amplifying them.
A 2025 nationwide survey by the Alliance for Immigrant Survivors documented this directly. Seventy-six percent of advocates reported that immigrant survivors have concerns about contacting police to report domestic violence or sexual assault. Fifty percent had worked with survivors who dropped civil or criminal cases entirely because they were afraid to continue. Seventy percent reported that survivors have concerns about going to court for matters related to their abusers. Nearly 80 percent observed an increase in immigration-related questions from survivors since November 2024.
These numbers reflect a specific, current reality: immigration enforcement at courthouses, the involvement of local law enforcement in federal immigration actions, and the detention of crime victims who come forward have created conditions in which seeking help feels more dangerous than staying silent. Abusers in these communities are aware of this dynamic and exploit it. Immigration status becomes a tool of control — a threat that keeps survivors from leaving, from reporting, and from accessing support.
This is the environment in which WHI does its work.
Fear in immigrant and refugee communities often looks like disengagement. Women who show up once and do not return. Youth who participate on the surface but will not speak about what is happening at home. Adults who minimize what they have been through because they have learned that expressing the full weight of it leads to outcomes they cannot control.
Fear also looks like distrust of institutions. Many people in these communities have had direct experiences — or have witnessed others have direct experiences — with systems that harmed them: healthcare providers who dismissed them, legal systems that failed them, social services that separated families. That history is rational evidence. The distrust it creates is not irrational. It is informed. And right now, that distrust is being reinforced daily by what people are seeing and hearing around them.
When fear and silence go unaddressed, the consequences are serious and long-term. Trauma that is not processed does not disappear. It affects physical health, parenting, relationships, and a person’s ability to work and build stability. It passes across generations. Children who grow up in households where silence is the norm around difficult experiences learn to silence themselves. The cycle continues.
Communities that are not given access to culturally grounded, trust-based healing spaces carry a disproportionate burden. The mental health system in the United States was not built for them, and for many, it remains inaccessible — through cost, language, cultural mismatch, and the very fear that keeps people from walking through the door.
Breaking through fear and silence requires more than programming. It requires relationships built over time, in languages people speak, delivered by people who share or deeply understand their cultural context. It requires spaces that are not connected to systems people fear — spaces that feel genuinely safe, where confidentiality is real and consistently upheld.
It also requires patience. Trust is not built in a single session. For communities that have been harmed by institutions, trust is earned through consistency, follow-through, and accountability. Organizations working in this space need to commit to the long term.
At WHI, our programming — including peer support circles and outdoor healing through the Maine Afro Yoga Project — is designed around these principles. We meet people where they are. We work slowly and with intention. We prioritize cultural alignment in our facilitation. And we recognize that healing, for people who have survived what many of our participants have survived, is not a linear process.
Supporting immigrant and refugee healing means funding the kind of work that does not show fast outcomes on a traditional program timeline. It means funding relationship-building, outreach, and trust — the foundational work that happens before a woman feels safe enough to enter a healing circle, or before a young person is ready to speak.
It also means understanding that attendance numbers and session counts do not fully capture impact. The woman who comes to one gathering and returns six months later — that is impact. The youth who, for the first time, talks to a trusted adult about something that happened to them — that is impact. These moments do not always appear on a spreadsheet, but they are real, and they matter.
The organizations doing this work need sustained, flexible funding and funder relationships built on genuine understanding of the communities being served. In a climate where fear is being actively produced by policy, the role of community-based organizations that hold trust and provide safety outside of formal systems is not supplemental. It is essential.
About Wounded Healers International
WHI is a nonprofit based in South Portland, Maine, providing culturally grounded healing, peer support, and outdoor access programming for African immigrant and refugee women and youth. Learn more at woundedhealersintl.org.