Social Work and Religious Diversity
Session Four • March 14, 2014
Taboo and Trauma, Resilience and Renewal:
Faith-Based Perspectives on Sexual Assault and Violence
Against Women
The panelists:
Robina Niaz, MS, MSW, Turning Point for Women and Families
Anindita Chatterjee Bhaumik, LSW, MSW, CONNECT
Chana Widawski, LMSW, Kings County District Attorney’s Office
Shaykha Reima Yosif, Al-Rawiya Foundation
The panel was moderated by Dr. Henry Goldschmidt, Director of Education Programs at the Interfaith Center of New York.
Panelist Biographies
Robina Niaz, MS, MSW, was born and raised in Pakistan and migrated to the United States in 1990. She is the founder and executive director of Turning Point for Women and Families, the first non-profit to address domestic violence in New York City’s Muslim community. In addition to crisis intervention and counseling services, Turning Point has developed youth programs to help teenage Muslim girls and young women develop leadership skills, and the ARISE NY! project to address the bullying of Muslim youth in local schools. Prior to founding Turning Point in 2004, Robina worked at several mainstream non-profits in management and supervisory positions. She has served on the boards of Sakhi, Queens Women’s Network, the Interfaith Council of New York, the Coalition for Battered Women’s Advocates, and the Muslim Consultative Network. She has also served as a consultant to the Domestic Harmony Committee of the Islamic Center of Long Island, and as a social work consultant to ICNA-Relief. Robina currently serves on the board of Hartley Film Foundation, is a member of the Social Work Advisory Council at Medgar Evers College, and the Field Instruction Advisory Board at Adelphi University School of Social Work. She has an MS in Applied Psychology (from Pakistan) and an MSW from Hunter College, School of Social Work. She was a 2007 CORO Immigrant Leadership Fellow and a 2005 Open Society Institute Social Justice Fellow. She has received numerous awards for community service, including being named a CNN Hero (2009) and one of the “500 Most Influential Muslims” by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center in Jordan (2009) among others. Turning Point for Women and Families is based in Queens, NY. For more information please visit its website: www.tpny.org.
Anindita Chatterjee Bhaumik, LSW, MSW, is a clinical social worker, and a lifelong advocate for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. She is currently an External Affairs Liaison and Educator for CONNECT, an organization dedicated to preventing interpersonal violence and promoting gender justice, and she has also worked with the Domestic Violence Project of the Urban Justice Center, and with Sanctuary for Families. She has dedicated her life to raising awareness about the perils of violence and its ramifications on children, women, and society at large. Anindita is also a member of the Hindu Temple Society of North America and the Vedanta Society of New York. She is a lifelong adherent and student of Sanatana Dharma, popularly known has Hinduism, and has been studying the religion under the guidance of Swami Tathagathananda of the Vedanta Society for more than ten years. She has served as a Hindu clergy liaison to the NYPD, and as an official court interpreter for the languages Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu. She also devotes her time and experience to preventing reverse assimilation among new immigrants, and protecting them from guns, gangs, and violence.
Chana Widawski, LMSW, has worked for ten years at the Kings County District Attorney’s Office, where she directs collaborative programs of direct services and grassroots education – sensitively bridging the gaps between Brooklyn’s orthodox Jewish communities and its criminal justice and social service systems, to address the often-taboo topics of sexual assault, domestic violence, and childhood sexual abuse. Chana is a committed social worker and community organizer who has worked in a range of settings, from political offices to community centers. She is also involved in a range of freelance and consulting work, including writing/visioning for non-profit organizations, leading educational travel programs around the globe, and serving as Adjunct Faculty at Hunter College’s Silberman School of Social Work. Chana is also passionate about local community and the use of public space, chairing her block association and working to transform her neighborhood park into an “outdoor community center.” Her writings on collaboration, inclusion, and sustainability have been published in Lilith magazine and the Journal of Jewish Communal Service. Chana received her MSW from Hunter College, with a focus in Community Organizing, and her BA in Rhetoric & Communication and Judaic Studies from SUNY Albany.
Shaykha Reima Yosif is the founding president of the Al-Rawiya Foundation, a nonprofit organization working to empower Muslim women through spirituality, education, the arts, and social action. Among other initiatives, Al-Rawiya sponsors a toll free domestic abuse recovery hotline, and a range of educational programs designed to foster open discussions of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse among Muslim women and women at large (see www.alrawiya.org for more details). In addition to her work with the Foundation, she is also the founder of Rawiya College (www.rawiyacollege.com), which offers accredited graduate degrees in Islamic Studies, and an Ariane de Rothschild Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship and Cross-Cultural Dialogue. Shaykha Yosif was born and raised in US. She memorized the Qur’an at an early age, and has studied the Islamic Sciences for over a decade with various traditional scholars from the Middle East, acquiring Ijazat (scholarly licenses) to teach the Qur’an, various collections of Tafasir (interpretations of the Qur’an), and various collections of Hadith (Prophetic traditions). She has studied extensively in comparative Islamic jurisprudence, with special emphasis on women’s legal issues, and has compiled a number of books on Islamic law. In addition to her traditional Islamic scholarship, Shaykha Yosif earned her undergraduate degree and a graduate diploma in English and Comparative Literature from Ain Shams University in Cairo, and a diploma in Classical Arabic from the American University in Cairo. She is also a published poet, and is currently working on her graduate studies in English Literature.
