Kiwi Tamasese & Charles Waldegrave

This paper addresses the issues of cultural and gender accountability within
therapeutic organisations. It is written from the perspective of a Samoan woman
and a Pakeha (white) man in an agency that is structured into three cultural
sections. The paper discusses the issues and agency experience around two
critical questions: How do workers, women and men and people of different
cultures in an agency or institution, protect against gender and culture bias in
their work on a day-to-day basis? Furthermore, how do they do this in societies
where sexist and racist assumptions are an integral part of the upbringing and
way of life, as they are in most modern industrial states?

The authors draw deeply from their agency experience as they outline the
possibility of responsible partnerships between the genders and cultures. In
doing so, they address issues of pain, vulnerability, cultural caucusing,
institutional space, and the convergence of meanings that were previously
conflictual.

There is an increasing awareness these days of insensitivity and injustice in
therapy experienced by women and cultural groups different from the dominant
one. In the family therapy field, feminist writers and theoreticians ( Goldner
1985, 1992; Harre Hindmarsh 1987; Kamsler 1990; Luepnitz 1988; McKinnon
& Miller 1987; Walters, Carter, Papp & Silverstein 1988; among many others)
have identified both the patriarchal determinants of family life and their infusion
in therapy in modern Western societies.

To date, much less has been written concerning cultural bias in therapy
( Boyd-Franklin 1989; Durie 1986; Gumoe & Nelson 1989; McGoldrick, Pearce1 McLean, Christopher
& Giordano 1982; Waldegrave 1986, 1990). There is, nevertheless, an emerging
consciousness of the inadequacy of social science models that grow out of ideas
from one culture being applied to another.

social science theories, models and practices, for example, were largely

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