In 2024, the Counting Dead Women project recorded 78 women killed in gender-based violence – the highest number since 2016. Preventing gender-based violence has always been urgent, but with numbers seeming to rise, experts, advocates and leaders alike have asked: “Is what we are doing to prevent gender-based violence working, and how should we be engaging men and boys to do this work?”
At MCWH, we’ve been exploring and working on solutions to this question for many years and just this month we hosted a public forum called “The Man Question” which explored intersectional feminist approaches to engaging migrant men in gendered violence prevention. Hosted by journalist Nour Haydar, we brought together experts who are doing the vital work to engage migrant and refugee men and boys in gender equality and violence prevention.
When it comes to gender-based violence, migrant and refugee communities often face intense scrutiny. Our panellists spoke about how migrant men are often unfairly painted as more violent or aggressive than other men, while migrant women often fear that reporting violence may lead to the entrenchment of stereotypes around their culture being ‘backwards’. As our CEO, Adele Murdolo explained, these assumptions work to exclude migrant and refugee women, gender-diverse people and men from taking part in efforts to prevent gender-based violence.
In one prescient example, Nesreen Bottriell, CEO of Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights (AMWCHR) shared how the “lack of willingness or inability of a lot of organisations to even talk about what has been happening in Palestine”, can make it difficult for Muslim men to trust, engage with and feel understood by services that “can’t recognise the experiences and suffering that they might be faced with.”
In an environment where migrant and refugee men might expect to be misunderstood, a proactive approach to understanding the experiences of men and boys is needed. As Dr Shane Tas and Priyanka Ajit from Our Watch explained, a crucial part of this is understanding how systems like race, class, gender, and migration shape ideas around masculinity. But we must also challenge societal notions about what we in Australia expect from migrant and refugee men and boys.
For example, Shankar Kasynathan from Open Exchange highlighted how the stoic archetype of the ‘good migrant’ who ‘just gets on with it’ intersects with masculinity, compounding pressures on migrant men to not seek help when dealing with the challenges of resettlement. Western binary norms around the male headed heterosexual family assumed in government policy can also displace more communal notions of care and responsibility held by migrant and refugee communities, narrowing what it means to be a man. As Dr Innocent Mwatsiya shared, to challenge this we can start by recognising the role of the ‘village’ in socialising boys and men, including that woman, trans, queer and gender-diverse people are also major role models for men and boys.
Engaging in difficult, vulnerable and confronting conversations about gender-based violence takes trust. For migrant and refugee men, who may be understandably wary of mainstream institutions, developing trust takes time and ongoing work – work that needs to be continuously funded. At present, tailored programs to engage migrant and refugee men in prevention work are critically and chronically underfunded, despite the enthusiasm, appetite, and expertise present in migrant and refugee communities.
A lack of funding is just one of many structural barriers we face in our attempts to prevent gender-based violence. For migrant and refugee women, gender-based violence is also facilitated by Australia’s migration system where visa conditions make many women and gender-diverse people highly dependent on employers and partners, and exclude them from accessing key health and social services.
As Dr Adele Murdolo said, “We need to see where the power lies… and look beyond interpersonal, behaviour or attitude change, and work together on systems change.” Migrant and refugee men can be powerful advocates against the kind of precarity and vulnerability Australia’s migration system produces both for themselves and for women. But so can all of us.
Prevention happens on many levels, not just the individual. To challenge the norms and structures that facilitate and justify men’s violence, prevention must also happen at the organisational, societal and structural level. To do this our eyes must be on those who do have the power to address structural racism and discrimination, to create fairer visa conditions, to challenge gender norms embedded in government policy, to fund tailored violence prevention programs, and ensure everyone has access to the support they need to be free from violence.
This article was first published in edition #143 of The WRAP on March 2025.