Zara* believes she and her children wouldn’t be alive today were it not for the support she received while at a family violence refuge in New Zealand tailored to her cultural needs.
“The mainstream refuge didn’t understand the seriousness of abuse the ethnic women go through,” Zara said. “I have been told by my own family, community and society to reconcile so many times and every time the abuse worsens.
“It’s the cultural impact that puts the pressure on us and we have to sacrifice everything for others.”
However, Zara was helped by social workers at a refuge run by Shakti – an organisation that supports women, children and families of Asian, African and Middle Eastern origin.
She said while she received the basic necessities and accommodation, the workers also spoke the same language as her, related to her situation and provided her with the skills to become self-reliant.
Shakti has a presence in Victoria, where it runs a crisis call service and offers case management, counselling, training programs and educational workshops.
But it does not receive enough funding to run a refuge in the state.
Unlike Queensland and New South Wales, Victoria has no culturally specific family violence refuges.
Veena Barsiwal, a Melbourne-based counsellor for Shakti, said the women she works with need tailored support given the unique challenges they face, such as forced or underage marriage, dowry abuse, visa insecurity, isolation and shame.
“Our beliefs are very deep-rooted. I had this one client who was facing abuse, and she told her parents, and her father said, ‘I would rather have a divorced daughter than have a dead daughter’ but she did not leave because she didn’t want to face the stigma of divorce,” she says.
“Here was this younger woman, who worked and was earning good money and she had her parents’ support but it was so ingrained in her that she will fail completely if she leaves. It’s something only a person from the same background can understand.”
In 2020, a Victorian coroner called for more accessible, culturally appropriate support services for South Asian women in the city of Whittlesea after an investigation into the suicides of four women in the community between 2018 and 2019.
The coroner ruled the evidence did not provide “a comfortable level of satisfaction to find that family violence was a precipitating factor” in the deaths, though there were serious allegations of family violence in two of the cases.
This came four years after a Victorian royal commission into family violence found that people from multicultural, faith and ethnic communities are disproportionately affected by family violence and face additional barriers to seeking safety and justice.
The government has implemented six of the seven recommendations the inquiry made in respect to people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
“We know that family violence can occur in any community and access to culturally appropriate support is critical – which is why we’re building a family violence system that is inclusive, accessible, responsive and safe for all members of the Victorian community,” the minister for prevention of family violence, Gabrielle Williams, said in a statement.
Applications for grants of up to $250,000 are currently open for projects that support partnerships and collaboration between Victoria’s multicultural community organisations and specialist family violence and sexual assault services, while $7m was provided in 2021 to provide culturally appropriate primary prevention and early intervention initiatives.
Barsiwal said women need to enter an environment where they feel safe and comfortable if they decide to leave an abusive relationship.
“Women need to feel that they aren’t being judged, that they don’t need to explain themselves, that they can speak their language, eat the food they want to eat or the prayers they want to perform,” she said.
“Otherwise, if they don’t feel comfortable, or they feel overwhelmed, they’ll end up going back to the perpetrator and it’s always harder when they go back because the abuse gets worse.”
Saleha Singh, from IndianCare, a community welfare organisation that assists women fleeing family violence, supports international students and provides drug and alcohol education, said they have been inundated with calls for help during the pandemic.
“Even big charities and organisations with much more funding than us are calling us up saying please help us, we don’t have culturally appropriate information for women,” she said.
“We deal with primary prevention and early intervention but I can’t tell you how many calls we are getting from women seeking legal support, financial support to pay for the bills, nappies, school fees. We don’t have the funding to keep up.”
Singh said there was a lack of education in the community about family violence and its many forms, including economic and technology-related abuse, coercive and controlling behaviours and marital rape.
“Sometimes people think because it’s not physical violence, it is not family violence. Nobody talks about it and sometimes women don’t even realise it’s happening because it’s what they’ve grown up with. We should not accept it any more,” she said.
Shakti and IndianCare, as well as several other multicultural organisations and support services, have formed a group called the Multicultural Alliance of Women Against Family Violence in an effort to secure funding for a refuge in Victoria.
The Victorian Greens leader, Samantha Ratnam, has previously called on the government to establish a culturally specific refuge, which she says would cost about $5m to set up.
“Ideally though, what you want to see is a network of culturally specific refuges, geographically dispersed so that everyone has equitable access to them, as is the case with Shakti in New Zealand,” Ratnam said.
* Name has been changed for privacy reasons
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 and the domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247. In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org
