Preventing Coercive Control for Migrant and Refugee Women
Project team
Chief Investigators: Associate Professor Marie Segrave, Dr Stef Vasil, Dr Shih Joo (Siru) Tan, Dr Ellen Reeves, Ela Stewart and Fatemah Roohafza.
Project contacts: Marie Segrave (marie.segrave@monash.edu) and Stef Vasil (stef.vasil@monash.edu)
Project research partners: inTouch Multicultural Centre Against Family Violence
Project funding: This project is funded by Respect Victoria.
About the project
This project is designed to lead the development of the evidence-base on the specificity of the domestic and family violence (DFV) experience among migrant and refugee women, with a focus on coercive control. Coercive control is an area of policy that is attracting increasing attention across Australia and elsewhere, with specific interest in the value of criminalising this practice specifically (or, as the case in Tasmania, criminalising related behaviours such as intimidation and emotional abuse). Coercive control is understood to be a key feature of DFV with research (e.g., Ptacek, 1999; Stark, 2007) pointing to the long-term, ongoing and pervasive nature of practices that are often not physical and compound to have a devastating and controlling impact on the individual. What is less well known about coercive control is the extent to which it may manifest in specific and particular ways in different communities, including among women who identify as migrants and refugees.
Recent research has demonstrated that migrant and refugee women experience specific forms of DFV (e.g., Segrave, Wickes, & Keele, 2021, Boxall & Morgan, 2021) but there is limited research specifically on coercive control. This research seeks to contribute to understandings of how these practices may be identified, understood and responded to by those who are the target of such actions but also by the wider community. Ensuring there is clarity in understanding is an important first step as this can help to inform efforts to prevent these practices.
The project is designed to achieve the following aims:
- to review the extant research on coercive control for migrant and refugee women; and
- to explore experiences and understandings of coercive control with a sample of men and women from migrant and refugee backgrounds across Victoria.
Research Design
This research has two key phases:
- Phase one: Expert desk review
- Phase two: Qualitative research with migrant and refugee women and men
Phase One: Review of knowledge
We undertook a comprehensive desk review (approx. 12,000 words) of existing academic and grey literature on migrant and refugee women’s experiences of coercive control and prevention. We found that while research on coercive control against migrant women is emerging, evidence on the effectiveness of prevention efforts remains limited.
Key findings include:
- Knowledge gaps around coercive control broadly and in relation to migrant and refugee women reflect the considerable challenge of capturing a complex pattern of control that is largely unseen beyond the familial context.
- Migrant and refugee women experience coercive control as do all women living in Australia: there are no simple delineations of prevalence. What is clear, however, is that for some women the nature of their experiences is influenced by structural and social conditions (ranging from migration status to familial and social gendered expectations).
- Prevention work in the area of coercive control remains broadly in its infancy.
- The evidence suggests that primary prevention alone cannot be the strategy.
- Given the diversity of the migrant and refugee cohort both in terms of migration experiences and pathways, primary prevention strategies need to also be well defined in relation to what can and cannot be achieved, and who they are targeting.
This phase of the research lays a solid foundation for the second phase which involves community-focused qualitative research.