Anxious to go to work, but frightened to lose their jobs - migrant and refugee women confronting sexual harassment in Australian workplaces are often placed in an impossible situation.
A new report by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety - or ANROWS - found almost half (46%) of the more than 850 migrant and refugee women surveyed reported experiencing workplace sexual harassment in the past five years.
But it also highlighted little action being taken to address the issue.
Professor Marie Segrave at the University of Melbourne is lead author of the report.
She says the high rates of harassment are significant.
"The other really significant finding was that women often experienced workplace sexual harassment at the same time and alongside other forms of discrimination and workplace abuse, those kinds of practices, which was really important to us to highlight. And one of the things that we found early on was that women we were speaking with saw sexual harassment as part of an unsafe workplace. It wasn't the primary thing they were focused on, it was part of a setting."
Harassment included anything from indecent phone calls or messages of a sexual nature, intimidating staring or leering, or intrusive questions about private life or physical appearance.
Most women who experienced sexual harassment described the experiences as less serious, but as occurring consistently and impacting women in serious and ongoing ways.
CEO of ANROWS Dr Tessa Boyd-Caine explains.
"It's important to recognise that even though we sometimes talk about sexual harassment as low level, some of the behaviours that we were looking at in this report are just completely unacceptable. So women spoke about inappropriate touching about sexual jokes and harmful stereotypes about attitudes in terms of their cultural background relating to a certain identity that there just is no place for this kind of behaviour in 2024. And at the same time, women in this research talked about bystanders in the workplace, joking along, behaving as though this behaviour was just a joke or turning a blind eye."
Women shared how these experiences often intersected with other types of discrimination or workplace exploitation, including racism.
Dr Boyd-Caine says this means current systems in place to report workplace sexual harassment may not be suitable for migrant and refugee women.
She says it's important to consider measures like extending exit interviews or complaint timelines, to allow women to disclose their experiences when they feel safer to do so.
"We have different systems to address sexual harassment to report and respond to it compared to the process for working under certain types of visas or even obtaining migration status. But for migrant and refugee women who are working in Australia today, these are interacting conditions and they significantly impact their ability to work in a safe environment. So our systems need to do better. So migrant and refugee women, they need to recognise this context and that sexual harassment intersect with workplace insecurity around visa status or around migration."
In fact, there was a serious reluctance by migrant and refugee women to report this behaviour at all.
Women reported being too scared to disclose their experience for fear of losing their job, or had witnessed little action taken in response to past complaints.
Others had even reported being threatened or advised not to complain out of fear of losing their jobs.
Professor Segrave says workplace cultures often discourage women from disclosing their experiences.
"One of the biggest challenges is silence. Even if people complain, they tend to be silent or silenced, but also there's no recognition of the perpetrator or the action. People are quietly moved on. People leave the workplace sometimes, often women leave, so nothing happens. So we found that people spoke to us about silence being pervasive and both discouraging women who experienced it, but also suggesting to them that nothing would really happen. There would be no proactive commitment to this behavior being wrong, no acknowledgement that it had happened."
ANROWS is committed to the government's National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children by 2032.
The first annual report tracking the progress of the plan has been published.
The Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner, Micaela Cronin, spoke at National Press Club about the influence of online misogyny on young men as a factor contributing to gender-based violence.
"They are attracted to what some of the voices they are hearing are saying because it gives them some sense of how to be a man. We need to get better. We need to get better at talking to those young men. We need to get better at listening to them. We need men to be leading those conversations."
The first progress report also said governments need better data on violent men; and their pathways in and out of violence; and must develop more intervention options.
Dr Boyd-Caine hopes ANROW's report can help inform the national plan around the unique barriers confronting migrant and refugee women.
"Firstly, we need to recognise that sexual harassment in any context and particularly at work, is part of the gendered violence that women experience in this country. It's part of the way that gendered assumptions behaviours affect women and particularly hold women in disadvantage. But we also need to understand the context in which that occurs. And so looking specifically at the experience of migrant and refugee women is a critical input into understanding what kinds of systems and services are needed for women in different communities in different contexts and making sure that our systems are not assuming a one size fits all."
Professor Segrave agrees that solutions to the issue must be multi-faceted.
She says it's vital to understand how these behaviours intersect with other forms of discrimination, in order to respond appropriately.
"There's a lot of work that's been happening in Victoria, some recent announcements about the use of non-disclosure agreements. Changes in that space would be transformative to stop silencing women, but also to have better recognition of what is happening. But we also need to recognize how important job security is and the fact that there is no sense of job security in this context says a lot about us failing both in terms of policy outside of the workplace, but also within the workplace."
Professor Segrave adds that more research is also needed around perpetrators and businesses to better understand the issue.
"So we need to better understand who's doing this. We need to be able to better capture repeat behaviour. One of the things is that perpetrators can be moved on quietly moved to, and then you will see someone get a job somewhere else and think how have they simply moved from being a major problem here to now getting that job? We need to better understand who perpetrators are, what businesses are doing about perpetration, but also really understand the kinds of insidious behaviour that they are perpetrating. Because a lot of it will fly under the radar."
