Migrant women are trapped in the living hell of violent abuse

The law is failing migrant women who are stuck in abusive forced marriages and urgently need our help to escape.

Afghan-born Roia Atmar was brought to Australia as a child bride, aged just 14. She now works in a Perth refuge helping women trying to ­escaping domestic violence. Picture Colin Murty

Maria recently left the home of her husband and her arranged marriage because he beat her up. In an ordinary Perth suburb, he locked her in the house and confiscated her phone.

Maria (not her real name) was sponsored to Australia by her husband’s family, had their child and found herself captive to his rage. She soon realised she was entirely dependent on him and his family because her partner visa doesn’t entitle her to Medicare or Centrelink payments for the first two years she is in Australia.

When the violence escalated a some weeks ago, she used a second phone she had hidden away to call police. They arrived and took Maria to a high-risk refuge unit, but within 24 hours she asked to be taken back to her husband’s home.

She had been reassured by the man’s family that all would be well if she came home. In fact, her decision may have been influenced by her fear, told to refuge workers, that if she didn’t return, her husband would find and kill her. Or that she could be sent back overseas to her own family, who might punish or even kill her for dishonouring the marital arrangement.

Another young woman who came to Australia to marry is still in hiding in Perth because she has left her abusive husband. She says she cannot go back to the family that “arranged” the marriage because she believes her father will kill her.

Both harrowing cases are recent examples that have come to the ­attention of the Women’s Council for Domestic and Family Violence Services, which represents women’s refuge services in Western Australia.

They say they are seeing a rise in women escaping “arranged” or “forced” marriages.

There is a difference. Arranged marriage is legal in Australia, as long as it is consensual, and forced marriage is not. But it hardly matters when a woman who has been coerced into marriage by her family finds herself subjected to violence and abuse by her husband. What matters is the woman’s ability to escape it.

Trouble on the rise

New data from the Australian Red Cross shows that the number of individuals seeking help after fleeing forced marriages has gone up fivefold since 2015. Almost half of the individuals were children or people under the age of 18.

The figures, contained in a Red Cross report titled Support for Trafficked People Program Data Snapshot: 2009 to 2019, show a steep rise in the number of people escaping forced marriage — up from three in 2014, to 48 in 2018 and 67 in 2019. Of the total number assisted, 56 per cent were adults and 44 per cent were under 18.

The location of those individuals was 51 per cent in Victoria, 29 per cent in NSW and 12 per cent in South Australia. Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania had smaller numbers.

Statistics held by the Australian Federal Police show that in the 12 months to mid-2019, there were 91 reported cases of forced marriage in Australia.

In the financial year 2013-14 — the period in which forced marriage was added to the Criminal Code under trafficking and slavery offences — it was only 11.

What women’s refuges are seeing suggests that the number of forced or coerced marriages is increasing, and so is the number of victims of domestic abuse.

Kedy Kristal, from the WA Women’s Council, says two years of data collection supports their observation that refuges are seeing more women from migrant backgrounds turning up with no means of support after leaving domestic violence situations.

“They’ve often come in on a spousal visa or with the intention of marrying their partner,” Kristal says. “They have to be in Australia two years before they can apply for permanent residency. So, if in the first two years, domestic violence happens and they move out, they are not entitled to receive any ­welfare payments.

“There’s a process for them to make a claim based on domestic violence. Immigration officials then assess it, and they may get special benefits or the child may be entitled to a tax benefit. But none of these benefits is enough for a family to live independently in the community.

“And you have to have evidence, your injuries documented or you have to have an advocate saying you’ve been abused. By the time this happens, the woman is at her wits’ end. And many of them don’t drive or speak English.

“A significant number of women come here to marry and then their partner puts off the ­wedding, so they don’t have a proper visa, or they come with their husband on a work visa and then the violence begins. We’ve had a number of cases where it appears women have been trafficked in. If they end up in a women’s refuge, Centrelink does not pay for them. The refuge must pay.”

Kristal says refuges receive no specific funding to support such women and their children, “who often have nothing but the clothes on their back”. The Women’s Council has initiated weekly payments for such victims, but Kristal says the only real solution lies in changes to Australia’s migration legislation “to ensure that all people escaping family violence are eligible for crisis payments regardless of their visa status”.

Roia Atmar works in a Perth refuge with women trying to ­escape domestic violence. “A lot of them have been in arranged or forced marriages,” she says.

Only fourteen

Ms Atmar was just 14 when she arrived­ in Perth from Pakistan to meet a man she had been married to a few days earlier. The paperwork said she was 18.

Her abusive marriage ended when her husband tried to kill her. She was holding her 18-month-old on her hip when he threw turpentine on her neck and body and set it alight. Ms Atmar spent three months in hospital.

Roia Atmar at age 14 when she was married. Picture: Supplied

“Women don’t leave abusive relationships, even when they want to get help, because they don’t know who to talk to,” she says. “In my case, I honestly thought nobody cared.”

In February, the National Advocacy Group on Women on Temporary Visas Experiencing Violence met in Melbourne to expedite change. It is seeking an active response to its Blueprint for Reform: Removing Barriers to Safety for Victims/Survivors of Domestic and Family Violence who are on Temporary Visas. The blueprint calls for changes to migration laws to allow women to stay and be given access to Centrelink and more financial and accommodation support services for women on temporary visas.

The need for such reforms has been noted already in the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence and the Not Now, Not Ever Report of the Queensland Special Taskforce on Family Violence.

As to which nationalities are most vulnerable to forms of coerced marriage, Kristal says it’s happening in several migrant communities. “From Middle East to African countries and Asian countries, with no one particular community that dominates. It’s widespread.”

A Red Cross Forced Marriage Capacity-Building Project has worked with ethnic groups that “self-identify as being affected by the issue of forced marriage”.

It has produced video scenarios warning of the signs of possible forced marriage — a girl becoming more restricted in her movements, a turbulent family, older siblings who have married early, and sudden changes in a girl’s behaviour such as a decline in school attendance or becoming more religious.

Another sign might be a ­wedding overseas during school holidays, in which the wedding could turn out to be the absent schoolgirl’s.

The videos also encourage young women to seek support, while acknowledging they often still want to remain within their family. “I love my family and don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” one video character says. “I just don’t want to get married.”

Carol Kaplanian, who has studied Jordan’s “honour” killings of women and works with victims of domestic violence in Perth, says the AFP figures for reported forced marriage cases are only the tip of an iceberg.

“It would be in the high hundreds, it’s a big problem and it’s getting bigger,” she says.

Kaplanian says at least 12 out of the 50 women who attend her therapy sessions for women from migrant communities have escaped what she would describe as forced marriages that involve ­extreme coercive control and sexual abuse.

“But even the victims don’t see it as violence because control and abuse has been normalised within their culture. A lot of the women are living in hiding and some of the beatings and sexual violence they have endured are beyond belief.”

One of the women, an Asian wife and mother who left her controlling husband, took her own life in December.

In January, a newly married Afghan woman in her 20s died in hospital after she was found bleeding from a neck wound in an inner-suburban flat in Perth. Her husband walked into a police station a short time later, and has been charged with her murder.

Coercion to marry is becoming a homegrown affair, Kaplanian says, citing the example of a beauty industry worker from the Middle East who threads eyebrows in one of Perth’s shopping centres.

“She said to me ‘my daughter has just turned 17 and so I’m finding a suitable husband for her’. When I asked, should the girl be able to find her own partner?, the woman said ‘Absolutely not, she’s too young and she won’t make a good choice’.”

The woman also told Kaplanian that she was making plans for her son, by “arranging” that a young female from the Middle East would be brought over to marry him.

No choice at all

“When they’re asked about consent, women say to me ‘I haven’t a choice’,” says Kaplanian.

“This is not arranged marriage, it’s forced marriage. It’s not a choice when they don’t even know who they are marrying.”

The beauty worker’s daughter and son were both born in Australia, yet native-born offspring are being ­coerced into arranged unions, Kaplanian says, because the parents feel the only way to maintain their cultural roots is to ­enforce marriage to so-called “suitable” partners.

It’s about control

“And the age of young girls being forced into marriage is getting younger because they want to be able to control them before they have sex or go against the expectations of the family,” she says.

Down the road from the Women’s Council office in Perth, the waiting room is invariably full at the migration advice service run by the charitable Humanitarian Group. “A significant amount of our work is providing migration legal assistance to victims of gender-based violence,” says migration lawyer Katy Welch.

“We have provided advice to women who are in, or at risk of, or have left arranged and forced ­marriages.

“If someone is on a spousal or partner visa, the partner has power and control. ‘If you don’t do what I want, I’ll have you deported. I brought you here and I can send you home.’

“What we have been seeing is an increase in threats like ‘I will dump you back in your home country and I will leave you there, you have no rights’. The majority of abuse cases have a visa threat ­attached to it.”

“When you have a person removed like that with threats and coercion, then that is actually an offence of human trafficking, of exiting someone out of Australia under coercion or deception.”

She says the case looks like this. A man is a permanent resident, and his children are Australian ­citizens, but the wife is still on a temporary visa. The husband ­persuades the woman to go with him and their children back to visit the home country. But when he ­returns to Australia, he brings only his children.

“This is a very new issue that is coming to our attention because of the strong referral network we have in WA for forced marriage and trafficking and slavery matters,” says Welch. “We’ve seen more cases in the past six months, although we’ve been hearing ­stories about it for a while. We don’t know the extent of it.”

Monash University criminologist Maria Segrave, an expert in human trafficking, says it makes no sense to deprive a person of help to escape family violence because of their migration status.

Family violence doesn’t discriminate, she says. “It cuts across cultural, ethnic and socio-­economic groups but, while all ­levels of government have moved to put it on the public agenda, there remains a glaring gap in ­Australia’s response to family violence as it relates to women who are temporary migrants.

“The main message we should be sending all the time, through every communication, is that ‘he cannot deport you’. But that requires more than giving that woman a leaflet.

“The message I would have is that to end violence against all women and make real inroads, we need to treat all women equally.”