Where Intersectionality and Multiculturalism Meet: Australian Muslim Women's Experiences of Domestic and Family Violence

Introduction

Intersectionality has gained traction in many countries, including Australia, as the approach of choice to support women from minority cultural and faith backgrounds. It is often positioned as a preferred development in light of the past failures of feminism and multiculturalism to holistically meet the needs of women (Siim & Mokre, 2012, pp. 3–19). Feminism has been criticized for neglecting the role of race in women's lives (Williams & Barber, 2004, p. 391). Multiculturalism, a framework that supports minority cultural groups to maintain their distinctive identities and practices, has been criticized for masking and even legitimizing gender discrimination within cultural and faith communities (Meer & Modood, 2012, p. 178; Okin et al., 1999; Song, 2010). Few scholars, however, have queried the capacity of intersectionality to comprehensively address complex social phenomena in practice. While intersectionality may illuminate overlooked dimensions in a scholarly sense, experts warn that the positioning of intersectionality as an all-encompassing theory in policy and practice risks replicating forms of essentialism that intersectionality critiques (Davis, 2008; Henne & Troshynski, 2013).

These tensions play out in the application of intersectionality to domestic and family violence (DFV) in the Australian policy and practice landscape. As part of a larger study on DFV in Australian Muslim communities, interviews with 20 Australian Muslim women experiencing DFV shed some light on the limitations of intersectionality when employed via policy and practice. In the sections below, I discuss how Australian Muslim women perceive responses from three key sites of intervention: mainstream gendered services, cultural and faith communities, and professionalized multicultural responses. The analysis shows each of the spaces are limited in their capacity to meet Muslim women's needs. Mainstream gendered services often fail to respond to cultural and religious needs, and cultural and faith communities fail to respond to gendered needs. Meanwhile, professionalized multicultural responses that can offer a holistic response are too few and thus cannot comprehensively deliver those more holistic responses. While the shortcomings are distinct in each of the sites of intervention, they all retain strong cultural and religious elements.

This analysis suggests that existing DFV systems need to improve the extent to which they address the cultural and religious elements of women's experiences. In the Australian context, multiculturalism provides one such approach to buttressing these systems. Whereas the singular reliance on multiculturalism has been critiqued for reducing women to their cultural identity, these findings suggest the use of intersectionality can also be reductive in practice. Intersectionality as a theory brings awareness to the multiplicity of women's experiences. However, it is difficult to resist essentialization—that is, positioning certain attributes as being essential to one's identity. As other scholars warn, bringing awareness of the multiplicity of women's experiences without adequately describing or responding to those experiences can result in intersectionality being evoked in language only, replicating the exclusionary pitfalls that come have come through movements that have focused on gender without considering other dimensions of identity (Carbado and Harris 2019). The findings of this study support claims that intersectionality can be limited in its capacity to drive meaningful interventions for multiply marginalized women, even though it has traveled widely (Nash, 2019, pp. 22–26).

Approaches to Women of Minority Cultures and Faiths in Australia

Historically, responses to women of minority cultures and faiths in Australia have fallen within two broad social movements: the women's movement and racial justice movements (Ho, 2008, p. 778). ¹ The women's movement has been criticized for overlooking the needs of women from minority cultural, faith, and racial backgrounds. It is precisely this criticism that led to the articulation and embrace of intersectionality, including its adoption in Australia. Meanwhile, racial justice movements have been criticized for neglecting gendered forms of oppression.

Multiculturalism is one such movement. It aims to recognize “group differences within public spheres such as law, policy, democratic discourse, shared citizenship, and national identity” (Bevelander and Taras 2013, p. 3). Some feminist scholars have argued that multiculturalism is incompatible with feminism (Okin et al., 1999). In Australia, a similar anxiety proliferated in the discourse relating to Muslim migration to Australia after the attacks of September 11. These debates positioned Muslim communities as oppressive to women and therefore queried the extent to which Muslim communities should have their cultural rights preserved (Ghobadzadeh, 2010). Other feminist scholars have challenged the framing of the “multiculturalism vs feminism” debate, claiming it characterizes minority cultures as uniquely responsible for women's subordination. They have also criticized the debate as denying women of minority cultures and faiths the agency to bring about emancipatory change on their own terms (Song, 2007; Ghobadzadeh, 2010).

In the context of DFV, it was the women's movement that drove the establishment of the first women's shelters in Australia in the 1970s. When women began flocking to these shelters in large numbers due to violence experienced in the home, particularly in the 1980s, demands to address gendered violence grew (Murray & Powell, 2009). As a result, there were several inquiries into violence against women throughout the 1980s. Subsequently states, territories and federal governments established formal policies and plans to address violence against women. Although there have been some attempts to “de-gender” DFV—for example, by using more gender-neutral terminology and removing explicit references to feminism and the women's movement (MacDonald, 1998; McDonald, 2005; Webster, 2007)—Australian policy and practice remain strongly influenced by the women's movement (Murray & Powell, 2009).

Multiculturalism in Australia follows a different trajectory. Up to the 1970s, Australia had adopted various formal policies that denied the agency of non-Anglo Australians, including colonization and dispossession of First Nations people (Walter, 2013); the White Australia Policy (which was a set of laws that restricted non-white people from migrating to Australia); and assimilation, described by Peter Shergold as “a bubbling melting pot into which all newcomers were expected to plunge, emerging after sufficient cooking as well-done Australians” (Richards, 2008, p. 254). The approach shifted in the 1970s with greater support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights, and a shift towards multiculturalism for non-English speaking migrants (Harding, 1995). The influential Galbally report of 1978 led to a formal acknowledgement of the rights of different groups to maintain their cultural distinctiveness, and the establishment of formal institutions that worked toward protecting the rights of non-English speaking migrants (Commonwealth of Australia, 1978; Tavan, 2012). This infrastructure formalized the advocacy and social support role of migrant community groups of the time and created new social service programs for migrants. However, the leadership of migrant advocacy bodies was male dominated, which meant women's issues were not prominent within the advocacy of multicultural groups (Ho, 2008).

From the earliest days of Australia's women's movement and multicultural movements, however, women of migrant and refugee backgrounds were active. They often organized to address their own needs, despite their marginalization in multicultural and women's movements. For example, Christina Ho (2008) documents the exclusion of migrant women from the dominant Australian feminist movement and how this led to the establishment of their own institutions, such as the migrant women workers centers, throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Migrant women's struggles to have their issues appropriately featured within advocacy agendas represent an Australian example of an intersectional struggle, culminating in outcomes that more genuinely meet the needs of migrant women.

These dynamics have carried over into DFV advocacy and mobilization in Australia more generally. In the specific context of Muslim women and DFV, a handful of Australian Muslim women's organizations have addressed DFV and gendered issues more broadly for decades. However, as a CEO of one of these organizations reflected in an interview for this study, this space was difficult to occupy, particularly in earlier decades, as dominant approaches to addressing women's issues were not suited to their constituents. Alongside Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, migrant women were regularly battling for approaches that were more inclusive. This included promoting whole of family models (which aim to be more inclusive of the communal nature of family relationships in many non-Western traditions), approaches that could facilitate families remaining together through changing men's behavior, naming racialized and colonial drivers of violence, and a focus on prevention. Activists calling for these approaches were questioned for their commitment to women. Due to these positions, many First Nations and migrant women were seen as undermining the gains made by feminism to name gendered violence and ensure women were supported to leave violent relationships (Pettman, 1992). It is only recently that some of their ideas have become popular within the broader women's movement (Keddie, 2023).

This history is distinct from U.S.-centered histories of intersectionality, which often draw on the experiences of Black women who found themselves marginalized in women's movements and racial justice movements. There are related developments, though. Parallel to Black feminists in the United States, other feminist coalitions were vocal about their marginalization within feminist and other movements, including Third World Women and Islamic feminist activists (Aguilar, 2012; Grami, 2013). Building on the work of earlier Black feminists, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991) coined the term intersectionality to demonstrate how single-axis thinking—that is, for example, a singular focus on gender or race—leads to Black women's grievances being unaddressed, because it does not capture the experiences of those who are multiply burdened. She argues that Black women endure forms of discrimination distinct from those experienced by white women or Black men (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). Although conceptualizations of intersectionality have come to differ in application, a shared central tenet is its attention to multiple axes of power, exposing how single-axis thinking is inadequate to address discrimination against multiply marginalized people (Henne & Troshynski, 2013: Potter, 2015).

Intersectionality continues to be used to explain and address DFV, particularly as it relates to ethnic minority populations (Almeida & Durkin, 1999; Crenshaw, 1991). Sokoloff and Dupont (2005) argue a strong intersectional approach to DFV is necessary, criticizing the tendency of the women's movement to emphasize a common experience in the name of forging a united movement. This requires going beyond gender-equality as the single cause of DFV and acknowledging other forms of violence that exist in tandem with DFV, such as racial micro-aggressions, heterosexism, and classism (Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005). McQueeney (2016) argues that DFV teaching should be underwritten by an intersectional pedagogical approach. Doing so promotes difference-consciousness, complicates gender-only power frameworks, and supports changemaking. It has also been supported as a mechanism to ensure better DFV policymaking and improve the visibility of minoritized women (Strid et al., 2013).

In the Australian policy and practice landscape, intersectionality has gained increasing prominence (Murray & Powell, 2009, p. 540). Its rising influence can be observed over the life of The National Plan to Address Violence Against Women and the Children 2010–2022 (the 2010–2022 VAW Plan), which is a joint plan by the federal government and all Australian state and territory governments, and its successor, The National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032 (the 2022–2032 VAW Plan). While the 2010–2022 VAW Plan does not mention intersectionality explicitly, it emerges in the four successive action plans that implement the overarching plan. To elaborate, the First Action Plan (2010–2013) has no mention of intersectionality, but the Second Action Plan (2013–2016) refers to the need for more research on how different systems intersect. The Third Action Plan (2016–2019) discusses intersectionality in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and the Fourth Action Plan (2019–2022) reflects intersectionality more broadly in that it acknowledges the intersecting drivers of violence and includes a national priority area for listening to and responding to diverse lived experiences such as culturally and linguistically diverse women, people with diverse sexuality and gender, and others. Whereas the earlier plan did not use the term at all, the 2022–2032 VAW Plan names intersectionality as one of three fundamental principles and has 13 references to intersectionality (Department of Social Services, 2019, 2022).

At the same time, multicultural programs have weakened in Australia (Ho, 2014; Jakubowicz & Ho, 2014, pp. xi–xvi). As discussed above, the 1970s to mid-1980s were characterized by strong recognition of migrant groups as being disadvantaged and proactive state intervention to address injustices. From the late 1980s, multiculturalism was retained as a formal policy, but the policy focus shifted toward the economic benefits of migration (Ho, 2014, p. 36). In doing so, it increased expectations of migrants to be economically productive and decreased the expectations of the state to deliver specialized supports for migrants. By the 2000s, the focus on economic benefit had overshadowed social justice issues. This economic focus has persisted up to the present moment.

The 1996 election of a socially conservative Liberal government led by Prime Minister John Howard, in particular, marked a significant shift in Australian multiculturalism. Over his 11-year tenure, Howard was known to politicize race and immigration policy, including in elections where he benefited from narratives about immigrants “taking jobs” and “failing to integrate” (Wilson, 2001). Under Howard, the rhetoric shifted from the obligation of society to secure the rights of migrants to migrants fulfilling their obligations to society both economically and socially. This intensified after 2001, with global attention turning to the threat of violent extremism. During Howard's term, several multicultural institutions were abolished, with funding to the multicultural sector substantially reduced (Ho, 2014, p. 38). Funds were instead channeled towards countering violent extremism programs, which have not only been ineffective, but have exacerbated social tensions (Abdel-Fattah, 2020; Riedel, 2022).

The election of a Labor government in 2007, which was more socially progressive than Howard's conservative government, brought about no significant change, despite more symbolic and rhetorical support for multiculturalism (Ho, 2008). A socially conservative Liberal government was re-elected in 2013, holding office until 2022. In 2017, the Government presented a new multicultural policy statement. Geoffrey Levey (2019) argues that the statement represented the most significant change to Australian multicultural policy in forty years, labelling it a “post-multiculturalism” multicultural policy. By this, he means it went so far in shifting the onus of social and economic integration onto migrants themselves, that it abandoned all together the stipulation that governments have an obligation to adjust to and support a diverse population. This framing lends itself to a “mainstreaming” approach to social services whereby migrants are expected to sufficiently integrate into mainstream services, rather than the government delivering services that are proactively responsive to their unique needs (Levey, 2019).

These shifts have been felt in weakened multicultural services and infrastructure. The multicultural sector has dealt with funding pressures, including the withdrawal of core funding in the 1990s for the migrant resource centers (Roumeliotis & Paschalidis-Chilas, 2014). Other research highlights the limitations on services, drawing attention to constraints on the level of support that can be provided to women who disclose violence in local, trusted, multicultural services (Vaughan et al., 2019). The Australian Government has implicitly acknowledged this weakening of Australia's multicultural framework: The current Labor Government has committed to a refresh and established the Multicultural Framework Review. In establishing the review, the Government noted that the institutional settings of Australia's multiculturalism have not been reviewed in almost a generation. The review will provide advice on the principles of multiculturalism, as well as institutional, legislative, and policy settings, making the findings of this research particularly timely (Department of Home Affairs, 2023).

The Multicultural Framework Review provides an opportunity to explore the impact of intersectionality, which has prevailed as an approach to addressing violence against women of minority cultural and faith backgrounds. Despite intersectionality's increasing prevalence, questions remain about the effects of these changing policies and infrastructures, particularly for survivors of violence. This study therefore asks how intersectionality as a framework has been used to address the needs of Australian Muslim women and whether multicultural policies have a role in improving responses to DFV for Australian Muslim women.

Methodology and Methods

This analysis draws on findings from a broader study on Australian Muslim women's experiences of DFV. The aim of the research was to explore how Australian Muslim women respond to violence, and what they seek in responses to DFV. The research included a targeted focus group with those with lived experience, religious leaders, Muslim women's advocates and others; interviews with 20 Australian Muslim women who experienced DFV; 13 interviews with individuals who work in DFV or related fields; and social media analysis of relevant social media pages and discussion forums. A qualitative study relying primarily on in-depth interviews, it kept with a tradition of non-positivist approaches in intersectional research. Positivist approaches have been critiqued by feminist scholars for not querying existing norms and practices (Alexander-Floyd, 2012). As such, this study focuses on elucidating rich, nuanced, and in-depth insights.

This article draws on data collected through interviews with 20 women with lived experience of violence. Using a broad range of strategies designed to mitigate biases in recruitment, recruitment included focusing on women's refuges, Muslim community leaders and contacts, migrant services, snowball sampling, and various social media networks. Most interviews were approximately 60 min in duration and conducted in-person or over the phone. Of the 20 participants, ten were born in Australia and ten were born overseas, with 14 different ethnicities and six different states or territories of residence represented. Participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 60. While the data captures a broad range of demographics, it is not a representative sample, and the diversity of Australian Muslim women is much greater than that which is captured (Hassan, 2015). It is therefore important not to read this as a generalizable study but rather one that provides in-depth qualitative insights based on a small sample.

In addition to the 20 interviews with women who had experienced violence, thirteen interviews were conducted to provide “practice knowledge” from those encountering Muslim women's violence. These interviews were conducted with community leaders, religious leaders, mainstream DFV services, Muslim-specific DFV services, and others with expertise in the field. The participants were recruited primarily through directly approaching relevant individuals, as well as distributing a call out for interviews, and snowball sampling. All participants in the research provided informed written consent to participate. The research was undertaken according to the requirements of the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research and the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research and received university approval by (Australian National University: approval number 2017–161). In addition, the recruitment methods and interview practices were reviewed by a specialist DFV service to ensure they reflected appropriate safety considerations. Pseudonyms have been used to refer to all lived-experience participants in the research.

It is relevant to note my positionality both in relation to the research participants and the systems they navigate. Researchers are often positioned as either insiders or outsiders based on how much the researcher and subject have in common (Adu-Ampong & Adams, 2020, p. 583). The degree of my commonality with the research participants differed from participant to participant; therefore, my positionality is not necessarily straightforward. Nonetheless, as an Australian Egyptian-Muslim woman, I broadly consider myself approaching this topic from the insider end of the insider/outsider spectrum. My work is also relevant to my positionality as my extensive experiences working both in domestic and family violence systems and in multicultural institutions inevitably shape my understanding of systems and how individuals relate to them.

Notes or transcripts of all interviews and the focus groups were qualitatively analyzed following an abductive process (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012, p. 167). Experiences were sorted into categories aligned to the three key sites of intervention: mainstream gendered services; cultural and faith communities; and professionalized multicultural responses. The analysis and emerging themes were iteratively revisited to identify sub-themes related to the participants experiences of engaging in each site of intervention, including both positive and negative experiences. Particular attention was paid to developing sub-themes that described experiences of intersectionality. This was done by starting with intersectionality as a thematic category. Specific experiences of gendered, racial, and Islamophobic marginalization were then coded within each of the sites. This enabled an understanding of intersectional gaps and disconnects between the participants’ experiences, and applications of intersectionality.

How Australian Muslim Women Perceive Mainstream Gendered Responses

The primary formal services available to interviewees were DFV services, which reflect a gendered approach to addressing DFV. These services are referred to hereon in as “mainstream gendered responses” insofar as they are not dedicated to and specialized in responding to women of Muslim or migrant backgrounds. This section outlines the strengths and limitations of these services as perceived by the women interviewed. Most women did not engage in mainstream gendered services; however, those that did reported that the services were beneficial to them in that they provided a high level of practical support to live independently and were emotionally supportive. Nine women described a wholly or partially positive engagement with gendered services or organizations. Many women also described significant limitations to mainstream gendered services, though, which I describe further in this section.

First, it is worth noting there are some benefits of these services. For the most part, women spoke highly of the practical support provided and credited this support with being able to leave the relationship. For example, Layla, who experienced DFV as a child, credited a mainstream gendered service as being the reason her mother left her father for good, despite having left and returned many times before. She said on previous occasions her mother did not seek support from a formal service, and therefore eventually returned to living with her father, as she was unable to establish an independent life. The final time she left, she was supported by a women's refuge that assisted her with housing, groceries, and re-establishing her life.

Tiago, a Sudanese woman who was experiencing intimate partner violence, was exceptionally grateful for the support of the women's refuge. She had come to Australia on a spouse visa and needed assistance to learn to live independently. She said:

Well like a big, big challenge, you know. How I live by myself, how—Australia is very, very difficult and with my two children, they are very little…When I come here [my son] he's preschool and [other son] have one year. It's very hard. But alhamdullilah [praise be to God] I find support here in [the women's refuge]. They have community group and they take us outside. They let us know anything you want to support, they tell us about the community, the legal…

Several women spoke highly of the emotional support provided by mainstream women's services. Hanan said she appreciated the lack of judgement, which she felt she would not have received from her cultural or faith community. Similarly, Fareeda said the service she engaged showed a high level of compassion. Yameena appreciated the care shown, despite not being ready to leave yet: “They helped me out a lot…they said there is a halfway home I can go to and that kind of kept on strengthening me bit by bit, if I needed to get out. And the fact that they kept on touching base with me to see are you OK today? What's happening today? You know, is everything OK?” These reflections capture that the mainstream gendered services established from the 1970s onwards respond to a shared need among women for services that can support them with the practical resources and confidence to leave a violent relationship if they choose to do so. Despite cultural and religious differences, this is a shared experience among women. Accessing mainstream gendered services was a key factor in ultimately being able to leave a violent relationship and a useful intervention for many of the women interviewed.

Participants did, however, describe significant limitations to mainstream gendered services, and not all experiences were positive. Six of the women interviewed described a partly or wholly negative experience of engaging a mainstream gendered service. For example, Flower felt the DFV service she was referred to through the police did not appreciate how difficult it was to leave a violent relationship as a migrant woman with few supports in Australia: “The [service] came and telling me, ‘Don’t be afraid. You have us. Blah, blah, blah.’ That's not the fact. That's what makes me go back to my ex-husband. It's better living in a hell than a world I don’t know, you know. I don’t know anyone.” In contrast to Tiago and Natasha, who felt the mainstream gendered service they engaged with responded to the practical challenges they experienced specifically as migrant women, Flower felt the migrant experience was overlooked by this service.

Fareeda, a deeply spiritual Muslim woman, was appreciative of the compassion shown, however felt the psychologist at the service was unable to engage around trauma and resilience in ways that aligned with her worldview and engaged her Islamic philosophy:

But I did feel that they really did hold victims to victimhood. You know, it wasn’t empowering. It was like you poor thing… So, psychologists are great but they only deal with cognitive behavioral therapy. Where it's like a lot of our drives are Islamically from the heart… So as much as that was really great… It didn’t help.

Fareeda's insights resonate with my own experience interviewing a DFV service, during which I observed the expression of Islamophobic views, as illustrated by the following extract:

Worker #1: It is, it is a cultural thing…it's something in their Holy Book that it's not right to follow someone else rule made by white people. So, they have their own rules –

While the comments made to me were direct, several women discussed perceiving judgement and prejudice even when none was verbalized. Consider, for example, Nurjahan's response when I asked a follow-up question regarding what she described as being able to “feel” judgment, despite it not being explicitly stated:

Nurjahan: I just felt so much judgement. I could feel this, oh, you’re a poor little brown thing, and that's the reality of it Sandra. In many situations, even though we don’t want to sometimes necessarily admit it, but then at the same time, I have so many awesome Anglo friends—it's not that I don’t like Anglo people, or that every Anglo person is judgmental, or anything. Geez, like …

While some of the negative experiences are avoidable and could possibly be remedied through cultural competency training, most women described inherent limitations. Such limitations included the inability to support women to obtain an Islamic divorce, provide spiritual guidance, and the depth of understanding of culture and faith. The inability of mainstream gendered services to support navigation of Islamic divorce processes is a specific and clear example of where reliance on mainstream gendered services for responses to DFV fails to meet the needs of Muslim women. In fact, nine of the women sought support from an Imam to facilitate a religious divorce. The importance of obtaining an Islamic divorce for many Muslim women has been well documented in other research (Ahmed & Krayem, 2021; Buckley, 2019). While obtaining an Islamic divorce was important to many of the women, this was not a need that could be serviced by the mainstream system.

These patterns also emerged in relation to participants’ desire for spiritual guidance, particularly in cases where there was spiritual abuse, or justification of abuse on religious grounds—again, something mainstream services were unable to address. In these situations, the women expressed a need to re-learn their faith, or re-assess their spiritual perspectives. The following extract of an interview with Najda, who was subject to extensive spiritual abuse, is illustrative:

Najda: I’m still in this very long—and I don't know if it will ever end, re-negotiation of my relationship with Allah [weeps] and what it means to be a Muslim. What—like what connection I can have with the rituals that were so damaging for such a long time, without re-damaging yourself. But also knowing the importance of ritual, and like the beauty of ritual…like you know, there is just something indescribably beautiful about [pauses] standing next to somebody—or lots of people, and just immersing yourself in devotion…

In interviews, few women could cite examples of supports that can respond to needs that sit at the intersection of spiritual or cultural needs and their experiences of DFV. Instead, seven women expressed reservations as to the extent that an Anglo professional or service could truly relate to their context. For example, Yameena wanted each of her children to get therapy to mitigate the impacts of violence on their development and emotional wellbeing. While it was important to her that they have a Muslim therapist, there were not enough Muslim therapists in Sydney to allow for all her children to see one. The value of a Muslim therapist was echoed by one of the participants who had experience working in social services and in cultural competency training. She described her skepticism of whether it was truly possible for an Anglo Australian person, even well trained, to relate to her cultural norms despite the good intentions:

I want to say that you can totally teach people about what growing up in an ethnic household is like. I was always taught to respect and love my parents and elders, so like, un-conditioning that, it's never going to happen. I’ve already accepted that. Could you sufficiently tell someone that? And have them really understand it? I mean, I’m not sure.

These dynamics surfaced when discussing who the women chose to disclose and discuss violence with. Another participant, for example, spoke of feeling that she desperately needed therapy, but was unable to find someone of the same faith or a similar cultural background and so she had neglected this to the ongoing detriment of her mental health. The only suitable psychologist she knew was one of her best friends: “It matters to me. It matters to me that—like, I mean, if [name withheld] wasn’t one of my best friends, and we didn’t work together, I would go to [name withheld].” This observation parallels findings that show Australian Muslim women are more likely to disclose violence in their informal networks and within their faith and cultural communities (Elhelw Wright, 2022). Thus, while the insights of the women interviewed indicate improved cultural sensitivity would be beneficial, they also question to what extent a mainstream gendered service can holistically meet Australian Muslim women's needs.

How Australian Muslim Women Perceive Faith and Cultural Community Responses

The insights from the participants about their engagement with faith and cultural communities demonstrate both the gendered marginalization they experience, and the unique emotional and spiritual support such spaces can offer. Fourteen of the women interviewed engaged with faith and cultural communities. The most common reasons for actively seeking support were to obtain an Islamic divorce or for spiritual guidance, such as to understand religious rights or learning faith independent of patriarchal interpretations. While these were common needs for the participants, as discussed above, they are unable to be addressed by mainstream gendered services, therefore necessitating engagement with faith and cultural communities, or in the alternative, not seeking any support at all for these needs.

Sixteen participants, representing the majority of women interviewed, described a negative experience of engaging with faith and cultural communities. The reasons related primarily to women being pressured to be dutiful to perpetrators or being made responsible for preserving the relationship. For example, Natasha said the following in relation to seeking assistance from cultural communities:

…and honestly, whenever I went to someone who could help me—which was the communities around here—they said the same thing, “Go back to your husband. This is how we do things.” And they start showing me the books that says, “Look, it says in here, if wife disobeys the husband, the husband can beat up the wife—just enough so she doesn’t have bruises.” And that was OK apparently. It wasn’t OK for me. I wouldn’t beat up; I wouldn’t beat up a dog…

A further six women reported the response being too lenient on the male party and not supportive of women. Zainab summarized the position she and many other women she knew of as:

Basically, it goes without saying that these mashayekh [Sheikhs] try to make the break as clean and convenient as possible for party holding the Y-chromosome. Heaven forbid, he should actually have had to uphold an Islamically binding marriage contract with clear as day stipulations.

Marginalization also occurred through isolation from community. Four women said their faith communities, cultural communities or social networks isolated them once they left the relationship. For example, Natasha had been told by her parents that they would never speak with her again if she left the relationship. Flower found herself losing friends, as her friends felt she was now a threat to their relationships as a single woman. Tahira's ex-husband was a prominent community leader, and when she left, she was completely excluded from her community:

I used to always go, you know, to mix with the community and to learn about Islam and stuff like that. And I just stopped. I have not been there since. Because like, I see how people from that organization now ignore me, turn away from me, avoid me in public. I don’t know what they’ve been told about me. But whatever it is, it's severe enough for them to have cut me off totally.

Two of the mainstream services interviewed discussed the challenges of women being socially isolated after leaving. Generally, the main social network of the Muslim women they supported—particularly migrant Muslim women—was their families, faith or cultural community. However, they described isolation from the community as an almost inevitable consequence of leaving the relationship due to community attitudes and safety concerns. As such, for many women in violent relationships they were faced with a choice between safety, and connection to their community.

In addition to the substantive words and behaviors of community members, some women also described the dynamics of institutional processes as harmful, particularly in the context of obtaining an Islamic divorce. Three of the women discussed poor or insensitive processes during the Islamic divorce process. All three discussed the intimidating nature of talking about their situation in front of several male religious leaders, and a dismissive approach to the violence they encountered during these processes. Two also discussed a lack of transparency in the process and unexplained time delays.

However, not all of the women had negative experiences of engaging faith and cultural communities. Eight had either a positive experience, or a mixture of positive and negative experiences. For example, when Aqilah (who experienced abuse from her father) was getting married, her father sought to prevent the marriage going ahead. When she tried to seek the intervention of religious leaders in her city of residence, they emphasized her obligation to be dutiful to her father. When her fiancé suggested flying to his hometown and meeting with an Imam who he thought would have a more supportive response, the response was positive:

…he was like “your parents have no right to be that way with you… You have no obligation to your parents Islamically if this is what they’re doing. You know you have a duty as a Muslim who's being abused, to go away from them. So, if they are hurting you, don’t worry about silat rahim [family ties] or all the rest of it. You don’t owe them this.’ And hearing that from someone who knows so much more about religion was just like ‘holy shit, maybe there are different interpretations that you know, aren’t so destructive.” And he repeated that. Like on our wedding day when he gave the khutbah [sermon] before he did the katb kitab [Islamic marriage ceremony] all he talked about was our rights basically. And it really pissed off a lot of the people at our wedding actually. I got yelled at by a couple of my uncles because they were like “he's telling all the women their rights.”

The impact of such interventions can be profound for victim-survivors. While Nurjahan felt elements of the response she got from a Sheikh were negative, she also credited that same Sheikh with saving her life:

it got me to a point of being suicidal as well, and the person who saved me was Sheikh [name withheld]… he said to me that I’m amazing, that I’m a good person, and I had lost all of that stuff because I was in this situation, where I felt, oh, my husband hates me; my dad wasn’t particularly nice to me, so I thought my dad hates me, too; God hates me, because an aunt in my family told me I had no iman because I asked for a divorce.

For another participant, who is deeply religious, the Islamic center was a refuge during the abusive relationship and after leaving:

my home, my family, my second bed is at the [Islamic center]. I feel like I'm this alive person where I volunteer, and I work with the younger youth girls and I just invite them and educate them. I take them out on excursions and the thing is I still feel like I have a sense of belonging; a purpose there. And they don’t deny me that. When I'm at lessons I'm learning, and I come out of there and I feel awesome. When my kids are there, they're safe. When I'm there I'm safe…And the thing is, when it was all happening, that's where my home spot was.

These insights show that, for better or for worse, many Muslim women engage their faith and cultural communities. When they do, many have a negative experience that reflects various forms of gendered marginalization, such as pressuring women to stay in violent relationships, privileging men's interests in separation processes, insensitive divorce processes, and socially isolating separated women. However, when the experiences are positive, the impact is profound: faith and cultural communities can intervene positively, including by validating the experiences of victim-survivors and driving cultural change. Positive responses from within faith communities in particular offer a unique form of spiritual affirmation that secular and mainstream spaces are ill-equipped to offer. Accordingly, they can enable intersectional service provision by addressing key cultural and religious gaps in mainstream gendered services. However, interventions from faith and cultural communities are rarely captured under policies and programs framed as intersectional in Australia, as will be discussed further below.

How Australian Muslim Women Perceive Professionalized Multicultural Responses

While the above sections discuss experiences of engaging with mainstream, and faith and cultural communities, respectively, this section discusses responses that combine both. The reflections of those who both did and did not access professionalized multicultural support provide insights on the benefits and limitations of these services. The participants tended to prefer these services, with the main reasons for not using them being privacy, confidentiality and limited availability.

The women who engaged a professional who was Muslim or of a similar cultural background described a positive experience. The reasons they said the engagement was positive was due to better cultural understanding, better understanding of spiritual and religious factors, and an absence of judgement. Tahira, who was seeing a Muslim psychologist, said “she understood the process. I didn’t need to explain anything to her.” Speaking of a counsellor of a similar cultural background another participant said: “The first person I saw was amazing—she was half Egyptian, half English. She wasn’t Muslim but she completely understood that weird family dynamic of hating my parents and also loving them.” These reflections speak to a sense of relief that the women did not need to waste their time, resources and emotional energy explaining their culture and faith to a person before they can proceed to discuss the substance of their issues. There is a natural ease and efficiency in seeking support where the two parties proceed from a broadly shared cultural understanding.

The benefit of professionals who are Muslim or of similar cultural backgrounds was echoed in interviews with leaders, service providers, and others with expertise in the field. A CEO of a specialist service for Muslim women experiencing DFV emphasized that their service provided a space where Muslim women could consider their options and make decisions about their futures without having to contend with a different worldview. Engy, a cultural liaison officer at a legal service, said women were often more comfortable with someone who could speak their own language, or who shared the same cultural background. She also believed women were more comfortable with a worker who is not necessarily of the same faith or cultural background but has a shared experience of being from a minority culture. Halima, a Muslim counsellor, said her clients took comfort in knowing she would not provide advice that contradicts Islamic teachings. This was a similar sentiment to that expressed by a survivor-advocate who said the following:

A lot of women are grappling with the deen[religion] side—a lot of women don’t know what their rights are Islamically, so to go to someone who understands that conflict, that battle within—you know, ‘it's haram[sinful], you’re a bad Muslim for leaving your husband, this is your Qadr[destiny], you’re going to go to Jannah[heaven] for being patient’ all that stuff—if it comes from a Muslima [female Muslim] you can dispel and break those barriers. That empowers them.

The insights of those who couple professionalism with cultural proximity show that this approach can simplify conversations by eliminating some of the doubts women might otherwise have about the advice they are given. This is particularly important given culture and religion are frequently weaponized as tools of abuse (Hansia & Merolla, 2021). In other words, victim-survivors are likely to have already been exposed to contradictory perspectives on what culture and faith demands of them as women.

The availability of individuals and services that were professional and had a strong cultural or faith-based grounding was severely limited. While professionals who were Muslim were generally viewed favorably, six women who did not engage Muslim professionals cited confidentiality and privacy as key reasons for not doing so, as the only professionals they knew were also part of their community network. For example, when asked if she would have preferred to get help from a Muslim service, Layla responded: “I think a generic service…there's a lot of talk that goes on in the community… It's like, I would rather an Australian who doesn’t know who I am to help me out, rather than someone who has a judgement on my family.”

Another woman said she knew a counsellor a lot of her friends were seeing but was hesitant to see her because she knew too many people in her social network. She was also hesitant to approach a Muslim community organization that was local to her, as several people who worked in that organization were distantly related to her. Several women were not seeing a therapist despite wanting to as they could not find someone who operated within a cultural or faith-based framework who was not also known to them.

In locations with smaller populations of Australian Muslims, the availability of such services or individual professionals is limited, and it may not be practicable to make such services available in all geographic areas. In smaller cities and regional locations, privacy concerns are further compounded due to the small size of communities. Therefore, while professional services by other Muslims or people of similar cultural backgrounds emerged as a preferred response for many participants, they are certainly not a panacea and cannot be relied on as a singular response to DFV in Australian Muslim communities. Nonetheless, their insights show the value in investing further in these specialized services, as they promise to improve outcomes for Australian Muslim women.

Discussion

Insights from interviews illustrate how Australian Muslim women perceive clear gaps in cultural and religious elements of responses to DFV. In particular, they express a desire for more culturally sensitive gendered services, assistance in navigating religious rights, gender-sensitive spiritual support, and greater access to professional services delivered by individuals from a similar cultural or religious background. In short, they desire a truly intersectional approach that is attentive to both their cultural and gendered needs. In Australia, however, these gaps have not been addressed by intersectionality alone: existing intersectional policy has not concerned itself with the establishment of the fundamental infrastructure required to address cultural and religious needs. Accordingly, multiculturalism, which has been a platform to fund and support institutions that focus on cultural and religious rights, is an essential companion in providing a specialist focus on culture that could ensure meaningful responses to Muslim women's needs.

These insights have implications for how scholars and policymakers alike position intersectionality as a vehicle for addressing DFV. For scholars, this example raises questions as to whether the evocation of intersectionality is enough to ensure justice for, in this case, Australian Muslim women (and likely other women). For policymakers, the research suggests a need to consider how other tools, such as those that have been enabled through multicultural policy, can deliver the promises of intersectionality.

This case study captures how several women described inherent limitations to mainstream gendered services, despite noting several recounting positive experiences. It is not reasonable to expect more from mainstream gendered services—for example, it is beyond their scope to facilitate an Islamic divorce, provide spiritual guidance, or have an in-depth understanding of the person's culture or faith. In addition, mainstream gendered services are limited by their reach, as violence is more likely to be disclosed within faith or cultural communities (Elhelw Wright, 2022). Some negative experiences recounted by women were due to discrimination or a lack of cultural awareness, not the inherent limitations of mainstream gendered services. These negative experiences can be addressed through improved cultural competency. Addressing this shortcoming, however, would require a sector that specializes in cultural competency and can impart these skills onto mainstream gendered services. It is therefore clear that culturally and religiously specialized services are an essential part of an intersectional ecosystem to both impart skills and knowledge on mainstream gendered services and address the inherent limitations of existing services.

The need for stronger culturally and religiously tailored infrastructure is further supported by the overall positive experiences that women recounted in relation to engaging services delivered by professionals of a similar cultural or faith background. This was the category of response that was most preferred by participants and the most likely to be perceived as positive. The sustainability of these services, however, necessitates a strong recognition by the state that there is value in tailoring public services for particular cultural groups—this would be a true recognition of intersectionality, not just women first and cultural differences second. This was a central tenet of multiculturalism as articulated under the Galbally review, which should be revived in the current review (Commonwealth of Australia, 1978).

Finally, responses evince a vacuum whereby DFV policy has not adequately engaged with cultural and faith communities. The current state of multiculturalism provides poor infrastructure for ensuring communities can play a positive role. For better or for worse, more women actively engaged with their cultural or faith community than with mainstream gendered services. This pattern is likely to remain a feature of how Australian Muslim women navigate violence in their lives, prompting the need for deeper policy engagement and support. Faith and cultural communities can respond positively—and when they do, the impact is profound, especially in an emotional and spiritual sense. Currently, however, this research supports observations that Australian Muslim women's experiences of engaging with faith and cultural communities tend to be negative, perpetuate harm, and can even have fatal consequences. Shortly after the death of Canberra woman Sabah Al-Mdwali, the following was posted on social media in relation to the murder:

Tonight I received a call from a friend who knew the victim's family. The mother and her husband have had ongoing marital issues for the past two years. Friends and families attempted on many occasions to rectify their problems but there was no permanent solution. No one encouraged her to leave him even though it was clear she was experiencing signs of abuse. No one offered her support to leave her husband or suggested it. But she left. They separated for a period of time, but in those times, a few people were encouraging her to go back to him. ‘He loves you,’ ‘He needs his child,’ ‘Divorce is not nice,’ ‘Your life will be better and he can change’. Months went by and she finally gave up to the constant nagging and judgemental people who would not leave her alone. She had returned to her husband only for friends and family to discover that he had murdered her.

Cultural and faith communities have a critical role in improving the societal response to DFV. In this case, a clear state policy of multiculturalism and strong associated social infrastructure is a prerequisite for appropriately defining that role and meaningfully engaging with cultural and faith communities to give effect to a positive role. Ultimately, the state requires guidelines, principles, a policy framework and resources for engaging with cultural and faith communities, particularly if it is to do so without causing further harm.

Conclusion

In exploring Australian Muslim women's perceptions of navigating a range of supports aimed at addressing DFV, this research provides important insights for how to give effect to intersectionality. Feminist standpoint theory suggests that marginalized groups are better situated to query and bring new understandings of systems and theories (Sweet, 2020). This is especially so in relation to research focused on power relations, such as research on intersectionality (Collins, 2000). Intersectionality itself arose from centering the experiences of people who had previously been ignored (Nash, 2008). Like analyses that show Black women in the United States can, and should, be able to theorize for women (see Carbado, 2013), this analysis draws from Australian Muslim women's insights to show how Australian DFV systems can be improved. This research can thus be instructive for how intersectionality is understood and applied more broadly in the Australian context.

A key theme throughout interviews is the notable gap in responding to cultural and religious needs. Starting with mainstream gendered services, the participants recounted instances of cultural insensitivity and highlighted the inherent limitations of these services. The services were limited in the extent to which they could relate on a cultural level; they could not address religious needs such as with Islamic divorce processes or providing spiritual guidance. However, faith and cultural communities also did not meet Muslim women's cultural and religious needs. While the effects of positive interventions from faith communities were profound, these positive experiences were not widespread or consistent. The paucity of culturally tailored professional services, particularly multicultural services and services delivered by individual professionals from similar cultural backgrounds, meant many women were unable to access supports that could holistically meet their needs. Despite these services being the most preferred by participants, they are not a panacea, as a significant number cited a preference for mainstream services due to confidentiality and fear of judgement. These findings align with previous research that shows a need to recognize multicultural and settlement services as an integral part of the DFV system (Vaughan et al., 2019). Taken together, experiences across the three sites reveal a significant intersectional gap that current DFV policy, despite outwardly professing to be intersectional, is failing to address.

This is unsurprising, given the erosion of multicultural infrastructure in Australia over recent decades. The ‘mainstreaming’ approach to social services has left many gaps in service provision, particularly in relation to cultural needs. It has also led to the reduction of resources available to mainstream services to build their own capacity to address women's needs through training and collaboration with specialist services. Having specialist infrastructure for mainstream services to draw upon is critical, given the privacy and confidentiality concerns of many participants in relation to specialist services, as well as the general lack of availability of specialist services.

The challenges outlined in this study point to the problems of primarily approaching intersectionality at the level of individual identities (Henne & Troshynski, 2013). If intersectionality speaks to how different positionalities collide in the lives of women, it must also speak to the need for different systems to support these women. In the case of policies and programs intended to support Australian Muslim women experiencing DFV, the anti-violence system has access to limited relevant resources due to the erosion of multiculturalism. The current review of Australia's multicultural framework provides a critical opportunity to re-build the framework and infrastructure needed to address the cultural and religious needs of Australian Muslim women experiencing violence. Strengthening Australia's multicultural framework is likely to yield benefits for a range of women experiencing marginalization at the intersection of culture and gender.

The insights are relevant to feminist scholarship more broadly. Given the prominence of intersectionality, it is pertinent to ensure it does not replicate the essentialism it critiques. This paper argues that, at least in the case of Australian policy, many of the risks of essentialism are best offset by recognizing the interdependence of both intersectionality and multiculturalism—and then developing systems to support their reinforcement. The insights provided here sound a warning about relying on intersectionality in name, especially when it emerges in isolation of other tools available to understand and respond to the varying elements of women's experiences. Intersectionality, as originally conceived by Crenshaw (1989, 1991) and other Black feminist scholars, was never intended to whitewash or simplify difference. This research demonstrates that without a framework for navigating cultural difference, intersectionality can have the perverse effect of flattening cultural and religious differences rather than responding to those differences to support women in need.