Cracking a sexually suggestive joke or a boss lunging at an employee to kiss her adversely impacts refugee and migrant women in Australia because of visa insecurity and the cultural pressures they carry.
A landmark study by Australia's National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety has gathered insights from nearly 900 migrant and refugee women in Australia through a survey, focus groups and in-depth interviews.
Led by Professor Marie Segrave, from the University of Melbourne, researchers found that culturally ingrained myths and assumptions are interwoven with diverse women's experiences of discrimination and workplace sexual harassment.
Nearly 90 per cent of the research participants were born outside of Australia.
Several women spoke of how stereotypes about their race or religion or cultural background were part and parcel of how they were sexually harassed by perpetrators.
"I feel the way I look like, the racial profiling as an Asian, I feel targeted a lot, because … people … have this stereotype, like Asian women won’t speak up," a woman cited in the report said.
Launched on Wednesday, the 108-page report noted that perpetrators of workplace sexual harassment were predominantly male but not always.
Offenders were identified as having both power and entitlement yet this was not exclusively linked to status within the workplace.
The first phase of the project, a wide-ranging survey, found 46 per cent of respondents had experienced workplace sexual harassment.
Of those 58 per cent had experienced two or more types.
The five most common were indecent phone calls or messages of a sexual nature (71 per cent), unwanted physical touching (54 per cent), sexually suggestive comments or jokes (53 per cent), intrusive questions about the respondents' private life or physical appearance (49 per cent) and staring or leering (48 per cent).
Detailed in the report was the case of Pakistani woman on a student visa who confided to her colleague about unwanted kissing by her store manager as she was unloading stock.
"She started crying, and obviously she tried to escape from him and left the work straight away," the colleague said.
"But she was so confused what to do, and she was also from Pakistan … and she was married."
Impact to careers was one of the most common reasons why migrant and refugee women did not tell anyone about incidents of harassment.
"I know a lot of people in my community, they do feel more secure after they get PR (permanent residency)," a participant from regional Australia said.
"When they are on temporary visa, they don’t want to lose the job...they even think that they (the authorities) might send them back to detention centres if they do anything wrong, if they have any report," she said.
The three-year study recommended tackling sexual harassment in the workplace in a more expansive manner, one that takes seriously the interconnected levels of discrimination such as racism, visa status, and employment conditions.
1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732)
National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service 1800 211 028
