Preventing violence against women: Engaging men from culturally and linguistically diverse communities

ANAGHA JOSHI: Welcome to today's webinar, Preventing violence against women: Engaging men from CALD communities. My name is Anagha Joshi and I am Senior Research Officer at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, I would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri, Woiwurrung and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation who are the Traditional Owners of Naarm Melbourne. I pay my respects to Traditional Owners of country throughout Australia across many of the lands many of you join us today and recognise their continuing connection to Taungurung Land and Waters, and we pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us today. There are live captions so follow the link in the chat box. There is Q&A in the GoToWebinar dashboard. We are trying to cover a big topic and we won't get to everything and for that reason any questions we don't get to today we will try to address in the recording after the webinar that you can watch in two weeks time and you will be notified or on the AIFS website. You can find readings and resources in the handout section of the GoToWebinar control panel and a short feedback survey will pop up at the end and we would appreciate if you could complete that for us.

Before we begin I would like to hold some space and recognise those who have lived experience of violence in their own lives and those that they love. During the webinar we will be discussing violence against women, family violence and sexual violence. Please take care while listening and if you would benefit from extra support there are resources available in the chat.

Engaging boys and men is an increasingly important part of preventing violence against women. The national plan to when violence against women in children highlights the importance of working with men in always on developing positive masculinity. In my review of the evidence I found emerging evidence on what works including frameworks of engaging boys and men but most of the research uses Western knowledge and language to discuss gender-based violence, engagement mechanism as the framing used. A major gap in the literature which how to engage men from culturally and linguistically diverse communities in the prevention space which is why we are here today. Where do we start, what strategies work and what don't? It is my pleasure to welcome the panellists, Anu Krishnan, Jun Bin Lee and Tarang Chawla, therefore bios are available in the GoToWebinar dashboard, I want to highlight a few things we want to discuss as a group in preparation for the webinar.

The first one was acknowledging the limits of using the word CALD. It is a shorthand at but it pulls to gather people with diverse backgrounds and migration pathways, using terms like CALD can be othering or assume... Some ethnic groups are more marginalised than others and we need to focus on this.

Secondly working on men who use violence might look different to those who haven't used it. Many of you work in spaces where this can be blurred, risk factor or signs or attitude, the key messages we will cover will work across the spectrum and be applicable to various areas.

Enough about me talking, I would like to bring in our panellists. And start to set the scene around your work, what drew you to the work and what is engaging men in prevention look like based on your work in the space? I would start with Anu first if that's alright.

ANU KRISHNAN: I would also like to acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded. What is it about working with CALD men? I am a social worker by background and for my first 15 or 20 years I worked with victim survivors, and children who were at the receiving end of violence and conflict. I started wondering if any of the work was having an impact because the number of clients keeps on increasing, and the ways in which women experience violence keeps evolving and changing and becoming increasingly difficult to address.

10 years back I shifted to working with men and started working in the men's behaviour change space facilitating group with men. You try to get them to change their behaviour which got me thinking whether we can actually stop it, so violent it doesn't happen over a generation we end violence in its entirety. This was around the time of the Royal Commission in Victoria and violence prevention came up and it made so much sense. Looking at the public health response to a problem like violence against women grabbed my attention and that's what I've been doing for the last 8-10 years.

ANAGHA JOSHI: How about you, Jun?

JUN BIN LEE: Thanks for inviting me, my journey started from a leadership course run by AMES, I was the second batch, it was a mind blowing leadership course, my initial reason for joining was quite naive, you could up skill and free food and all that but seven or eight weeks later it shattered my worldview and that's how I got more interested in doing work in this space. Clearly because I hadn't been paying attention most of my life. I guess something that has a stronger pull for me, I was 30+ at that time and not paying attention, I was focusing on my career and my education, my relationship and all that part.

long story short I change my career path. What does it look like? Constantly asking myself what am I trying to do? Self-doubt and learning and unlearning journey for me. That's where I am that this point.

ANAGHA JOSHI: Tarang, tell us a bit about what you bring to this space and what you are working on at the moment.

TARANG CHAWLA: Thank you. I came to this work through family tragedy following the murder of my younger sister Nikita. At the time this was 11.5 years ago she was murdered, my work focused on the criminal justice system responses and an element of recovery and healing work, an area that is growing and I know AIFS focuses on as well. Much like what Anu was talking about men's behaviour change, a lot of it is fixing something after some life altering consequences have occurred. I shifted to work more around prevention, what drew me to the work in the first place was family tragedy but I stayed there because men's violence is bigger than family or personal stories, it is social, cultural and political and we all have the ability to prevent. What drew me in further was that gap in how we talk about violence after it happens and how little we do as a society on systems or norms at a structural level that make violence a possibility in the first place, that make it a choice that are not insignificant number of men choose. Men are overwhelmingly the people that choose to use violence, but they are the brothers and colleagues and community leaders who can either reinforce the conditions for violence or challenge them.

There is a spectrum of what that looks like. For me, my work around prevention is not about reassuring men they are the good guys but inviting them to a conversation about collective responsibility so when the don't carry the responsibility of educating us as men. Prevention work whether CALD communities or broader mainstream communities has to go beyond awareness, most men know violence is wrong, the harder work is the prevention work and recognise entitlement, control, minimising sexist humour, before they become visible forms of violence. My work is a lot about meeting men where they are but not leaving them there, it is important to take them somewhere else. Connect thing and helping them to understand. Hopefully we can talk about what that can look like in practice.

ANAGHA JOSHI: Thank you, the introduction sets the scene up for what this work can look like. I want to move on to one packing some of the drivers of violence and intersectionality. One of the key drivers for violence against women is gender inequality. Anu, do you agree this holds true with CALD communities?

ANU KRISHNAN: I agree that gender inequality is where violence can thrive and at its core violence is the intersection of power from one person to another. Power is exerted when you feel you can control the other person or coerce them to do what you want, the application we are talking about, gender is one of the greatest drivers of men feeling they have a hold over women and others less powerful than them at a core level.

If we follow the Change the Story model, it is not so different from multicultural community or CALD communities, it just looks different when you see it from the outside. For the uninitiated it is easier to attribute it to culture but it is the expression of culture in different ways. For example, many communities to come to Australia from other countries, they might have seen gender stereotyping done differently, they may have seen coming as a gender equal society as a challenge to their authority and that's why the violence continues. 

The other key factor to keep in mind is gender inequality and gender stereotyping do not thrive and flourish just because men are the ones holding up that pillar. It is because many women, also for the sake of security and other cultural factors that system alive, and they bring those beliefs and values from their home countries into Australia. And that allows violence to thrive here as well.

Very frequently in our assessment of risk of violence, we think culture is a great risk factor. But what we sometimes fail to unpack is held at culture exists within communities both here and in their home communities is a greater driver of violence. What culture feels like, what it sounds like and what it looks like are often key factors of what we need to look at when it comes to intersectionality.

And as practitioners, particularly prevention practitioners, we need to become familiar with that language so we can meet people where they are at. I really like what Tarang said earlier where we have to meet people where they are at, we can't leave them there. If they are using culture as a crutch to excuse that violence, we need to shake them out of that spot and get them into a little bit of the discomfort so we can move them away. Leaving them there is not an option. We cannot leave people where they are at if it is going to make others in that sphere of influence unsafe.

So gender inequality definitely sets the foundation, and culture is often used as an excuse.

ANAGHA JOSHI: Thanks, Anu. Jun, would you have anything to add to this? How does this affect violence in culturally and linguistically diverse men?

JUN BIN LEE: One thing I have been working on is really trying to unpack a lot of this from an arts perspective, through storytelling. One form is through musical or creative storytelling.

I just want to quickly share a discovery from that experience. Sorry, let me back step. The story is about two migrants growing up with a certain belief system and how they navigate when they migrate to a new country, and migration comes into play, racism comes into play. And how that impact influences some of the decision-making and in this particular story it led to domestic environments.

The more we unpack this, the more we realise it is essentially a human story. It is human nature for people to want to be respected, to want to have their dignity upheld, and when we come back to this migration and racism experience that they have, that, often time, is where this very, very fundamental human desire was being stripped off or taken away. And then you can see how it is connected to some decisions that are not a good move, but you can see how things link.

So I guess that is where my job or my mission really is, to unpack this and put it out on stage, in this particular case, and have a discussion from that point onwards.

ANAGHA JOSHI: That's really interesting, because what you are describing there is how that intersection between migration and racism can have that connection to things like violence use.

I might bring Tarang into this conversation as well, if you had anything to add to this, as well as if you a chance to tell us a little about what kind of barriers are there to men working in this space generally. I think we mentioned in your introduction that we have had quite a few questions about men justifying the use of violence due to cultural reasons. So what is your advice to practitioners who, maybe working with this kind of mindset?

Tarang, before you start, the audience has mentioned they cannot hear you very well Would you mind adjusting your microphone so they can hear you a bit better?

TARANG CHAWLA: Is that a bit better?

ANAGHA JOSHI: Keep talking, and hopefully it will be better.

TARANG CHAWLA: In terms of the barriers that arise with culturally and linguistically diverse communities, CALD men, and so on, it is touched on that reality that some men will use culture or religion to justify that use of violence. But it is imperative on practitioners not to accept that framing. And also to challenge that framing internally, so that we do not become those who collude with those who use violence, because we are also products of the broader cultural and social environment, not only the ones in which we were raised, but the ones we live in now.

It is important to ask ourselves, as well as others, "What do we mean by culture here?" And that helps us get to the bottom of that definition.

With men's use of violence, we have patriarchal violence, misogynistic violence, anti-women ideas, and rigid ideas about what being a man or being a boy means. So it is important that whenever culture is framed as the cause of violence, we are careful that violence is not caused by culture, and harmful norms exist in any kind of culture. Patriarchy will use the Scripture or its holy book, whatever it is, or the interpretation of that, to justify how women should occupy certain roles in society, and men should be expected to occupy certain roles.

It's important to think about, with migration and racism, it is important to acknowledge that yes, they create distress, loss of status, loss of financial and economic well-being, and certainly add to economic pressures to those who were already facing consequences from racialised inequality.

So we understand that they intensify the risk factors. And those experiences in and of themselves do not cause violence in a misogynistic way. There are many men, in fact the majority of men who experience migration and racism stress will not use that to then enact violence on the women and girls in their lives.

So the key issue is how we socialise men to respond to those pressures, how to encourage them to act when they do feel those pressures, and how to identify those pressures. Especially if they try to regain authority in home.

That is where some of the conversations around male privilege are often lacking, around the experience of men of colour. Because a lot of them will go through life with economic inequality, knothole power, and they will hear through a white, liberal Western notion of equality that men are privileged and men have everything. And they will look at the world, and rightfully point out, "I don't really have a lot. I work doubly hard to get half as much as the man next to me."

So there needs to be a much more intersectional approach in understanding the men who use violence. So that is where understanding migration and racism risks, and being from a culturally marginalised community at pressures. But at no stage do they ever build out to excuse violence. So practitioners who work with men who experience these have a real challenge ahead of them, because it requires holding multiple truths. Racism matters, but it does not excuse violence. Because you experience racism outside home, it does not excuse you to go into the home and an act of violence or controlling behaviours on the women or the children in your life.

So men will often use that culture, and I think one of the ways that we can maybe shift those barriers, or that we challenge the barriers, is making sure that we involve trusted community voices, but always making sure that they are aligned with women's safety and not reinforcing patriarchal authority.

So for example, faith-based settings can be a great way to reach many men, I have lost count of the number of faith-based seminars I have sat through where often the priest or the conduit to a higher power is giving the most patriarchal interpretation or adaptation of something that is not meant to be read in that way whatsoever.

So they actually add on a whole bunch of misogynistic subtext, which then, for those who look at those people as trusted figures, will then take home. It is those sorts of cultural attitudes that then allow for some people to think that violence is an acceptable response, because the person I trust most all the figures they trust most are giving them patriarchal readings of it.

So it is really important that we are challenging patriarchal attitudes at every possibility.

ANAGHA JOSHI: Thanks, Tarang. I think it is a really interesting point about holding multiple truths, and that makes this conversation particularly hard, working across intersectionality and having those spaces where men can talk about this in an open way.

Anu, I saw you nodding away. Do you have anything else you want to add in terms of the barriers and the intersectionality conversation?

ANU KRISHNAN: Thank you, Tarang for that. I think you said that beautifully. There are lots of barriers, but I think there are opportunities for us to engage. Barriers where we stop and say "This is too hard, let's go back home," but there are opportunities to actually have some of these very meaningful conversations.

One of the things that strikes me about intervention work is that unlike other settings I worked in previously, it is actually about sitting down with people and having deeper conversations, and being open for us to be challenged, and for us to challenge from a place of curiosity, not judgement.

One of the biggest challenges as a worker working with people from different cultures is that sometimes, you are actually worried that you might come across as racist or you may be engaging in a stereotype. Or your biases might be coming out. But approaching this with genuine curiosity and openness, and being willing to debate your point of view I think opens more doors.

Jun spoke earlier about the leadership programs we have had at AMES since 2017, and we sat down with a cohort of people with diverse cultural backgrounds and had these discussions of what does culture look like? What actually is culture? We are using culture as a crutch to explain violence, we are using it as a reason to perpetuate patriarchal views, but what are those values? It is shaped by our practices and beliefs, and what you see on the outside is culture. But if you go back to the basics, it is the values that we all hold dear. And these are universal values.

If you picked any three people from across the street, they might be like, "My core values our respect, trust, I want to be safe, I want to be loved." Engaging people in those conversations, OK, trust is a core value, safety is a core value, what does that look like for you? Is that for her to feel scared when she walks in the door, or for her to turn around and ask you to take out the rubbish even though you have had a long day at work? What does safety look like?

If you genuinely want your partner to trust you and trust her, is that constantly checking her messages, or worrying that she is out late? These are questions people need to sit with. As practitioners, we are not looking for an end or an outcome at the end of that conversation. We're looking for people to open those doors for themselves, and have those conversations in safety and without judgement. Because the minute judgement comes in, we know people get defensive. And if we are looking for long-term change, we need to sit with discomfort, and we need to be comfortable with other people sitting with discomfort as well.

It is a slow boil, it is not going to happen overnight.

One of the challenges in this instant gratification society is that we are expecting people to fall into our way of thinking straight away. Whereas the messaging needs to be very nuanced. If we are genuinely respectful of everybody's culture, that needs to show up in the way we do our work as well.

One of the big conversations I have with a lot of practitioners is, "How are we supposed to know everybody's culture?" It's very different to ours, but bringing back to those core cultural values, having those discussions around the expression of that culture in today's context - if something made sense 100 years ago, in some other geography, is that still relevant now? And is that that value you want to keep going, or that practice, which has no longer got any meaning today? It takes time and effort but prevention is a long-term game.

ANAGHA JOSHI: It's great how you combine the common challenges with the opportunities and solutions, what that might look like when you are working with men from CALD communities. I want to shift it a little bit, but still relevant, you can't have a webinar on this topic without having the role of misogynistic content online and how that impacts young people. How does working with engaging young people look like, especially in the new age in this context?

TARANG CHAWLA: Things may have worked 100 years ago in terms of attitudes all the way society was structured and does it work now? Obviously the manosphere, we can't go a day without seeing a news story in Australia or internationally about the effects of of it, boys needing role models or young men not having positive role models. That may be true that boys lack role models but the flipside, people from these communities haven't always had the role models in the public sphere to model their behaviour on and yet they have not been drawn to, as communities, to enact physical violence or coercive control that men have as a collective. The idea that men being given good role models as an antidote to the manosphere is misdirected. At the moment younger men countering misogyny whether they get it through humour, means, pod casts, gaming spaces, algorithms designed to push forward increasingly misogynistic, trans phobic tropes and ideologies and they are getting that at 6-8-12 years old, they see the issue before they have language to identify it.

They might know it is wrong but they might not know why because they don't know what is going on in the content they are consuming. One of the things that makes it successful is it gives boys and young men extremely simple explanations of complex feelings and if we take into account a broader historical view about how men are socialised to reject emotional security, to reject emotional introspection, they are often socialised to not understand feelings of loneliness, rejection, shame and insecurity and the manosphere are giving them the most concrete fixed binary outlook on what they are saying and why it works.

For example, they feel, boys and young men, they don't have life opportunities, they will never buy a home or succeed in life and they often give boys the answer ? feminism or nor certain racial minority groups are to blame. It might be wealth inequality but they blame women as opposed to blaming the billionaires who take from everyday working people. It's a convenient script.

What we have to acknowledge is the work as practitioners to engage boys in this space is to help them identify those feelings of loneliness, rejection, insecurity, shame and confusion and build a degree of media literacy and emotional literacy. As we have seen with Hollywood celebrities, it is perfectly capable for them to understand they need to respect women in a broad sense but not engage in behaviours that display that respect and value women.

For example, a few years ago a Hollywood celebrity, setting up the boundary ways coercive control of a partner could do or not do in terms of her relationships with her female friends. It is important that we approach boys and young men around the manosphere with practice that challenges entrenched belief about authorities, relationships, control and gender and power. The entry point to how we approach it is always different, through sport, community, faith or online avenues, it has to be grounded in the lens of gender and power and not just well-being. It can't be a proposition to make men feel better, it has to ultimately have measurable outcomes for women, girls and children.

ANAGHA JOSHI: Thanks for that, some insight about the manosphere and how it influences young people and how that changes how we engage them. Jun, you work with young people, do you have anything to add about engaging young people from CALD background in this space?

JUN BIN LEE: That was mind blowing, really good. I was looking at the question and thinking about the role model perspective, I guess with some of my interaction with young people, from my cultural background, I am from Malaysia, I am Chinese Malaysian, and seeing the way to understand the way to engage with young people when it comes to role models, I have been exploring pop culture, anime, there are some characters, not all of them are perfect but some of them come with a good characteristics like kindness and loving and trying to... I came across a couple, I'm not sure about whether your audience would know this, a character from Demon Slayer expresses kindness and love, and Prince Zuko from 'Avatar' went through a journey himself from being angry and all that to somehow unlearning prejudice and how to be a better person, more responsible in his actions.

Some of the pathways I have been exploring on how to start a conversation before we go to a deeper discussion on this topic.

ANAGHA JOSHI: It's really good you are bringing in pop culture and how they can be good examples you can weave into your work in prevention as well. We might move on soon to respectful conversations, but I wanted to ask you, Anu, how do older men refer to working with younger men in terms of their behaviours in the CALD context?

ANU KRISHNAN: The narrative people can latch on to, one of the things we see in our work both in intervention response and prevention is Australia as a multicultural country with waves of migration and if you think about the migration 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, a lot of people who came with skilled migrants and came from countries where they had patriarchal systems, they have come here and started to fall in with the rise of gender equality and awareness, they are in Australia, the conflicting sharing of power, they feel they are losing their authority because they have to share what they have with others.

A lot of things you will hear about from that generation is they have lost opportunities to a female candidate, they talk about affirmative action and many organisations have quoted to promote women and that causes anxiety.

The current crop of younger men have grown up in a gender equal society, they are already on board, the narrative they've been hearing is they will never get opportunities because women will take it all. It is not the fact they have to share their opportunities and their power and resources, it is the anxiety of lost opportunity of what it could have been. It's a narrative you see being played out, parents complaining that every problem you have someone else to blame, there is not enough jobs because women are getting all the jobs.

It is not really that, it is not every young man complaining a woman has taken his job, what job are we talking about? Entry-level? Skilled jobs? Are they trying the same things? A lot of the global angst is caught up in the very seductive narrative in the media, the other things, the identity politics in the US, it makes for an attractive narrative for people who need someone to blame.

The narrative in front of them, their partner or sister, the physical evidence that everything is wrong in their life, I will stop there because you have another question.

ANAGHA JOSHI: I would like to move towards some of the practical conversations you can have with people from CALD communities, we have spoken about unpacking gender inequality in the broader context but a lot of practitioners here want to know what they can do differently when working directly with their clients. One of the things that has come up in the question box, what are we talking about specifically when talking about violence? Anu, can you discuss a little bit about the language and what violence might mean to people from different cultural backgrounds.

ANU KRISHNAN: It's important for other practitioners to be aware, even if we are speaking different languages understanding could be different things. The concepts of safety and violence and control, they mean different things to people from different cultures and different things in different languages. In many languages there is no term for coercion, no term for false, it is expressed as a feeling, not as an action. When we are trying to talk to people from different communities, we want to know if we are singing from the same song book. We may have an interpreter but unless we understand the nuance of what they mean, our work will have some holes. Language barriers is one of the biggest things in intervention and prevention. Prevention is conceptual, people need to understand what it looks like and sounds like for them to be on board and a player in their practice.

We are asking people to come on a journey, if they are not speaking the same language that will be a challenge. The language of safety, the language of equality and respect, to know what that looks like for other people is really important for practitioners to understand. As a simple example, we talk about respecting women and for us it means giving them an equal opportunity, treating them as equals and listening to them. Perhaps somebody from another culture, respect means we are problem-solving for them and protecting them and not allowing them to encounter discomfort. I could be talking about respect in my sense of the word all day long and the person thinks they are already doing that. I am already respecting my mother, my sister.

What does safety look like? It is about going through a western culture without worrying from anything that is a danger to me. But from a different background, it could be that the house is locked, and the woman is in there, and nothing bad can happen to her.

So sometimes, we are talking about very different things. These things come up when we are ready to have these conversations, rather than assuming that they know exact what we're talking about, but asking the questions "What the safety look like for you? What does respect look like for you? What does equity look like for you?"

ANAGHA JOSHI: Thank you, Anu. That's a really great perspective. I want to move to Tarang now, you have really spoken about this a bit, but I want to know if you have anything to add to this about having conversations that are culturally responsive, but not also losing sight of accountability and gendered power.

TARANG CHAWLA: Adding to what I was saying before, we have to be really careful not to apologise for culture, migration or religion, and just acknowledge that patriarchy and these ideas exist across all groups.

The practice of understanding cultural responsiveness doesn't mean that we don't have to have cultural relativism. We can understand some bodies context without excusing it. In practice, we can respect people's identity and their dignity, and particularly those who choose to use violence, but stay firm on women's and children's safety.

The experience of fear that they instill in their family or the acts of coercive control that they engage in are inexcusable, even if they don't necessarily have, as Anu touched on a round framework of language, even if they don't have the words to describe these actions, we can speak to the values or feelings base that they will understand. For example, they will know and experience of fear or shame or rejection or isolation or loneliness, even if they don't have the words for it.

So our task as practitioners is to help them understand that to help them engage in prevention that is culturally responsive, that does not lose sight of accountability for women's and children's safety.

ANAGHA JOSHI: Thanks, Tarang. I think what would be really great now would be to talk about how to create an environment where people feel safe enough to talk honestly about their experience of this topic. I know Anu, you mentioned that we have to get people to a point where they feel safe to be honest. Tell us a bit about that.

Maybe I will start with you, Jun. given your work in the creative space, how do you create that safety when you start engaging with CALD communities? What tactics do use?

JUN BIN LEE: Jun speaking. I guess just acknowledging that the men or the boys that we are working with are mostly in the prevention space, and so one way to do so through storytelling is a way to help them feel that they are seen, they are heard, or less directly, without feeling like they are being judged. And that it is a story that they can resonate with and relate to.

A lot of the time, that barrier is already partially gone. They are more willing to engage or share. So I guess that is where storytelling, or seeing someone else's journey happening in front of you can have some magical moment, especially when you can relate or resonate with that.

I guess another way for them to feel like they can trust you is understanding their language, or understanding in this case their culture. It doesn't necessarily need to be ethnic-based culture, but just trends, the culture and the vocab that they use. I brought in a few comic references, but once again, that is something that is useful.

The reason why I felt that was useful was because I recently went to Taiwan and had a chat with the Taiwanese group who had groups for people, young people, young men and boys to come in and share their experience in navigating challenges. One thing they used as a conversation starter is card games that have comic book illustrations and they already have that buy in, "yes, that's like me," and then they have this conversation.

So different tools that can work from my perspective.

ANAGHA JOSHI: Making the space feel relatable, and catching on to the things that they already relate to, and then using that as an opportunity to have deeper conversations.

Tarang, I want to thank you first for sharing your lived experience to the panel and to the audience. Can you tell us a bit about how you weave in lived experience carefully in this space, in this prevention space?

TARANG CHAWLA: It's tricky. And I think I have to acknowledge at the outset that it is tricky. And thank you Anagha for the question as well. I sometimes struggle with the way we talk about this issue broadly, and the reason is people will often say to me, "I know your story, I know your sister's story." But what they are really saying is that "I know that your sister was murdered."

Niki's story was one of the first Australian born child of migrant parents. It was Niki's birth that really planted roots in Australia and made Melbourne start to feel like home. So it's a tricky one. I don't have the solution of how to speak about this.

But when it comes to men's violence, it is a difficult, sensitive topic to broach. It is someone's story, but to call it a story feels insufficient. But I use the experiences of what Niki endured to help humanise the issue. Not to make it about tragedy. Because people's lived experience is powerful, but I think at the same time, drawing from experience, having worked across multiple government survivor advocacy councils and other setting, it must be connected to evidence, to systems, and to prevention work. Otherwise it is at risk of becoming an emotional testimony.

There is a space for story sharing, and a space or understanding the experiences of primarily women and children in their own right as victim survivors, but we can't allow that to substitute for informing evidence in systems around prevention work.

So I think from my perspective, it is something that I am always juggling. I am very careful, and hopefully direct enough in saying that we can't make women's suffering the only way that men learn anything. The idea that men need a personal connection to care, for example politicians sometimes say "I had a daughter and then I understood." No, women and girls should have all of the dignity afforded to men.

One of the things I will say that I think is really important when it comes to lived experience, is that there is a myth that engaging men makes the conversation softer, ensuring that they have a personal connection to the work, a sister or a mother or a cousin or a friend. I don't think that is true. I think the way we engage men and the way we honour lived experience is that we make the conversation more honest, more practical, and harder to avoid.

So for example, men can and should care because of the women in their lives, but understand that if the women in their lives represent the one in three that are impacted by this, and imagine just how many women in the broader community are impacted? If they visit the city of Sydney or the city of Melbourne, if they walk through the street or go to a large shopping complex, look around and think of the sheer number of women impacted, and the sheer number of men in their lives who use coercive controlling or diminishing behaviours towards women.

I think that is a much more powerful way to honour lived experience than simply going "Of course you should care because you have a daughter now," that is the lowest bar in terms of human behaviour, and I think that is how we let men get off the hook for bad behaviour for a long time.

ANAGHA JOSHI: Thanks, Tarang. We're getting to the end of today's webinar. I want to weave in a question that is coming from the audience, as well as one we already had in mind for you, Anu, which is that people are quite curious about the cultural values. You spoke about going back to the real values way of working in this space. Do you have any final advice, in about two minutes you can give to petitioners who may want to do similar work that you do at AMES? What would you say?

ANU KRISHNAN: I completely agree that we shouldn't only care if we have got skin in the game, just because we have got a woman in the family or a woman in a circle of influence ? that is not the reason we should care. We should care because it is important, it is essential, and it is human, it is a human value to care for others.

Values-based work for us here at AMES is really important, because if we are looking for long-term, sustained, applicable change, it has to be anchored in core values, and the core values of safety, respect and equity I think to start with.

One of the challenges I see, and one of the questions you asked earlier was how can we create an atmosphere of safety. I think lack of judgement, being genuinely curious, not inquisitive but curious, and parking judgement at the door.

We are living in a world now where it is much more acceptable, and in fact expected that a person can be angry and violent without anybody criticising, but we are judging people for having human values or vulnerability, kindness. We actually talk about it as if it is unusual. It shouldn't be. Sadness, despair, vulnerability are all part of human experience, but we somehow don't make it attractive for particularly men to engage with those emotions.

So we need to create safety around that, and show that anger and violence are actually part of the core human values.

To answer the question about how other people at other organisations who want to do this work genuinely go about it is to actually look at their internal policies and procedures to see if they are actually parking their judgement at the door. If we are expecting people to come on board and immediately have an evolution and a change, and disbelieving everything they believe in the past, probably not.

But we need to open the conversations and be willing to invest that time. This is a slow work. It is not work that can be done quickly, and we need to take people along for the journey. That is the one point I would keep returning to. We go to where people are at and we worked on that runway with them for however long, because it is not a helicopter that is about to take off. It is an A380 that takes a longer runway.

ANAGHA JOSHI: Thanks, Anu, that is a great way I think to summarise today was my conversation. We have taken a journey from unpacking the drivers, talked about intersectionality, and also what the work can practically look like.

ANAGHA JOSHI:

So I really wanted to thank all of you for your time today. All of our panellists online, to be sharing so honestly and genuinely your experiences in this space, it's such an important conversation to have.

I also wanted to just say a big thank you to our audience who are joining us online, in submitting some amazing questions. Sorry we didn't get the chance to get to all of them.

And also our AIFS comms team and the chartered family evidence evaluation team, who are working hard in the background making these webinars possible.

Please do subscribe to our AIFS newsletter for when this webinar will be available to watch, and please take the time to answer some questions in the feedback survey. We do take the time to read feedback and use that feedback to shape our webinars.

We have another webinar coming up on 23 June, on strengthening support for LGBTIQA+ young people with disabilities. And I want to do a final shout out ? there is earlybird registration still available for the AIFS conference. It will be taking place in Naarm Melbourne on the 9th to 11 September. We would really like to see you there, we plan to bring together government, practitioners and researchers to explore how best to support families.

Thank you, everyone, and we will see you again soon.

ANAGHA JOSHI: We had a few extra questions we wanted to discuss that were quite interesting. One of the questions was practical: how do we get men to attend sessions on the prevention of violence against women? Any ideas on this one? I might start with you, Tarang.

TARANG CHAWLA: Thank you, Anagha. I think it’s one of the age-old questions, and certainly one of the more prevalent questions now, because we are seeing a growing appetite among groups of men. There is also a push from government to see how we can engage men in the solution to preventing men’s violence against women. I think there are a few different strategies. To encourage men to engage, leading only with violence against women can sometimes have the opposite effect, particularly if that group is not already engaged. Finding other ways to engage — whether through relationships, leadership, fatherhood or workplace culture — can be a strong way to get men involved through ideas of respect, or through being a better mate or friend. But it must also connect clearly to prevention. Use trusted messengers. Men are more likely to attend when the invitation comes through a workplace, club, faith group or other setting, or from a leader, coach or peer they already have an affinity with or respect for.

Using affinity bias can almost work as a Trojan horse to get to the prevention messaging. Making the session practical is important, and not moralising, so men feel they are attending to build skills rather than being told why men are the problem. At the same time, we have to be honest about the purpose. We are not here to trick men into attending, but we also cannot make it sound like a public shaming exercise, or just a session on leadership or fatherhood. Ultimately, this is a session on the prevention of violence against women and children, and specifically on men’s violence, the use of coercive and controlling behaviours, and related issues. It is important to frame it as an opportunity to build the skills needed to have difficult conversations. There is a myth that if we have difficult conversations, men will shut off. I don’t think that is the case. If we have difficult conversations honestly and offer pragmatic solutions, many men will want to be involved rather than feeling judged, exposed or lectured.

I also think it is important to give men a reason to care beyond personal virtue. It is part of their role as a good father, partner, friend, colleague, leader, or member of broader Australian society. For recent migrant groups, that can include understanding that being a respectful and functioning member of society involves treating women and girls, in the home and outside it, with equality and respect, even while acknowledging experiences of racism, dislocation or other challenges. It is a balancing act: we need to use avenues that attract men and get them in the room, but we should never excuse or remove gendered power, entitlement and accountability from prevention work. If we make it so palatable that we do not talk about those issues, we are not really doing prevention work. We are just getting men into a room and giving them an avenue to explain grievance or share frustrations, without actually combating patriarchal messaging.

ANAGHA JOSHI: That is a really interesting point about getting the balance right. The idea of using indirect approaches came up in the research as well: how do you start bringing men into the conversation, often by framing it around healthy relationships or something else that is more palatable, as you described? Anu, would you like to add any other examples of how you can bring people into this space?

ANU KRISHNAN: Thank you. I think Tarang covered quite a lot of that initial safety and engagement, which is a core feature here. One of the things we have found in our work is that rather than expecting men to come when we want them to come, we need to be open and proactive in going to spaces where men already are and where they feel engagement is safe. Sports settings, especially young people’s sport, are really important places to start introducing messages of safety, respect and gender equity. University spaces, where safety is a big issue, are also important. Workplaces are definitely a huge one. One thing we forget is that universities are workplaces as well as places that teach the next generation and prepare people for the future. Having conversations about gender equity, safety and respect across all these platforms is really important. I think the initial question was, how do you attract men to these sessions? Before that, there is a big step around normalising the message of prevention. As I said earlier in the webinar, we have treated the prevention of violence as a public health issue.

In public health, we speak extensively about prevention, whether it is heart disease, lung cancer or other issues. Australia has done a really good job of highlighting safety, and I think that is what needs to happen here. We need to have a conversation about safety in our communities and families generally, so we can motivate people to attend when we want to speak to them more specifically. Going where people already are is usually an excellent way of engaging.

ANAGHA JOSHI: Thank you. Jun Bin, you were engaged in the program yourself. Tell us about how that worked out for you and what worked for you.

JUN BIN LEE: I just want to resonate with what Tarang said. Once he said it, I realised that is also why I went to that course. Yes, it had “violence against women prevention” in the name, but it was the leadership course that really attracted me. Reflecting on that journey, that particular word did resonate with me. At the time, I was also a fairly new migrant in Melbourne, and knowing it was an opportunity to meet other people from multicultural backgrounds attracted me as well. Part of me was going there to meet friends outside my circle from diverse backgrounds. So, once again, I resonate with what Tarang shared.

ANAGHA JOSHI: Thank you so much for all your contributions. That is quite a practical thing people want to know: where to start. One of the other practitioners online asked, do practitioners need to be male or from the same culture to engage men within these communities? Anu, I might start with you.

ANU KRISHNAN: Thank you. That makes me think about the four gender drivers of violence and the four pillars in the Change the Story model. People are most likely to be influenced by others they consider their peers. The question is whether men listen to others they think are the same as them, or whom they respect in the same way — whether that is other men or people from the same cultural background. I don’t think it hurts, but what really helps is for practitioners to be genuinely open and curious, and to park judgment at the door. As I said before, having men talk about this issue is really important for the sector in general, because it is not just a women’s issue or a women’s safety issue. It is about everyone being equally safe. I have read a lot of literature showing that gender stereotyping is as bad for men as it is for women. We know that a lot of men’s mental health and other issues are connected to the impact of gender stereotyping, and how we have internalised it in our cultures. So it is important for men to share that message and invite other men to listen.

The culture question is a little more complex, because sometimes it can almost seem like colluding — as if saying, “I know your culture, so let’s go off and do this work.” Being respectful to everybody’s culture should be the foundation of all our work, and we should be agnostic to that. You should not need to be from the same culture to understand where another person is coming from. But I do agree with the first part: we do need to have men represented in this work a lot more. What do you think?

TARANG CHAWLA: I am so moved by what you said, Anu. I could not agree more. Representation matters, as you point out, but representation is not enough. The question is not just whether the practitioner shares a background with the men, but whether the practitioner has the capacity, ability and curiosity to hold cultural nuance and gendered accountability at the same time. That is really the core of this. One thing that happens is that there can be an expectation that men from culturally diverse communities will automatically understand other men from culturally diverse communities better. But that does not automatically make someone culturally safe or prevention literate. They can still reproduce patriarchal ideas, minimise harm to women and girls, and over-identify with men’s discomfort. I have shared this before in relation to men’s behaviour change, but it also happens in prevention. We can use the same affinity with men from different cultural and ethnic groups to over-identify with men’s discomfort rather than centre prevention, which includes accountability.

That is much more uncomfortable for men collectively, because they have to identify that they may have, even unwittingly, benefited from the subjugation of women and girls. Even when men face many challenges themselves, culture can still be used as a shield for control or violence. It is a fine balancing act. I appreciate the person asking the question because I think it shows curiosity and good intent, and it also course-corrects a little. There is sometimes a fear in progressive spaces about saying the wrong thing or offending, so people self-censor. You may have people from particular backgrounds saying, “I can’t work with so-and-so because they are from a different background.” I do not agree with that proposition. That is my personal opinion. Representation is significant and it matters, but it is not the only consideration. We also need to consider whether those engaging in prevention have cultural knowledge, gender analysis, family violence expertise and accountability to women’s safety. Just having cultural affinity or gender affinity is not sufficient.

ANAGHA JOSHI: I think that is really interesting, and it requires quite a bit of skill to get that balance right: to be culturally curious and accountable, while also holding people accountable. I think it is a journey that a lot of the audience is interested in taking. Thank you so much for spending this time unpacking a couple of extra questions, and we hope to see you again in one of our webinars. Amazing. Thank you.