EXTERNALLY FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECTS
Addressing reproductive violence in migrant and refugee communities (LP240100141)
Background
This project aims to address a critical gap in knowledge about migrant women’s experience of a serious form of family violence: reproductive coercion and abuse. Through a mixed methods design this project expects to advance understanding and identify opportunities to increase the safety of survivors.
Expected outcomes include a new conceptual model, co-designed, culturally responsive resources for communities and health professionals, and recommendations for legislative and policy change.
The results should benefit migrant communities, legal and health professionals working with migrant communities, and policy makers through improved conceptual knowledge, suggestions for legal reform, and evidence-based resources for workforce training.
Aim
This project aims to give voice to migrant and refugee women experiencing RCA. Although we use the term ‘women’, our project’s inclusion criteria are deliberately flexible to include all individuals with female reproductive organs. Given the dearth of research globally in this area, we are proposing a series of pioneering qualitative studies that centre the voices of migrant and refugee victim/survivors of RCA.
We aim to:
1. Explore the lived experience of RCA for migrant and refugee women.
2. Identify and understand the obstacles and opportunities current laws and policies create and produce recommendations for legislative change that supports policing and justice responses to RCA.
3. Generate guiding principles for culturally responsive and equitable sexual and reproductive health care in the context of RCA and develop resources for workforce training and development.
4. Co-design targeted in-language, culturally responsive resources that support migrant and refugee communities to recognise RCA as a form of violence and where and how to seek appropriate support.
Methods
The project comprises 3 phases that will be overseen and designed by an advisory group.
In Phase 1, we will conduct a qualitative study to understand the experiences of RCA from the point of view of victim/ survivors. Bilingual educators who work in SRH will conduct interviews with 60 victim/survivors from migrant and refugee communities around Australia.
Data will be analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis through a reproductive justice lens, consisting of inductive coding, development of initial themes and superordinate themes, allowing us to explore how they make meaning of their experiences of abuse in the context of the systems and structures in which it is occurring.
Participants will be invited to participate in subsequent co-design phases.
In Phase 2 we will conduct a mixed methods study to generate guiding principles for culturally responsive and equitable SRH care in the context of RCA by exploring how factors and structural inequalities influenced actual engagement in SRH service utilisation.
This mixed method study draws on data routinely collected by our POs, including demographic, service usage, and violence data (recorded both quantitatively and qualitatively).
We will extract data pertaining to migrant and refugee clients who reported RCA and sought support from our POs to explore how factors such as financial inequalities (access to Medicare), language inequalities (access to interpreters) and other legal, structural, or systemic factors intersect with the provision of SRH services.
The cases notes will content analysed. Following preliminary examination of the data and development of a coding scheme, emergent coding will be used to identify key facilitators/barriers.
Binomial logistic regression and chi square analysis using SPSS will be used to analyse predictors of healthcare utilisation.
In Phase 3a we will use a participatory design to co-create culturally appropriate, in language educational and support resources focused on RCA. In Phase 3b we will codesign resources for HPs working in SRH.
Specific best-practice, culturally responsive guidelines, and resources for discussing and responding to RCA experienced by migrant and refugee women will be developed based on the findings.
The resources will be targeted at HPs in primary, secondary and tertiary settings providing SRH. Draft principles will be work-shopped with the advisory group and participants prior to finalisation.