Each year, the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC) recognises outstanding contributions to the field through its Early Career Researcher Award, celebrating innovative and impactful research by emerging scholars and practitioners.
In 2024, Stefani Vasil received Highly Commended for her article, “I Came Here, and it Got Worse Day by Day”: Examining the Intersections Between Migrant Precarity and Family Violence Among Women with Insecure Migration Status in Australia”, published in Violence Against Women (Vol. 30, Issue 10).
Stef’s work explores the complex intersections of migration, precarity, and family violence, drawing on insights from her doctoral research project focused on migrant women in Victoria. Through in-depth interviews and a multicultural feminist lens, Stef reveals how insecure migration status shapes women’s experiences of violence and resistance. She reflects on the broader implications for policy, public understanding, and the importance of collaborative, justice-oriented research.
I caught up with Stef to speak about her research, the inspirations behind her work, and what’s next for her in the field of criminology.
These findings stem from my doctoral research, which explored the ways that insecure migration status intersected with other social inequalities to shape migrant women’s lived experiences of and responses to domestic and family violence. It was through in-depth interviews with migrant women in Victoria that the impact of women’s impermanent status and its connection to the experience of domestic and family violence emerged. The women that I spoke to were a diverse cohort who migrated in different ways and had different aspirations. I found that migration status played a role in shaping the nature of women’s experiences of violence, including the ways that perpetrators controlled them in their daily lives in Australia and in transnational contexts. It took time to decide what language to use to describe the effects of migration status, which impacted women in different ways. I decided to use the concept of precarity to capture these subjective experiences and suggest that there are three components of precarity that characterised migrant women’s lives in Australia, which are legal, social and economic.
I first became aware of these issues as an undergraduate where I volunteered with the Victorian Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Coalition. At the time, the organisation ran a drop-in service in Melbourne where victim-survivors who lacked permanency and had limited protections would go to seek advice and assistance. This is an issue that is widely recognised across the sector, and the National Advocacy Group on Women on Temporary Visas Experiencing Violence has been actively advocating for system reform for some time.
I drew on insights from Australia’s established tradition of multicultural feminist scholarship. This provided a framework for understanding the interconnected issues of violence, migration, and settlement. By examining the intersections of different aspects of social difference, scholars and activists have drawn attention to the diversity of migrant women’s experiences of violence. This has helped to destabilise limiting discourses by engaging in forms of structural analysis. I hope that my research has in some way contributed to this work. I think one of the most significant insights is how precarity can function as a structural condition to heighten women’s vulnerability to violence and undermine their significant efforts to resist different forms of control. Central to this is highlighting the coercive power of the state and how it can contribute to and compound the violence women experience in their intimate lives. However, I also found that while women were disadvantaged by their insecure migration status, they exercised their agency in the face of structural constraints, drawing on different strategies to ensure their safety and survival. To me this reinforces the need to attend to complexity in any analysis of migration and violence, recognising the heterogeneity of lived experience.
I’m unsure about the impact my study can have on its own. Instead, I view this work as part of a broader scholarship that aims to highlight lived experiences often overlooked in research. Together, this knowledge can support ongoing efforts to advocate for change, including at the policy level.
By using precarity as a lens, I have really sought to disentangle some of the assumptions about migrant women’s vulnerability to domestic and family violence, which, as scholars in Australia and other national contexts have argued, tend to be plagued by cultural essentialism and static accounts of difference. I show that migrant women in my study were made vulnerable by migration systems and processes and were forced to confront a range of barriers in their daily lives. While family violence policy responses reinforce the importance of reducing barriers for all victim-survivors who reside in Australia, there needs to be further recognition of the ways that state policies influence the dynamics of violence and the options that are available to women. This includes attending to the ways that migration-related violence and abuse manifests in the Australian context, as well as the transnational character of violence, which can compound women’s experiences in intimate relationships and reduce the options that are available to them.
As an Early Career Researcher, I am very grateful to have this work recognised. However, it is not a project that I could have undertaken without the contributions, support and participation of many women – the interviews at the heart of this study were deeply moving, and I have felt a strong responsibility to represent them accurately. After completing my PhD I was able to build on this work as a postdoctoral fellow with the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre. I am very fortunate to be guided by brilliant mentors who challenge my thinking on these issues in different ways, continuing to push ideas forward.
I’m not sure I’m best placed to offer advice, but I would emphasise the value of collaborative work. There are many connections between the work we do in this area and the questions we raise about how systems and processes operate in practice. This is where I have been most challenged in my thinking and have really valued opportunities to collaborate with others who bring different expertise and perspectives.
We, the members of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC), acknowledge the traditional custodians of Australia and the sovereignty of the Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand.
ANZSOC would like to acknowledge the ongoing Traditional Custodians of the lands for which our constituents conduct their teaching, learning, and research. We would like to acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded and the lands, now called Australia, continue to belong to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the Traditional custodians of the lands. ANZSOC would like to pay respects to the Elders who have passed on the legacy of knowledge and culture to the future generations and acknowledge that the future generations hold the hope, the stories and the continued knowledge for current and emerging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. May this knowledge through Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing, being and doing guide you with wisdom and courage.
ANZSOC also recognises iwi Māori and their unceded right to tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) and their expression of mana motuhaka (self-determination). We acknowledge mātauranga Māori (Māori ways of being and knowing) informs both traditional and contemporary knowledge production and its ability to enhance our collective futures.
The Association acknowledges the consequences and harms that continue to be inflicted by the criminal justice systems of Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand on Indigenous peoples in the region and seeks through its activities to address these harms and to work to prevent them from continuing in the future.
