AMES Australia is a leading Australian multicultural organisation, providing services of education, settlement and employment to approximately 30,000 newly arrived refugees and migrants each year.

AMES Australia has joined with Federal and State governments to implement the recommendations and action strategies of Australia’s National plan to prevent violence against women and their children 2010–2022 and the Royal Commission into Family Violence (Vic 2016). Over the past four decades, Australia has seen rapid development in its management of violence against women and their children, with emphasis on improving recognition, response and intervention of service provision in the prevention of violence against women (PVAW), however prevalence of this violence has remained static.

Australia has become a global leader in developing and trialling activities in the primary prevention of violence against women by addressing root causes of violence as a preventative strategy. These strategies have largely been targeted toward the general community with limited tailoring of these strategies to ensure relevance to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) community members.
Whilst CALD communities are affected by the same risk factors for violence as experienced by the general community, AMES has identified additional vulnerabilities for refugee and migrant women, has developed a prevention of violence program to address the many complex factors including:

• women’s position in communities and families where social and cultural norms are not necessarily informed by notions of human rights and equality.
• past experiences of gendered and widespread community violence in countries of origin and through the transition process;
• overwhelming demands placed on settlement communities and families;
• women’s experience of poverty, isolation and dislocation from traditional support mechanisms;
• integration into a new social context where traditional social norms are eroded by exposure to new societal norms such as the widespread accessibility of pornography.


This presentation articulates the landscape in which AMES Australia’s “Prevention of Violence against Women in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities Leadership Course” developed. The course is based on the understanding that violence against women is rooted in gender inequality, discrimination and harmful cultural and social norms and that culture is neither a fixed nor an inherent feature of individuals or groups, but is shaped and therefore can be changed by social and economic forces. Course participants, equipped with evidence-based data and leadership skills use their unique experiences and skills to develop this material in ways that are creative and engaging to create awareness shifts for their communities. The musical “A fatally flawed love story” showcases the pressures on gender roles during settlement in a new country. As an audience member expressed after the opening production, “this isn’t a musical, this is my life”.