By Anthony Brown
Filipina women in violent relationships with Australian men are often not aware of their rights, according to a Brisbane social worker who works with migrant women.
Since 1980, 17 Filipina women and four children have been killed in Australia, mostly by their Australian husbands or fathers.
The acting coordinator of Brisbane's Migrant Women Emergency Support Service, Theresa Gatbonton, said that although Filipinas who left violent relationships could now remain in Australia, many were not aware that they could, and the men played on their fear of deportation.
"The men use the immigration issue against them. They'll say 'I'll deport you' or 'I'll ring Immigration and tell them what you've done'. The men use this to keep the women in line, so many feel trapped. There's nowhere else to go, but to stay and bear the horrible situation."
She said the women fear having to return to the Philippines when their families expected so much from them. Until recently, Filipinas who left such relationships could be deported.
If a Filipina now leaves a violent situation, once she has obtained an Apprehended Violence Order against the man, or he has been convicted of committing criminal assault against her, she can get permanent residency.
The problem is that violence against women in general is still vastly under-reported in Australia, and the reporting rate of violence against Filipinas is particularly low ("Serial Sponsorships", Centre for Multicultural Studies, the University of Wollongong, 1992).
Gatbonton said that although the law reform was positive, it needed to be more widely publicised and a specific infrastructure needed to be provided so that Filipinas could feel comfortable using the justice system to take on violent partners.
Serial sponsors
The federal government's failure to implement the recommendations of a 1992 report on serial sponsorships has outraged migrant support groups.
The 1992 report, commissioned by the Department of Immigration and undertaken by the University of Wollongong, noted that an increasing number of Australian men were serial sponsors of Filipina and Thai women. The most extreme example was a South Australian man who had seven Filipina brides.
The report defined serial sponsors as men who, having tired of their first partners, separate from them and go looking for new partners, sometimes several times.
It found that the men were constantly looking for "compatible" relationships and were unable to find their desired companions in Australia.
The men were constantly disappointed with each new spouse or fiancee because she did not live up to their expectations of how the ideal woman should behave.
The report identified these men as having very traditional views of women and perceiving Asian women as the ideal partners. It found a high incidence of domestic violence in these relationships.
It quoted one woman who worked in a woman's shelter in South Australia for seven years: "Asian women don't leave till it really is bad, so we only see the most serious cases — the tip of the iceberg. But twenty percent of the women who come through the shelter are spouses or fiancees of serial sponsors."
Gatbonton said that two years after the report was published, none of its recommendations have been implemented.
"The South Brisbane Immigration Legal Service, the Bureau of Ethnic Affairs and ourselves have just convened a group of people to monitor the recommendations of the report and to collect more information. We're planning to make it into a national network, and we're building links with organisations and people in other states and trying to lobby the government", she said.
Personal details
The report recommended that the department should do all it could to identify serial sponsors and should obtain personal information about these men.
It also recommended that it should inform women who were intending to enter into relationships with these men about their backgrounds.
Gatbonton would like to see not only serial, but all, sponsors legally required to provide their intending spouses with personal details, including abuse or assault records and any history of protection orders issued against them.
She feels women would then be able to make up their minds based on the information supplied.
However, she believes the federal government has been slow to implement this recommendation because of the Privacy Act (l988), which forbids government to reveal personal information.
Gatbonton said the irony was that when a Filipina applied to come to Australia, the Immigration Department scrutinised her. "She's got to have health checkups, supply them with personal details about herself and her family, and lots of other private details. And yet there are no details required from the men. It's just not a balanced view. What about the rights of these women to know about these men?"
[Conclusion of a three-part series.]