Editorial Journal of Gender-Based Violence
Editorial
Authors: Shih Joo Tan, Marie Segrave,Stefani Vasil, and Hyein Ellen Cho
Article Category: EditorialCopyright: © Authors 2025Online Publication Date: 17 Feb 2025
Pages: 163–167Publisher: Policy PressVolume/Issue: Volume 9: Issue 2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/23986808Y2025D000000072
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Keywords: violence against women; gender-based violence; migrant women; Asian diaspora
This special issue of the Journal of Gender-Based Violence is focused on migration, migrants and gender-based violence, and looks specifically at lessons from Asia and the Asian diaspora. There is a global conversation around the need to advance efforts to address gender-based violence via evidence-based policy design and implementation. Within this context, the diversity of experiences of gender-based violence and the specific structural conditions that women negotiate in their everyday lives have been the subject of some focus by feminist scholars across a range of disciplines including Criminology, Sociology and Critical Migration Studies. Collectively, this work illuminates the importance of analyses that attend to structural inequality and the conditions within which gender-based violence occurs. Given the high rates of migration globally and the role which gender and other factors play in both women’s opportunities to migrate, their decision-making regarding their mobility and their experiences in transit and in destination countries, this dedicated attention to women migrants is timely. There is also a critical need to recognise how migration flows, state policy, border policing and gender-based violence intersect. Given this, we argue that it is timely to undertake an examination of these issues as they are playing out in Asia and with the Asian diaspora in traditional countries of immigration destination, including Australia. We suggest that an analysis of this kind, which involves interrogating the ways that the lived experiences of women migrants, can offer critical insights into advancing the breadth and depth of evidence that shapes policy, regulation and practice in these spaces. And in doing so, work towards laying the foundations for more nuanced and advanced international and national commitments to realising women’s safety, especially in relation to issues of transnational mobility and border control.
For this special issue collection, we set out to examine the intersections of gender-based violence across the public and private sphere, including its manifestation within different labour contexts (that is, from paid labour to sometimes unpaid and largely unrecognised domestic labour, and irregular labour), and gendered violence that women experience in the context of mobility and within specific diasporic communities following migration. The evidence base drawn on for this special issue offers important empirical data from Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, India and South Korea and brings specific discussions across these studies into global conversations around women’s experiences of gender-based violence and strategies for addressing it in transnational contexts. What the articles collectively point to, is not only the diverse manifestations of domestic and family violence, but more importantly, how women seek help, and how this is limited by intersecting factors related to gender, race, ethnicity, migration and cultural background. This suggests that developing and implementing interventions against gendered violence is important, but there is also a critical need to foreground considerations of viability so that we can better support help-seeking for women in different contexts.
The objective was and is to advance beyond global conversations that have often been dominated and shaped by western nations and scholarship. This special issue was designed to:
create a platform for work on gender-based violence focused on Asia and the Asian diaspora;
interrogate gender-based violence experienced by migrant women in countries where English-language research is not dominant;
interrogate migration systems and gender-based violence.
The impetus for this special issue came from a knowledge exchange event between Australian, Japanese and South Korean gender-based violence researchers. The ambition of this exchange was to build a foundation for collaboration and knowledge-sharing between Australia, Japan and South Korea through the creation of a collaborative research network. This was then further developed via this special issue of JGBV to share with other scholars who could engage with research from these contexts, focusing on gender-based violence issues in Asia and within Asian diasporic contexts. The ambition was achieved not quite in the way it was originally conceived: along the way various pressures impacted our original group of writers, meaning that other contributors whose work sits at the intersections of migration, women’s experiences and gender-based violence is featured in the final collection of articles. Despite this, there remains a collective group of researchers, many of whom are early career researchers, all focused on interrogating the broad issues for which we had set out to provide a platform.
Researching gender-based violence and migration: common themes
While the articles included in this themed issue offer insights into a range of experiences and issues, there are also some important threads that interlink these articles. Several articles in this issue examine the diasporic experience in detail. This research offers key insights into both understanding experiences of gender-based violence and the important implications for the ways in which response systems operate in countries of destination. Cho’s article (Cho, 2025), focused on the South Korean diaspora in Melbourne, Australia, highlights the importance of the specificity of both the experience and the response to gender-based violence, specifically domestic and family violence. Her research intersects with the research that forms of the basis of the article by Louie and Vasil (Louie and Vasil, 2025), focused on Chinese migrant women’s experiences of domestic and family violence in Melbourne, Australia. Their article illuminates the importance of understanding that while domestic and family violence is universal, there are specific gendered and familial expectations and interactions that shape both the conditions that sustain it and the ways in which women navigate these experiences as victim-survivors.
Three articles focus on the implications of border crossings, specifically, the ways in which women’s migration can intersect with gender-based violence and reproduce various forms of harm and violence. O’Donnell (O’Donnell, 2025) examines how migrant and refugee women are forced to navigate punitive migration policies in Australia, in particular, the relationship between criminalisation and victimisation, and how women are punished as victims. From a different perspective, Mehta’s article (Mehta, 2025) examines the relationship between violence in the home in countries of origin and violence experienced in destination countries. She illuminates how the experience of gender-based violence can both induce, and then be reproduced in migration pathways, drawing on narratives of migrant and refugee women in prisons in India and Australia. Her article makes an important contribution to the relationships between criminalisation, violence and forced migration. Segrave and Tan’s article (Segrave and Tan, 2025) similarly examines the relationship between border crossings, gender-based violence and the recognition or denial of women’s experiences of harm. This article draws on research across Southeast Asia with women migrant workers and stakeholders, to examine how responses to human trafficking and labour exploitation operates in practice. This article highlights the limitations and risk of bifurcating responses to different forms of gender-based violence, and similarly to Mehta, makes the broader case for recognising the intersection of violence and harm.
In addition to these articles, which focus on the intersections between gender-based violence and state systems, two other articles raised some important questions about how harm can be understood in the context of women’s experiences of violence. Writing from South Korea about marriage migration, Yi’s article (Yi, 2025) examines how men’s rights groups persuasively challenge the recognition of the forms of violence that are being enacted against women who migrated for marriage, framing their wives and commercial matchmakers as deceitful. Yi’s argument is that this challenge resulted in the reversal of many protections for women and efforts to address gender-based violence. From a different global perspective, Yalamarty, Anitha and Roy (Yalamarty et al, 2025) draw attention to women who have experienced transnational marriage abandonment in India and South Asia. They highlight how the promise, not just the practice of migration for marriage, can be a significant form of gender-based violence that remains largely unrecognised. This again brings to the fore the question of who defines violence and abuse and how we understand the intersections with migration and different forms of control.
In response to contributor reflections on ways to respond to gender-based violence in countries of origin, in transit and in destination contexts, the editorial team reflect on the approach adopted in the Australian policy context. In Australia, the language of intersectionality has been increasingly used by leading gender-equality and gender-focused organisations, as well as policy makers, to inform ways of responding to gender-based violence for migrant and refugee women across the country. We argue that the current approach to deploying the language of intersectionality in policy on gender equality and violence for migrant and refugee women, can end up being the co-option of an approach that originally sought to capture the complex realities of power differentials, and can undermine stated efforts to prevent and address violence in practice. This final piece offers a foundation for future work. It calls to attention the importance of examining what lies behind the rhetoric, and to be open to recognising that well-intended practices can have consequences that are at odds with the broader commitments to addressing inequality, inequity and gender-based violence. This reflects the overarching impetus for this collection, and the intention of this contribution: to continue to create opportunities to drive further a more robust and sustainable commitment to addressing gender-based violence in the fullness of the conditions that sustain it.
Where to from here?
In this editorial, we have considered both the ambition and the realisation of this themed issue, and we finish with some key considerations that we can draw from this group of articles.
The first is that it remains critical that to engage with work that exists in jurisdictions that differ significantly, and to reflect on the connections and disconnections in understanding and responding to gender-based violence. Even when political, legal and cultural factors vary widely, it remains the case that gender-based violence is a significant and ongoing global challenge.
The second is the importance of work that continues to look beyond the boundaries of responses to gender-based violence in isolation. Women’s experiences of violence and their responses to it are shaped significantly by structural conditions that they have to navigate, and therefore it is imperative for us to interrogate the ways in which migration, labour and other areas of law and policy are critical to producing the conditions that continue to sustain it. The ongoing interrogation and evidence building in these areas can support more comprehensive and targeted advocacy and intervention.
The third is how important it is to illuminate experiences and harm that may be unseen. When we focus on policy responses to gender-based violence, we can miss the very specific experiences of different members of communities, and how variable their experience of awareness and response is when it comes to seeking support in the context of gender-based violence. So, too, a number of articles highlight how some forms of violence are ‘unseen’ by law, policy, systems and structures and points to how this ‘invisibility’ reproduces and intensifies gendered harm. In some instances, it in fact leads to women’s punishment in the context of gender-based violence.
It would be misplaced to argue that this special issue resolves these issues or that it is entirely comprehensive. Rather, we hope that our ambition to elevate and bring together work collectively that is seeking to illuminate the intersecting harms of migration, diasporic experiences, state responses and gender-based violence leads to ongoing commitments to bring together researchers to exchange knowledge and perspectives and to challenge each other to thinking differently and to value learning from each other. We write at a time of significant international upheaval and state violence in different local, national, international and transnational contexts, which impacts individuals, families and communities in diverse ways, compounding and exacerbating experiences of gender-based violence. We want to bring together conversation and the possibility of learning from each other, and doing so in a collaborative and collegial way. We hope that the value of this special issue collectively and via the individual articles is recognised by many of the readers of the Journal of Gender-Based Violence.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
References
Cho, H.E. (2025) Filling the gaps: grassroots prevention of domestic and family violence within the Korean-Australian community, Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 9(2): 168–88. doi: 10.1332/23986808y2024d000000050Search Google Scholar
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Louie, Y.M. and Vasil, S. (2025) Breaking the silence: exploring the sociocultural context of domestic violence for Chinese migrant women in Australia, Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 9(2): 189–211. doi: 10.1332/23986808y2024d000000052Search Google Scholar
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Mehta, R. (2025) Circularity of violence and institutionalisation: understanding women’s (im)mobility across borders, Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 9(2): 234–51. doi: 10.1332/23986808Y2024D000000058Search Google Scholar
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O’Donnell, S. (2025) Punishable victims: interrogating intersections between gender-based violence and punitive migration policies in Australia, Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 9(2): 212–33. doi: 10.1332/23986808y2024d000000053Search Google Scholar
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Segrave, M. and Tan, S.J. (2025) Woman, migrant or worker? Human trafficking, violence against women and women’s safety in ASEAN, Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 9(2): 252–72. doi: 10.1332/23986808y2024d000000062Search Google Scholar
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Yalamarty, H., Anitha, S. and Roy, S. (2025) Im/mobility as a form of gender-based violence: the case of transnationally abandoned wives in India, Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 9(2): 291–307. doi: 10.1332/23986808Y2024D000000040Search Google Scholar
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Yi, S. (2025) Backlash or victims? ‘Victimised Korean husbands’ of migrant wives and problematic norms on sexual relations in South Korea, Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 9(2): 273–90. doi: 10.1332/23986808y2024d000000049
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