Centre for Muslim States and Societies - ((Dr Jeremy Northcote))

Edith Cowan University

Breaking the Isolation Cycle: The Experience of Muslim Refugee Women in Australia

Abstract

Australia has accepted an increasingly diverse group of refugees and immigrants

from a variety of nations, cultural backgrounds and religious faiths in recent decades. In particular, the past ten years have seen a growing Muslim presence in Australia with the increased settlement of refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia and former Yugoslavia being the main countries of origin. Due in large measure to recent Muslim migration, in 2001 approximately 1.5 per cent of the Australian population identifies Islam as their religion, and Islam represents the third largest religion in Australia after Christianity and Buddhism (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2002). Many Muslims have a range of specific needs and concerns related to their religious heritage and their migration experience. Perhaps the most acute and distressing needs are those relating to Muslim refugee women.

There is clearly an immediate need to empirically examine processes of resettlement experienced by Muslim refugee women in Australian society, which is crucial to understanding the nature of social cohesion in an avowedly multicultural society. Based on the results of focus groups and key informant interviews conducted among Muslim refugee women in Western Australia in 2004-05, we argue that many such women are caught in a ‘cycle of isolation’ emanating from certain features of their religious, ethnic and refugee background, and also from the social, political and institutional processes of the host society. This cycle of isolation is the result of a multiplicity of factors interacting in a complex, mutually reinforcing manner, where both internal ‘ethnic’ factors and external ‘marginalising’ factors come into play.

The model that we propose has important implications on the debate surrounding the integration of immigrants within Australian society and other Western nations. The position is advanced that integration – to the extent that Muslim immigrants face greater challenges on this matter than any other immigrant category – is due to the reinforcing effect that results from ethnic and marginalizing factors working in concert with one another, rather than any particular ‘group’ being to blame as such.

Bio

Dr. Jeremy Northcote is a Lecturer in the School of Marketing, Tourism and Leisure at Edith Cowan University. He has a strong research background in theological studies and in issues of contemporary sociology in Australia. Dr Northcote has research interests in many areas including the policy impacts of the settlement experience of Muslim refugee women in Australia and he is currently working on a number of large research projects at numerous Australian universities.