The Illawarra Women’s Trauma Recovery Centre has welcomed new national findings that highlight the critical role of multicultural lived experience in shaping effective responses to domestic, family and sexual violence.
The Multicultural Communities Roundtable Report (2025), released by the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission, says services must be informed and led by the voices of migrant and refugee women themselves.
It draws on the perspectives of more than 70 representatives from multicultural services, settlement organisations, faith leaders, academics, frontline workers and lived-experience advocates.
The report identifies the unique barriers that many women from multicultural backgrounds face when seeking safety and support.
These include visa insecurity, systemic racism, limited access to housing and income support, language barriers, and cultural stigma surrounding disclosure of violence.
Participants also highlighted that too often, migrant and refugee women are treated as a single group, rather than communities with diverse needs and experiences.
For our Centre, the findings strongly reinforce ou rown model of care, which is community-led and rooted in lived experience.
“Healing cannot happen in isolation from culture and identity,” said Sally Stevenson, Executive Director.
“When women from diverse backgrounds shape how services are designed and delivered, we build trust, increase accessibility, and ultimately achieve better outcomes for victim-survivors.”
The report calls for urgent investment in bicultural staff, more leadership opportunities for multicultural workers, and stronger partnerships between mainstream services and community-based organisations.
In the Illawarra, 27.4% people said they had one or more parents who were born overseas in the 2021 census, while Wollongong regularly welcomes migrants from Syria, Congo, Iraq and Myanmar, according to Wollongong City Council’s Refugee Communities in the Illawarra 2025 report.
The report calls for reforms to migration settings that leave women vulnerable, shifting to long-term funding models that prioritise healing, and embedding lived experience at every level of service design.
The Illawarra Women’s Trauma Recovery Centre is a place for women to heal and rebuild their lives if they have or are experiencing domestic, family and sexual violence.
Our range of services supports women in living secure and independent lives.