Executive Summary
No one should be prevented from escaping violence by Australia’s legal systems. But the reality is that many women fear leaving violent relationships because they are on a temporary visa and fear losing their children, being thrown into homelessness, being denied access to Medicare and social security and deportation. Gaps in Australia’s migration laws and the complex maze of intersecting legal systems can make it feel impossible to leave. Too often, perpetrators of domestic and family violence weaponise the precariousness of temporary visas and threaten deportation or the loss of their children or financial support, as a tool of control and abuse.
Domestic and family violence has been declared a national crisis in Australia. For refugee and migrant women in Australia, it is estimated that one in three have experienced domestic and family violence, with temporary visa holders reporting disproportionately higher rates of abuse (40%) – including forms of violence specifically weaponised through their migration status.
For women on temporary visas, compounding systemic barriers are leaving them at risk of harm and re-traumatisation. Existing domestic and family policies do not fully account for multi-dimensional barriers, including the complexities of the legal system, the lack of culturally competent services, and the absence of integration between migration, family law, and social welfare systems. For many women, domestic and family violence and visa status are irrevocably linked, with many of the barriers women face directly linked to their temporary visa status.
This report presents an evaluation of the implementation of the Temporary Visa Holders Experiencing Violence Pilot (‘the Pilot’) by seven Women’s Legal Services across Australia, which saw over 2500 women supported to navigate a web of complex laws and seek freedom from violence.
Funding for the Pilot was granted by the Australian Government in 2021 and was extended through to June 2025. The Australian Government has since rolled this funding into the National Access to Justice Partnership (Attorney General’s Department 2025) agreement.
The seven Women’s Legal Services are members of Women’s Legal Services Australia (WLSA)¹, the peak organisation for 13 women’s legal services across Australia that specialise in providing legal assistance and wraparound social and financial support services for women. Women’s Legal Services involved in the pilot have collaborated on service delivery, workforce challenges, policy and law reform through WLSA’s Migration Law Committee, forming a community of practice as they implemented the Pilot. The Women’s Legal Services aimed to create a holistic “one stop shop” model that was trauma-informed, victim and survivor-centric, culturally safe, and integrated.
This evaluation has found that the Women’s Legal Service migration model was a highly innovative and best-practice service model that took a holistic wrap-around and trauma-informed care approach to address the legal and migration needs of women and children experiencing domestic and family violence. However, the evaluation also found that the Women’s Legal Services faced significant sustainability challenges, in particular, caused by inadequate funding for service provision and intermittent government commitment. This created acute challenges for delivery of services across wide geographical areas and across multiple legal jurisdictions.
The successes of the model, if combined with adequate resources and funding, suggest great potential to normalise this best-practice approach across the sector, and with the potential to extend it further to other service sectors.
This evaluation also identified a pressing need for a standalone ‘family violence visa’, that responds to the unique needs and rights of victim-survivors of domestic and family violence and addresses the dangerous gaps in Australia’s current visa framework.