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I think it's really important for organisations to work with men of all cultures.
Australia is a highly diverse country. So if we don't have a strategy and an active effort to work with people from diverse cultures, we're never going to be able to reach pockets of our community that we need to reach and our services need to recognise that because the way in which we work should represent both the community we serve as well as the community that works within those organisations.
I think it's definitely very important to work with men specifically from multicultural backgrounds because they do face challenges coming into a new community when someone comes in as a migrant into a new country, there's a whole self education that needs to happen.
You need to learn how the new community works.
You need to learn how to make a life for yourself.
How to rebuild ff your social capital in this new community and that can be challenging and added to that in this work.
We keep talking about intersectionality as if it's something that is only applicable to women but equally intersectionality applies to men as well because they bring their own experiences the expectations of the community and the expectations that they have on themselves, but one of the things that I have found that works really well is we automatically as people working in the sector tend to go to the why question our questions are usually why are you doing this?
Why are you not respecting your wife?
Why are displaying disciplining your children in the way that we see you do it?
But I think what's really worked for me is asking the how question and asking men.
How do you think that's done in your own community or how have you experienced respect in your family?
How did your father work with your mom?
How did you feel seeing the things that you did growing up?
And that's been really valuable because that's helped men talk about things that they know intimately and that's opening a door for us to get in and do the work that we need to do.