Women working holiday makers and sexual harassment in Australia: accounting for spatially-embedded rural masculinities

Abstract

Each year, over 200,000 temporary migrants come to Australia on a Working Holiday visa. The conditions attached to these visas produce precarious circumstances that heighten vulnerability to sexual harassment. While previous research has examined structural influences on sexual harassment, few studies have explored WHMs’ experiences beyond specific workplaces or regions. Further, the role of temporal and spatial contexts remains underexplored. Drawing on a feminist geographic lens, and a mixed-methods study including a national survey (n = 573) and interviews (n = 11), this paper examines women Working Holiday Makers’ (WHMs) experiences of sexual harassment in Australia. I argue that vulnerability is shaped not only by structural conditions such as visa rules, but also by temporal and spatial contexts. These include temporal pressures arising from time-bound work requirements and the spatial-embeddedness of rural colonial masculinities in regions where WHMs travel to undertake work. This paper contributes to feminist and migration geographies by revealing how sexual harassment is patterned through specific temporal and spatial contexts within Australia's migration system.