The executive order calls for something that the government currently doesn’t have: a way to systematically track gender-based abuse. “There isn’t like a comprehensive, single source of information about how many citizens or non-citizens commit acts of domestic violence,” said Grace Huang, the policy director at the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence. Definitions of domestic abuse vary state by state, she said, and most statistics are gathered by imperfect phone surveys. A lot of abuse is also invisible: Women deal with all sorts of challenges in reporting their situations to authorities.

The group that may face the greatest barriers to reporting is the same group targeted by the executive order: immigrants. “Let’s say the husband is the abuser and … the breadwinner,” said Nadiah Mohajir, the co-founder and executive director of Heart Women and Girls, a Chicago-based organization that predominantly serves Muslim victims of sexual abuse. “The wife will likely be even more hesitant to report because she’s afraid of losing that financial security.” While this is a concern for all domestic-violence victims, it’s particularly acute for immigrants, Mohajir said. “If the wife and children have limited English skills or limited mobility in the country to survive on their own … the chances of them reporting will get slimmer and slimmer.”

There’s also the risk of deportation—for either the victim or the abuser. “One of the obstacles is … a mistrust of government agencies or service providers,” said Salma Abugideiri, the co-director of the Peaceful Families Project, which trains imams and Muslim community members on abuse issues. “People fear that by reporting domestic violence, they’ll get their children taken away from them, or their immigration process will be interrupted.”

Like members of any other religious group, Muslims in the U.S. might experience distinctive “flavors” of abuse, Abugideiri said, whether or not they’re immigrants. “Abusers will often use scripture as another control tactic. Muslims, like any other group of people, may not always be familiar with their scripture,” she said. “There may be Muslim women, Christian women, or Jewish women who believe the abuser is correct and they have the right, particularly if it’s the husband, to beat or discipline [them].”

Cultural mores might also make Muslim women reluctant to talk about violence. “There’s an extreme level of shame and stigma with respect to sexual assault in the Muslim community,” said Mohajir. “The need for the community to uphold positive and praiseworthy qualities like modest and privacy—they conflate that with feelings of shame.” And “the emphasis on sexual purity is another reason that survivors feel that they can’t report,” she added. “Especially if the survivor is unmarried, the concern becomes, ‘Well, who’s going to marry you now?’”