The Endless Cycle of Violence Facing Refugee and Migrant Women

41.6 million. That is the number of people who ended 2025 as refugees worldwide, per the UN High Commissioner for Refugees' Global Trends report published in June. The Mail & Guardian makes the structural point plainly this week: armed conflict may force women to flee, but crossing a border rarely marks the end of violence. The EU's newly adopted Return Regulation ensures it does not — it codifies a second violence into bureaucratic infrastructure that member states are now preparing to deploy.

Documentation as Gatekeeper

In South Africa this Women's Month, refugee and migrant women are asking the same question their predecessors asked seventy years ago at the Union Buildings in Pretoria: when will a document stop determining whether we deserve dignity?

The Mail & Guardian traces how xenophobic mobilization weaponizes paperwork. A child turned away from school because officials question their papers. A woman denied healthcare for lacking the "correct" documents. A market trader's livelihood erased when anti-foreigner protests target migrant businesses. A mother who will not report gender-based violence because she fears deportation more than her abuser.

This is what medical xenophobia looks like in practice. Researchers Alexis Harerimana, Julian Pillay and Gugu Mchunu documented pervasive exclusion of refugees and migrants in African healthcare systems in the Journal of Migration and Health last year. The continuum of harm runs on bureaucratic gatekeeping as much as on fists.

The Return Machine

The EU's Return Regulation, adopted under the 2024 Pact on Migration and Asylum, expands the coercive apparatus available to member states. It permits longer and systematic detention. It allows authorities, under certain conditions, to search private homes and humanitarian shelters. It shifts the burden onto third-country nationals to cooperate with procedures. Most consequentially, it conditions access to legal assistance and the suspensive effect of appeals on whether people know to ask — a design that guarantees many will lose protections they never realized existed.

Provisions on "return hubs" take effect immediately. The European Council on Refugees and Exiles and the Network of Afghan Diaspora Organisations in Europe will brief communities and advocates next month on what implementation looks like.

We should be precise about what this represents. It is not border management. It is the legal codification of a hierarchy of human worth, exported as a European standard and waiting to be normalized elsewhere. Pope Leo's message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees lands in this context — a moral intervention arriving after the machine has already been switched on.

The question refugee women keep asking — when will she be safe — has an answer none of us should accept. She will not be safe until the systems that profit from her precarity are dismantled and the documentation that determines her protection is rendered irrelevant. Until then, the second violence compounds the first, and Women's Months will keep arriving without delivering the protection they claim to commemorate.