At the Crossroads of Violence and Neglect, the Cost of Safety for Women and Girls on the Move
By Amirah Ahmedi
Trigger Warning: Sexual Violence, Exploitation
For millions of women and girls on the move, migration, instead of being a search for safety, becomes a minefield of abuse, coercion, and impunity. From North Africa to Central America, the routes meant to deliver refuge usually come with a price, exposing women and girls to sexual violence, often at the hands of those tasked with their protection.
This violence speaks to the very way power operates across migration systems, from militarised borders and refugee camps to the failures of humanitarian response. The promise of protection remains dangerously hollow. For countless women and girls, survival comes at the cost of their bodies.
Crossing at a Cost
According to the UNHCR, for over 60 million women and girls worldwide on the move, navigating perilous transit routes, gender-based violence is not a possibility but a near certainty. Along these routes, basic rights to food, water, shelter, and safety come at a cost. Sexual exploitation becomes currency whereby ‘sex-for-food’ is a common reality in refugee camps, and smugglers have been reported to demand sex as payment. According to data from the Italian Observatory Against Trafficking, in 2021, 698 victims were identified, of whom 477 were women. These numbers are climbing, with a 2024 UN report revealing a 25% rise in human trafficking post-COVID, with women and girls overwhelmingly trafficked for sexual purposes. Even once they arrive, the violence doesn’t stop. A lack of legal status keeps them trapped and vulnerable to further exploitation. With nowhere safe to turn and their identities fragmented, much like the systems that failed them, women and girls are left invisible in the very places they hoped would offer safety.
In Mexico, the militarisation of borders “invisibilises rape by symbolically considering it an inevitable act in a war context,” writes academic de la Reguera Ahedo. In such places, violence is normalised and hidden behind uniforms and policy. While it is the perpetrators who should feel shame, the silence that follows sexual violence often falls on survivors instead. Shame, stigma, trauma, and the constant threat of deportation keep many migrant women silent. When abuse goes unreported, it goes unrecorded, rendering survivors both legally and socially invisible. Without legal status or access to justice, many have no recourse and no safe way to speak out. This invisibility is not incidental but instead weaponised. The downplaying of such violence allows perpetrators to exploit the silence while states, through inaction or hostile policies, reinforce it.
In a 2023 study, Elena Rubini and colleagues found that of 30 women, 21% were migrating due to gender-based violence. Sardonically, what women are initially fleeing often leads them into new and potentially more dangerous forms of gender-based violence. This harsh reality frames women as trapped within a persistent narrative of abuse, offering no real escape. The violence doesn’t end—it evolves. This is not the only cycle that migrant women face. In these harsh migration contexts, transactional sex is deemed a survival strategy. While some advocate this as an act of agency, that argument presents paradoxes when the ‘choice’ is made within a system built on patriarchal abuse. With a system that necessitates such exploitation, where support is absent and protection conditional, true freedom remains out of reach. What is interpreted as empowerment or agency is, in fact, an adaptation to a system that punishes them and continually fails them. These cycles presented to women play on their vulnerabilities: fleeing violence, only to be met by new forms of it, with fewer ways out.
The Paradox of Protection
“Many women report that being raped was the price exacted of them to cross the border without being apprehended or deported, or to receive their confiscated documents,” wrote feminist scholar Falcón in 2001. Over two decades later, the pattern persists.
Falcón’s account of the US-Mexico border presents the harrowing transactional nature imposed on migrant women and girls, whereby they are stripped of their autonomy and bodily integrity. However, it further exposes the contradiction surrounding the concept of ‘protection’ as infiltrated by security systems. Sexual violence, in this context, is not incidental but instrumental, functioning as a tool of control within a landscape defined by profound power asymmetries. Those positioned as protectors, including border agents and military personnel, emerge instead as perpetrators or facilitators of harm. Rather than signalling a failure of protection, this reveals how protection becomes performative. Protection is selectively granted, contingent upon proximity to whiteness, legal status, and adherence to gender norms. In such a framework, state sovereignty takes precedence over human rights, transforming protection from a universal right into a conditional privilege, one systematically denied to many migrant women and rendering them vulnerable to ongoing exploitation.
Additionally, this also points to the blatant weaponisation of sexual violence, where women’s bodies serve as battlegrounds as a strategy of migration deterrence. As Segato argues, sexual violence in these contexts is not incidental but reflects a broader paradigm of war, where women’s bodies become the front lines of state control and patriarchal power. The combination of unchecked authority and a lack of legal safeguards allows violence against women to thrive under a system of impunity. What emerges is not just a deterrence strategy but a calculated indifference, where suffering becomes part of the message. In such a system, gendered violence is not a collapse of order—it is the threat itself.
This dynamic is not just confined to borders. In Iraq, a 2018 Amnesty International report documents cases where women were raped or sexually exploited, primarily by those entrusted with their safety, including security guards, militia members, and military personnel operating in and around the camps. This further blurs the boundary between protection and harm, laying bare the bitter irony of what security has come to mean.
Women trafficked along migration routes encounter a similarly distorted reality. They often find themselves under the control not only of their purported ‘protectors’ but also of broader criminal networks to which these exploiters are connected. The violence they experience is not merely interpersonal—it is embedded within transnational systems of exploitation. Refusing this violence does not offer an escape; instead, it often provokes threats or retaliation that span across borders, endangering family members in countries of origin. These women are trapped in a cycle where so-called ‘protection’ becomes a manipulative currency, offered not to ensure safety but to extract submission.
A darker revelation is the failure of protection by those entrusted to provide it. Refugee camps, spaces designed as sanctuaries for those fleeing violence, can mirror the very dangers women thought they had left behind. Rather than sheltering vulnerable populations, structural neglect and the absence of gender-sensitive planning confine women to their tents out of fear or push them into transactional sex to access food, mobility, or basic physical security. Even more disturbing are documented cases where humanitarian workers have themselves perpetrated abuse. The 2018 Amnesty International report discloses that “women with perceived ties to IS have been sexually harassed by medical staff and aid workers”, sometimes within their very own tents. This betrayal not only causes profound physical and emotional harm but also erodes any remaining sense of trust, deepening the isolation of women already living on the margins.
Childhood to Motherhood
On paper, international frameworks such as the UN Trafficking Protocol (2000), the Hague Convention (1996), and political commitments like the New York Declaration (2016) and Global Compacts (2018) all publicly pledge to protect children. However, in practice, international laws are non-binding, loosely enforced, and not even signed by certain countries. These cracks leave space for the exploitation of children, reflecting a global failure to take violence against migrants seriously. This negligence not only speaks of the credibility of international commitments but also weakens the very concepts of deterrence and protection. When violations carry no real consequences, impunity thrives for perpetrators. According to UNICEF, by the end of 2023, 47.2 million children were displaced by conflict and violence. In such an environment where justice becomes optional, the promise of safety slips further out of reach.
UNICEF reports that unaccompanied children at the US-Mexico border seeking asylum often fall victim to violence and sexual abuse. Rather than preventing child susceptibility, the US immigration policy on family separation actively increases their vulnerability, making it easier for children to be targets. These policies don’t just leave children vulnerable to abuse, but they also have serious long-term repercussions on their development. For girls, the stakes are even higher. Age and gender converge to deepen this vulnerability, leaving girls particularly exposed to trafficking, sexual violence, and exploitation. Structural patriarchy and deep-rooted gender norms only widen the gap, positioning girls’ safety as secondary and making their bodies more expendable. At this intersection, girlhood becomes a risk factor, and childhood innocence is traded in for survival in a world that looks the other way.
On the other end of the spectrum, motherhood forms a cruel shape along migration routes. Preparing to nurture someone else when you are not even protecting yourself. How do you bring life into the world when unsure if you will survive yourself? Migrants from Tunisia reported being financially incapable of providing even the basics, such as milk and diapers, for their children, with no support available for infants. It takes unimaginable strength to care for a child under such conditions. Unfortunately, this is not the worst of it. A woman informed Amnesty that a pregnant detainee in a Libyan immigration centre was beaten to death by officials. Her body, already carrying life, was deemed disposable. This is what it looks like when power is unchecked.
When even the most vulnerable are not spared, motherhood becomes a site not of care but punishment.
Migrant women from Tunisia described raising children conceived of sexual violence. Likewise, Rubini and colleagues’ 2023 study found that many women on their migratory journey through Libya had been raped, with the most commonly reported physical consequence being pregnancy. ‘Physical’ consequence, and yet the emotional consequence runs deeper. To carry the child of a perpetrator is to live the violence that doesn’t end with the act; it continues to live within the body. The trauma of forced maternity in its most invasive form: bringing an innocent child into the world, conceived out of unimaginable violence and exploitation.
Rethinking Safety on the Move
From girlhood to motherhood, migrant women and girls endure systematic neglect that traps women and girls in cycles of abuse and fear. The hidden costs of crossing: where violence is inescapable, protection is less about safety but more about control, and where the bodies of women become battlegrounds in a global system that fails them repeatedly.
As global displacement reaches unprecedented levels, the need to revise how gendered violence operates through systems supposedly designed to protect is crucial. The UN’s 2030 Agenda calls for the eradication of child trafficking and exploitation, but in 2025, are we any closer to that goal? In 2023, conflict-related sexual violence rose by 50%, with women and girls making up 95% of verified cases, UN data shows. Protection remains non-binding and inconsistent, leaving women and girls with their rights, safety, and autonomy continuously compromised.
Rethinking protection requires more than policy reform—it demands dismantling the very structures that reproduce harm. It means holding state and non-state actors accountable, enforcing gender-sensitive asylum systems, and building survivor-centred responses that offer tangible care, not conditional aid. It means recognising that violence on the move is not an anomaly but a manifestation of how deeply patriarchy is ingrained in the politics of migration.
Migrants deserve more than survival—they deserve to cross without fear, without violence, and without sacrificing their bodies.
This article is part of the series “Women On The Move. Fleeing, Fighting, Forgotten” To read more inspiring stories of everyday women making a real difference in the world, be sure to check out the latest edition of Wempower magazine, or listen to our podcast.
