Interview with Sodfa Daaji from the European Network of Migrant Women

How would you describe yourself and your organisation?

We are a migrant women-led feminist, secular, nonpartisan platform that advocates for the rights, freedoms and dignity of migrant, refugee and ethnic minority women and girls in Europe.

Our membership ranges from grassroots service providers to NGOs focused on advocacy and research. Our members cover a diverse range of subjects, including economic empowerment, anti-discrimination and access to justice, and combatting male violence against women and girls.

We work through collaborative actions with our members promoting capacity building, access to rights and justice and self-representation among migrant and refugee women at both the European and international levels.

Collectively, we foster safe space where women and girls of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds can come together to support each other, forge alliances and build solidarity across differences and borders.

We are visionary, proactive and bold, and we prioritise migrant women and girls.

How do you see the situation of people on the move and/or the communities you advocate for in the countries in which you’re active? And how do you see things across Europe more broadly?

Across Europe, women and girls on the move are subjected to a migration system that is increasingly restrictive, punitive and indifferent to their lived realities.

European migration policies are presented as neutral and technical, yet in practice they systematically ignore the specific harms experienced by women and girls. This false neutrality produces violence rather than protection.

We are particularly concerned with the direction taken at the EU level.

The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum institutionalises detention-like border procedures and accelerates asylum processes with reduced safeguards. These measures significantly increase the risk of detention and rights violations for women and children, while further limiting access to meaningful protection.

Across Europe, the cumulative effect of these policies is clear, with women and girls being treated as administrative cases rather than as rights holders with agency, histories and specific needs. The current EU approach actively reproduces harms at borders, in reception systems and through detention practices that should have no place in a rights-based Europe.

In such a difficult context, when it is easy to lose hope, what motivates you to keep doing this work?

In a context where violence is normalised and suffering is increasingly managed rather than prevented, what keeps us going is the knowledge that migrant women and girls are being systematically erased from migration and asylum debates.

We are motivated by the fact that we are women, and that our experiences, bodies and survival strategies are treated as secondary, invisible or expendable with migration governance.

Violence against women is universal. It exists across borders, legal statuses and cultures. Yet in migration contexts, it is treated as exceptional, incidental or too complex to address. We understand violence as a continuum, and this violence does not stop at borders.

What motivates us is the refusal to accept this erasure.

In the midst of highly securitised debates about borders, numbers and control, women and girls are too often reduced to footnotes or vulnerability checklists. We continue this work because naming this violence, connecting its different forms and insisting on accountability is both a feminist and political necessity.

We are also sustained by collective resistance. We organise, support one another and speak out when systems are designed to silence us.

Lastly, our organisation works in an incremental way: we do not expect that 10,000 years of patriarchy – the system that lies at the root of the current violent regimes we are witnessing – will be eliminated with the stroke of a pen. We believe in small but consistent changes – including at the level of women’s own awareness – that lay the foundations for long-term fundamental change.

What would you say to people in Europe with passport privilege, silently watching all this unfold?

Having an EU passport is not necessarily a privilege per se. We are made to believe that it is. However, obtaining citizenship is a legal right.

That many EU states do not respect or limit this right turns citizenship into a special privilege when it should not be viewed as such.

Holding an EU passport is not just freedom of movement, but also protection from the daily violence, uncertainty and exclusion that migration regimes impose on others.

For female migrants, it means a lot of things, including greater protection from domestic violence as well as access to shelter and justice, child and unemployment benefits, and health care, education and employment opportunities.

People with privilege have power, whether they use it or not. The question is not whether one is “directly affected,” but whether one accepts living in societies built on exclusion and suffering.

What sort of Europe would you like to see in the future, and what do you think it would take to make it a reality?

We want a Europe where all women and girls – including those on the move – are recognised as full rights holders.

The Europe we want to see is where migrant women are not treated as collateral damage of migration control, sensationalist stories in the media or tokens on “diversity” panels. Also, a Europe where freedom of movement is not criminalised, where borders do not expose women and girls to violence and death, and where asylum systems are accessible, dignified and responsive to women’s experiences and needs.

We envision a Europe where no woman or girl is detained because of her migration status, where protection from violence is not conditional on legal categories or narrow vulnerability frameworks, and where access to safety, healthcare and justice is guaranteed.

Making this a reality requires confronting structural racism, colonial legacies and patriarchal power structures, and centring migrant women and girls in decision-making. It also requires confronting some uncomfortable truths about why we have reached such levels of polarisation in society including the role of political parties, governments and civil society organisations, and the substance behind what too often has become slogans on social media.

For more information about the European Migrant Women Network, please visit their website.

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