South Africans observe August as Women’s Month to celebrate the contributions of women to society and the country’s liberation struggle, while highlighting issues that most affect them, such as gender-based violence (GBV), intimate partner violence and women’s health. But as we recognise and honour past, current and future women pioneers, let us also remember that not all women are celebrating in South Africa.

Not all women feel safe, seen, valued or protected. For many, this month is another reminder of the violence, discrimination, inequality and exclusion women continue to endure every day.

Seventy years ago, thousands of women marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest against pass laws that reduced dignity and freedom to a piece of paper. This Women's Month, refugee and migrant women stand outside clinics, schools and government offices asking a remarkably similar question: when will a document stop determining whether we deserve protection?

The recent xenophobic mobilisation has exposed how overlapping vulnerabilities shape the everyday lives of women. For migrant and refugee women, the burden is often doubled or even tripled. Many fled their home countries because armed conflict, persecution or political instability made staying impossible.

Increasingly, in South Africa, the barriers they face are not soldiers but citizens who demand IDs before allowing them access to healthcare, education, employment and other essential services.

The violence the women experience is not confined to physical attacks. It is the child turned away from school because officials question their documentation. It is the woman denied healthcare because she cannot produce the “correct” papers. It is the market trader whose livelihood disappears when anti-foreigner protests target migrant-owned businesses. It is the mother who chooses not to report GBV because she fears deportation more than the abuse.

In an article in the Journal of Migration and Health (2025), Alexis Harerimana, Julian Pillay and Gugu Mchunu identified pervasive medical xenophobia and exclusion of refugees and migrants in African healthcare systems.

This is the second violence. The first violence drove them from home. The second waits where they hope for safety.

For many refugee and migrant women, violence does not end when they cross an international border. It changes form.

Women’s Month offers an opportunity for us to recommit ourselves to ending GBV. Yet it should also prompt us to ask a difficult question: when is a refugee woman safe?

According to the latest UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Global Trends report, Forced Displacement in 2025, published in June 2026, more than 41.6 million people worldwide were refugees at the end of 2025. Across Africa, conflicts and economic insecurity continue to force families from their homes. Increasingly, many of the families are led by women responsible not only for finding safety but also for rebuilding family life after unimaginable loss.

Humanitarian responses often assume that safety begins once refugees reach another country. My research with African refugee and migrant communities suggests something different. Violence against refugee women is better understood as a continuum rather than a series of isolated events.

Armed conflict may force women to flee but crossing a border rarely marks the end of violence. Instead, violence is reconfigured through immigration systems, xenophobia, economic exclusion, institutional discrimination and, for some women, continuing abuse in the family. Understanding violence as a continuum helps explain why so many migrant and refugee women continue to experience insecurity long after arriving in places officially described as safe.

South Africa illustrates this continuum particularly clearly during protests against undocumented migrants and refugees.

Many refugee and migrant women living in South Africa escaped countries devastated by war, political instability or economic collapse. They sought protection, only to encounter new forms of insecurity. These include xenophobia, discrimination, barriers to employment, insecure immigration status, limited access to healthcare and profound social isolation. Violence, in other words, becomes personal and structural.

South Africa faces one of the world's most serious crises of violence against women. The landmark __ First South African National Gender-Based Violence Study__ (2022), conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council and released in 2024, found that 35.5% of women aged 18 and older in South Africa have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime.

Recognising the additional vulnerabilities experienced by refugee and migrant women does not diminish the reality. Rather, it acknowledges that some women experience violence through multiple, intersecting systems of exclusion. Gender, nationality, immigration status, race and poverty combine to create forms of vulnerability that responses often struggle to recognise.

For some families, the consequences are devastating. Women return to countries they originally fled, not because conflict has ended or economic insecurity has improved but because they no longer feel safe where they sought refuge. Others remain, living with the daily uncertainty that safety depends not on their rights but on whether they can produce the right documents at the right moment.

This is not simply a South African story.

My research with African refugee communities in Australia revealed remarkably similar patterns. Although the political contexts differ, women consistently described losing the extended family networks that once provided care, experiencing discrimination in employment and public institutions and learning that belonging remained conditional. Violence had changed its form but not its effects.

If violence follows refugee and migrant women across borders, then our understanding of protection must also change. Safety cannot be measured simply by whether a woman has crossed an international border. It must include the ability to access healthcare without fear, report abuse without risking deportation, enrol children in school, secure decent work and participate fully in community life regardless of immigration status.

Achieving this requires action at several levels. Governments, including the South African government, must ensure that immigration status never becomes a barrier to protection or justice. Community organisations and other institutions have a vital role in challenging xenophobia before it becomes normalised. International organisations and wealthier states must also recognise that deterrence policies and exclusionary migration practices reinforce, rather than reduce, the continuum of violence experienced by displaced women.

Until refugee and migrant women no longer move from one form of violence to another, we cannot honestly say they have found safety. We have simply relocated the violence.

Therefore, as we honour women in South Africa throughout August, let us ensure that our celebration is accompanied by a renewed commitment to creating a world where every woman here and elsewhere can live with dignity, safety, equality and hope.

Dr Akuch Kuol Anyieth is a future chair research fellow, lecturer and postgraduate programme convenor at the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest at Stellenbosch University.