South African refugee and migrant women are being turned away from healthcare, schools and government offices unless they can produce the right documents, even as Women’s Month is used to celebrate women’s contributions and the country’s liberation struggle.
Who Gets Stopped at the Door
For many women, August is not a celebration at all. It’s another month of being told, in one form or another, that safety depends on paperwork. The article says refugee and migrant women stand outside clinics, schools and government offices asking a question that should shame every gatekeeper: when will a document stop determining whether they deserve protection?
That question lands hard because the violence isn’t abstract. It shows up when a child is turned away from school because officials question documentation. It shows up when a woman is denied healthcare because she cannot produce the “correct” papers. It shows up when a market trader loses her livelihood after anti-foreigner protests target migrant-owned businesses. And it shows up when a mother decides not to report gender-based violence because deportation feels more immediate than the abuse.
The article says 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 armed conflict, persecution or political instability in their home countries. Then they met another system of control in South Africa, where citizens demand IDs before allowing access to healthcare, education, employment and other essential services.
The Second Violence
In a 2025 article in the Journal of Migration and Health, Alexis Harerimana, Julian Pillay and Gugu Mchunu identified pervasive medical xenophobia and exclusion of refugees and migrants in African healthcare systems. The article calls that the second violence. The first violence drove them from home. The second waits where they hope for safety.
That framing matters because it strips away the comforting lie that crossing a border ends the harm. The article says 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 gets reconfigured through immigration systems, xenophobia, economic exclusion, institutional discrimination and, for some women, continuing abuse in the family.
The scale is brutal. According to the latest UN High Commissioner for Refugees 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, and increasingly many of those families are led by women responsible not only for finding safety but also for rebuilding family life after unimaginable loss.
South Africa’s own record is grim. The landmark First South African National Gender-Based Violence Study, 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.
What Safety Actually Requires
The article says some families 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 stay, 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.
It also says this isn’t only a South African story. Research with African refugee communities in Australia found similar patterns, with women describing the loss of extended family networks, discrimination in employment and public institutions, and conditional belonging. The form changes. The damage doesn’t.
The article argues that safety can’t 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. It says governments, including the South African government, must ensure that immigration status never becomes a barrier to protection or justice.
Community organisations and other institutions are also named, though the article gives them a limited role: challenging xenophobia before it becomes normalised. International organisations and wealthier states are told to recognise that deterrence policies and exclusionary migration practices reinforce, rather than reduce, the continuum of violence experienced by displaced women. That’s the machinery at work. Borders, paperwork, exclusion, and the quiet bureaucratic violence that follows people long after the first flight from home.
The article ends with a blunt line: until refugee and migrant women no longer move from one form of violence to another, they cannot honestly be said to have found safety. The violence has simply been relocated.