GBV, Migration, and the Right to Housing

“I highlight the agency and political citizenship of migrant women, who challenge the boundaries of property and territory every time they fight to remain in their homes.”

Julieta Lechini, CMGJ Research Fellow | Youth Engagement Academy (2025)

I sit on the cold stairs of María’s house, in L´Hospitalet, Region of Barcelona. I sit waiting for her to return the key of what was her home for more than twenty years. She is losing the mortgage after the bankruptcy of her small business, where she sold fabric and clothes in a neighborhood shop. The house that once represented her arrival, her labor, her aspirations, now slips away through the cold procedures of a judicial eviction.

We move upstairs slowly, at the crip time marked by her fibromyalgia and hip pain. I know from previous conversations that these pains have accumulated through years of overwork, prolonged stress, and the anxiety of financial debt that has now materialized into this morning’s event. We walk carrying more than the physical pain,

I stay outside, on the stairs, banned from entering by the authorities. I reread my notes and trace the threads of violence that have woven themselves through María’s life. Menjívar and Domínguez’s concept of multi-scalar violence surfaces in my mind, offering a frame to grasp the interconnected forms of harm that accumulate in the lives of migrant women. Violence that is not episodic but chronic and layered, leaking across institutions, bodies, laws, and borders.

I count.

I remember the police shoving us away during her previous eviction attempts, their voices rising, their arms pushing us away.
I remember her former partner — the one who bought this house with her money, without her consent, leaving her without legal ownership. The man she spent ten years avoiding inside the same walls, informally dividing the house into fragments of non-encounter.
I remember her stories of years of struggle to get residency documents.
I remember the last six months I have known her, during which she never stopped searching for a rental for herself and her daughter, receiving the same answers again and again: “We do not rent to single mothers” “you need a permanent contract.”

Later, I will learn that María’s story is not unique. It is common. Normative among the migrant women at the activist housing platform Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH). Since 2009, PAH has confronted the rise in foreclosures and the persistent violence of evictions in Spain. Over the years, a notable pattern appears: migrant women — many mothers, many survivors of gender-based violence — make up the backbone of the platform. They come because institutions fail them. In many of their words, they stay because La PAH becomes the first place where they are not treated like criminals for trying to remain home.

The Housing Crisis for Migrant Populations

Barcelona’s housing “crisis” is often narrated through numbers: rent increases of over 30 percent in the last decade, thousands of families displaced, public housing stocks that remain among the lowest in Europe. But crises never land equally. The housing “crisis” is not simply a material condition of scarcity; it is a politics of who is allowed to belong and occupy the city, a politics of housing as a commodity and not as a right.

For racialized and migrant people, racism enhances the lack of housing and opportunities to live in the City, sometimes experiencing a continuum displacement. Even when they have the income, paperwork, or references, doors still close. The scholar Desmond argues that racialized single migrant mothers are often positioned not simply as tenants, but as potential “risks” to property. Landlords often avoid renting to migrants, particularly Black, Arab, and Latin American women. Many of the women I interviewed referred to being labeled as “el perfil malo” — the “bad profile,” coded as risky, unreliable. Single mothers are especially penalized, as if their caregiving is a reason for non-payment of rent, and not the increasing rents. 

This everyday discrimination pushes many migrants into overcrowded rooms, exploitative rentals, or informal occupations of empty flats. And when the city labels these occupations as illegal, the criminalization of poverty becomes yet another form of violence. In my research, several women explained that squatting was not an act of rebellion but an act of survival. “Where else can I go?” is not a rhetorical question. It is a geographic one that traces from their embodied violence to the territory they inhabit.

Gender-Based Violence and Housing

As part of my master’s thesis on deterritorialized bodies, I used the participatory methodology of cuerpo-territorio to explore how migrant women from Latin America that are facing an eviction, navigate housing precarity, violence, and belonging. Inspired by Latin American decolonial feminisms, cuerpo-territorio invited us to map not just the places women inhabit but the ways power inscribes itself on their bodies: through labor, through migration, through motherhood, through eviction.

As Adrienne Rich reminds us:

“But start not with a continent or a country or a house, but with the closest geography — the body. Bodies are crossed by powers from other scales: the politics of motherhood, abortion, compulsory heterosexuality, rape, forced sterilization, racism. Claiming the right to the body makes it a space for social struggle. The body is a spatial scale produced in and through these relations. “

Working with 22 individual interviews, body maps, territory maps, and group workshops, I analyzed evictions as a point of entry into the multidimensional violence faced by migrant women. Evictions were not isolated events. They exposed the wider web of institutional, border, legal, and gender violence shaping their lives.

Six of the fourteen women who spoke to me explicitly identified gender-based violence by a partner as a reason or a cause of housing precarity. Several had lived years — even decades — with abusive partners because they had nowhere else to go. For two of them, squatting became the only escape route when rental discrimination left them without alternatives.

In conversations with activists from PAH, the message was constant and clear: housing is essential to confronting gender-based violence. Without a home, there is no safety plan. There is no autonomy. There is no exit.

This aligns with global research. Dos-Santos shows how migrant women specifically experience an intensification of GBV due to immigration status, labor precarity, and legal dependency inside their homes. Adding to this, Clough et al. (2014) highlight how stable housing is one of the most critical factors for survivors. Women will go to extreme circumstances to avoid ending in the street, due to fear of more violence. Hence, they are more likely to remain with abusive partners or accept abusive exchanges and precarious housing options. In the midst of a housing “crisis” it is the right to a home that blurries what is a weapon and what is a refuge.

A Colonial Continuity

The effect of the housing “crisis” on migrant women reveal that displacement through eviction or a need to run from GBV, is not simply the loss of a home. It is the reactivation of older wounds — colonial, economic, racial, patriarchal. Migration itself is often the result of dispossession: environmental degradation, political instability, labor exploitation, or global inequalities shaped by centuries of extraction in the Global South. To arrive in Europe and encounter new forms of dispossession through violence and housing precarity is not a coincidence. It is a structure.

In Barcelona, the right to housing is entangled with racial capitalism. Property regimes, as scholars like Blomley, Roy, and Porter remind us, have never been neutral. They define whose life is grievable, whose presence is legitimate, whose occupation of space is permitted. Women like María occupy the margins of the city and the margins of property because she is a migrant woman. The patriarchal system allowed her husband to purchase a home without her name, and the legal system left her unprotected as a “squatter” even after living more than twenty years in her home.

Migrant women are not only targets of violence. Being involved at the PAH, they become creators of new territorialities. Through collective organizing, mutual aid, and everyday resistance, they reconfigure the meaning of “home” and “city.” In PAH, women build political kinship, share childcare, teach each other how to navigate institutions, and form what many describe as their “chosen family.” These practices challenge the territorial logics of exclusion and create alternative geographies of care.

Understanding housing struggles through the lens of gender-based violence and migration reveals the historical and global forces shaping women’s urban lives. It shows why we must situate the housing crisis within broader histories of dispossession, and why participatory, feminist, and decolonial methodologies — like cuerpo-territorio — are essential for generating knowledge that emerges from lived experience.

During these sixteen days of actions, I denounce that housing commodification and speculation, which leads to the increasing prices, leads to women enduring gender based violence within the walls of their homes due to lack of alternatives. 

I proclaim that all politics -including housing- must be gender-responsive.   

And most importantly, I highlight the agency and political citizenship of migrant women, who challenge the boundaries of property and territory every time they fight to remain in their homes. 

Imagining a feminist world starts by having housing as a right.