The theoretical engine of the study is a framework borrowed from philosophy and migration studies: the tactic–strategy continuum, developed by De Certeau and elaborated for migrant populations by Sereke and Drzewiecka. Strategies, in this account, belong to the powerful—migration offices, welfare agencies, employers, refugee centres—institutions that set the terms of access to housing, work, healthcare and language education. Tactics belong to those who must build their lives within frameworks designed by others. The researchers treat tactics and strategies not as a binary but as points on a continuum of action, and they ask what everyday ‘techniques’ women deploy to overcome or sidestep barriers, negotiate state integration requirements, and counter racist exclusions. The answer, they find, is written into the smallest details of daily life.

The study’s second analytical lens is intersectionality, understood through the work of postcolonial feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Rather than treating gender, ethnicity, religion, age, disability, education and legal status as separate variables, the researchers examined how these dimensions overlap and compound one another in concrete situations. A highly educated physician from a conflict zone, for instance, faces a very different set of barriers than a woman with limited literacy, even when both hold the same temporary residence permit. The framework also foregrounds solidarity among women as a form of resistance, a theme that turned out to be central to the findings.

Between August 2021 and October 2025, the team conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews lasting 45 to 90 minutes, in German, English, Swedish, Dari and Farsi, with interpreters and trained cultural brokers supporting some sessions. Participants ranged from 21 to 49 years old and lived in cities, where access to language courses, public transport and jobs is better than in rural areas but where bureaucracy and competition for housing and work are fiercer. The interviews were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, with intersectionality applied as a critical reflexivity tool across all six analytical steps. The researchers were explicit about their own positionality: the first author is a migratised occupational therapist with roots in Pakistan, and several co-authors have personal histories of exile and voluntary migration, including one who grew up during Chile’s dictatorship and later worked with survivors of human rights violations.

The analysis produced four themes, and the first captures the emotional terrain on which everything else unfolds: moving between uncertainty and hope. Participants described waiting years for residence permits and language courses, living in a liminal state one woman called being ‘lost in the woods’, torn between countries, ‘not there and not here at the same time – like a ghost’. One participant, Amira, waited more than three years for a permit and access to a German course while experiencing severe depression: ‘No place to live, no work, no language.’ The researchers interpret this enforced waiting as a strategic exercise of power—what other scholars call slow violence and necropolitics, the bureaucratic machinery that makes some lives wait indefinitely. Against this, the women’s tactics were strikingly concrete. One participant, Naima, denied language classes in 2016, wrote new German words on her wall to memorise them and raised her hand declaring ‘I want, I want’ whenever anyone at the refugee centre mentioned work. Another summed up her survival philosophy in five words: ‘Information is more than money.’

The second theme, disrupted narratives, documents how migration severs the story a person tells about her own life. Amira, a former specialist physician, described needing to ‘wear my white coat’ but being unable to practise medicine in Germany, working instead as a nursing assistant and feeling ‘like a small human’. Professional validation processes took years, and the researchers note that high qualifications can paradoxically make labour market re-entry harder, because the gap between previous status and available work is so wide. Other participants described precariousness rooted in family structure: financial dependence on partners, full responsibility for childcare, and no personal time or independent social network. One woman relied on her partner for housing and finances while unable to work as a midwife, describing herself as feeling like a ‘small child’—a metaphor the researchers read as infantilisation produced by oppressive living conditions.

The third theme is the study’s most vivid: nature-based occupations as tactics of freedom. Bicycling emerged as far more than transport. For women who had been barred from cycling in their countries of origin by gender restrictions, learning to ride in Germany or Sweden carried symbolic weight connected to gender equality, independence and health—one participant said she had to bicycle every day ‘because of bad thoughts. I have nightmares.’ The researchers situate this within a long history: the bicycle has been a ‘tool for liberty’ in women’s rights movements since the late nineteenth century. Gardening played a parallel role. One participant rented an allotment where her family could simply be together in peace; another claimed a patch of green in her neighbourhood to plant a vegetable from home, creating a living link between her past and present. The researchers interpret these cultivated spaces as ‘gaining territory’—small, physical reversals of the power imbalance that otherwise defines displaced women’s lives.

Solidarity, the fourth theme, operates at a different scale. Participants volunteered in NGOs supporting refugee women, counselled peers on breast cancer screening and contraception, explained how the German and Swedish systems work, and taught other women to ride bicycles. Naima, who lives with a disability herself, declared: ‘No matter if I get money or not, I want to help the women.’ Her volunteering made her more independent and strengthened her position within dominant social structures, even though it brought no economic stability. Another participant recalled the moment her sense of self shifted on arriving in Europe: ‘I am in Europe, I am not just a housewife anymore.’ Drawing on Mohanty’s account of cross-cultural feminist solidarity, the researchers argue that these practices are not merely mutual aid but forms of resistance to structural violence—collective occupations that counteract the absence of state and institutional initiatives enabling a good life for displaced women.

The methodological choices deserve attention because they shape what the study can claim. The team used information power rather than saturation to justify the sample size, conducted analysis meetings guided by critical reflexivity, and evaluated quality against Tracy’s eight criteria for excellent qualitative research, including sincerity, resonance and meaningful coherence. Interpreters were matched to participants by sex and ethnic background, and every participant received a follow-up phone call days after her interview, along with contact details for psychosocial support networks—a safeguard reflecting the interviewers’ therapeutic experience with trauma. The long data collection window, stretching across election cycles, pandemic restrictions and shifting migration policies, is framed as a strength, because it captured how political change altered participants’ everyday conditions in real time.

The implications reach beyond academia. The authors argue that occupational therapists—health professionals who specialise in enabling meaningful daily activity—are uniquely positioned to support displaced women, but only if they understand everyday life as tactics and strategies in motion, shaped by intersecting power dynamics. Rather than treating a client’s difficulty attending a language course as an individual deficit, a therapist applying this lens would ask which structural barriers, gendered expectations and legal constraints are at play, and might work with the tactics women already use: cycling groups, gardening projects, solidarity networks. The researchers go further, insisting that practitioners must become allies and advocates rather than reproducing existing power imbalances in clinical settings. In a European policy climate marked by stricter border controls and the new EU Asylum and Migration Pact, the study is a reminder that integration is not something that happens to people—it is something people actively, ingeniously do, one bicycle ride, one planted seed and one act of solidarity at a time.

Subject of Research: Intersectional power dynamics and everyday occupations among women with experiences of forced migration in urban Sweden and Germany

Article Title: Tactics and Strategies Operating in Everyday Life Among Women with Experiences of Forced Migration

Article References: Scheer, S., Asaba, E., Buerk, T., Guerrero, M., & Mondaca, M. (2026). Tactics and Strategies Operating in Everyday Life Among Women with Experiences of Forced Migration. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 33(1), Article 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44474-026-00011-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44474-026-00011-5

Keywords: forced migration, refugee women, intersectionality, occupational therapy, power dynamics, solidarity, bicycling, gardening, social participation, qualitative research, Sweden, Germany

The study, led by Jamilah Sherally of the Athena Institute at VU Amsterdam together with colleagues from Leiden University Medical Centre, KIT Royal Tropical Institute, Radboud University, and the University of Amsterdam, was built on an unusual foundation. Nine refugee women living in the camp were trained and employed as co-researchers. They helped develop the research questions, recruited participants, collected data, and took part in collective analysis of the findings. Between August and October 2023, the team conducted six focus group discussions and 27 peer-to-peer interviews, in which women from the community spoke with one another rather than with external investigators. In total, 67 women from nine nationalities took part, with seven women contributing to both methods.

The participatory design was not merely a matter of convenience. Research with displaced populations has long been criticized for extracting information without returning any control over how it is framed or used. By using approaches drawn from Participatory Ethnographic and Evaluative Research, the team employed creative techniques such as body mapping, in which participants draw their experiences onto an outline of a human body; storytelling; photovoice; guided visualization; and a world café format of rotating small-group conversations. These methods are designed to allow women to express experiences that may be traumatic, taboo, or difficult to articulate in a conventional interview, and to position them as agents of change rather than passive subjects of research.

The title of the paper itself captures a recurring grievance. One participant’s words, quoted in the study, describe clinical encounters in which examinations were performed without explanation: women submitted to pelvic examinations without being told what was being looked for or why. That single complaint crystallizes a broader finding. What the women described as missing from their healthcare was not only access to services but respect, information, and autonomy. They wanted timely and equitable care, but they also wanted to understand their own bodies, to make informed decisions, and to be treated as competent adults rather than as bodies to be processed.

Using a socio-ecological model combined with an intersectional lens, the researchers organized the findings across multiple levels, from individual wellbeing to camp conditions to the structures of European migration governance. At the individual level, women emphasized mental health and health literacy as core components of sexual and reproductive health. Many described the psychological toll of prolonged uncertainty, and the way that anxiety, depression, and trauma shaped their capacity to care for themselves, their pregnancies, and their children. Information emerged as a recurring demand: women wanted to understand contraception, pregnancy, menstruation, infections, and their legal rights, in languages they could actually read and hear.

At the level of daily life, the study found that sexual and reproductive health was inseparable from material living conditions. The quality of accommodation, access to sanitation, and the adequacy of nutrition all shaped health outcomes in ways that no clinic could compensate for. Women described how inadequate food supplies affected pregnancies and breastfeeding, how shared and unsafe sanitation facilities compromised privacy and hygiene, and how the physical environment of the camp made it difficult to maintain basic reproductive health. Relational and religious support networks, the researchers found, served as important coping resources, but they operated within conditions that no amount of community solidarity could fully offset.

Safety emerged as a central and multidimensional concept. For the women in the study, safety meant far more than the absence of violence. It encompassed physical protection from assault and harassment, legal stability regarding their asylum status, food security, and access to reliable information. Protection from gender-based violence was a persistent concern, particularly for women traveling alone or heading single-parent households. The researchers note that needs were shaped by intersecting identities: legal status, single motherhood, and gender combined to produce distinct patterns of vulnerability and resilience among the women interviewed.

Perhaps the most striking analytical contribution of the study is its account of justice. The women articulated a demand for fairness that extended across the entire system they inhabited: asylum procedures conducted without arbitrary delay, non-discriminatory treatment within the camp, equitable access to healthcare, protection from gender-based violence, and an end to pushbacks, the forcible return of migrants across borders without any opportunity to apply for asylum, a practice that contravenes the principle of non-refoulement under the 1951 Refugee Convention. The authors frame this as reproductive justice in the fullest sense: reproductive autonomy, dignified conditions during pregnancy, safety for newborns, and even birthright citizenship for children born in displacement.

This framing matters because it reframes what health interventions should aim at. If the health needs of refugee women are produced by securitized migration governance, border violence, and precarious camp conditions, then distributing more contraceptives or adding antenatal appointments, while valuable, cannot address the root causes of poor outcomes. The authors argue that improving sexual and reproductive health in such settings requires tackling structural constraints on self-determination, information, food security, safety, legal stability, and dignified healthcare, and that this demands interdisciplinary and justice-oriented approaches rather than purely clinical ones. The study contributes to ongoing debates in reproductive and gender justice by demonstrating, in the authors’ words, how justice is lived rather than externally defined.

The methodological lessons may prove as influential as the substantive findings. The research received ethical approval from the Hellenic National Public Health Organization and was funded by the Dutch Research Council, and its design shows that rigorous qualitative research can be conducted with, rather than merely on, displaced communities, even in one of the most heavily controlled migration environments in Europe. The nine co-researchers are listed as authors, an acknowledgment that the knowledge produced belongs to the community that generated it. For policymakers and humanitarian organizations, the message is uncomfortable but clear: refugee women on Lesbos do not need to be studied again so much as listened to, and what they are asking for is not charity but the conditions under which health, autonomy, and justice become possible.

Subject of Research: Sexual and reproductive health needs of refugee women in the Mavrovouni camp on Lesbos, Greece

Article Title: “They looked at our vaginas but didn’t tell us why”: a participatory study on sexual and reproductive health needs of refugee women on Lesbos, Greece

Article References: Sherally, J., Grossek, G. M., Alshamari, Z., Bari, L. B., Beshir, E., Hosseini, Z., Jafari, H., Jafari, M., Mohamed, K., Mohammadyasin, S., Mobaki, K., van den Akker, T., Le Mat, M. L. J., & van den Muijsenbergh, M. (2026). “They looked at our vaginas but didn’t tell us why”: a participatory study on sexual and reproductive health needs of refugee women on Lesbos, Greece. International Journal for Equity in Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-026-03024-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12939-026-03024-5

Keywords: sexual and reproductive health, refugee women, participatory action research, Lesbos, Mavrovouni camp, reproductive justice, intersectionality, gender-based violence, migration governance, health literacy, Greece, qualitative research

The trial enrolled 24 traumatized refugee women living in communities across Southern Germany, drawn from six different countries of origin. The researchers used a controlled within-group design in which every participant served as her own comparator across time. Each woman was assessed at three points: a baseline measurement (t1), a pretest after an eight-week waiting period (t2), and a posttest following the intervention (t3). This waiting-period structure is methodologically important. Because the women received no other psychotherapy during the entire study period, any change in symptoms during the waiting phase could be attributed to natural recovery, the passage of time, or the mere attention of being assessed. When all symptom scores remained essentially unchanged across those first eight weeks, the researchers could be considerably more confident that whatever happened afterward was linked to the therapy itself.

The measurement strategy reflected the linguistic and cultural diversity of the sample. The primary outcome was the Refugee Health Screener-15 (RHS-15), a validated instrument developed specifically to detect emotional distress in refugee populations. Secondary measures included the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS21) and the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Checklist (PCL-S), the latter a 17-item instrument used to characterize posttraumatic stress severity. Crucially, all scales were administered in an interview format in each participant’s native language or a language she spoke well, with trained interviewers rather than self-completed questionnaires. This attention to language matters enormously in refugee research, where literacy barriers, unfamiliar response formats and subtle translation problems can systematically distort results. The researchers also conducted an exploratory follow-up with ten participants to examine whether gains persisted beyond the end of treatment.

The intervention itself consisted of eight weekly group sessions, each lasting 1.5 hours, delivered by trained dance movement therapists. Dance movement therapy, or DMT, is one of the creative arts therapies recognized by professional bodies such as the American Dance Therapy Association and its German counterpart. Rather than asking clients to narrate traumatic memories verbally, DMT works through the body: movement improvisation, rhythmic coordination, and expressive physical activity are used as the primary channels of therapeutic work. Two design features of this trial stand out. First, the sessions incorporated music that was emotionally meaningful to the participants themselves, drawing on their own cultural traditions rather than imposing a Western therapeutic soundtrack. Second, the women created their own dance improvisations within the group setting, making the therapy a participatory and culturally adaptive process rather than a standardized protocol imposed from outside.

The results were remarkable in their consistency. At baseline, every woman in the study showed clinically relevant levels of trauma symptoms, confirming the depth of need in this population. During the waiting period, as noted, nothing changed—symptoms of trauma, stress, depression and anxiety all held steady. After the eight weeks of dance movement therapy, however, all four symptom domains dropped significantly. Most strikingly, on the PCL-S trauma measure, scores fell so markedly that the group average dropped below the clinical cutoff value, meaning that the women moved, on average, from a symptom range that would warrant a PTSD diagnosis into the non-clinical range. The statistical analysis employed Greenhouse-Geisser corrected F-tests, a technique that adjusts for potential violations of sphericity in repeated-measures data, alongside t-tests for related samples comparing the matched time points.

The exploratory follow-up added an important nuance to the picture. When ten of the participants were reassessed eight weeks after the intervention ended, the symptom reductions appeared to hold—the benefits carried on. At a one-year follow-up, however, the effects were no longer evident. This pattern, common across many psychotherapy studies for posttraumatic stress, suggests that dance movement therapy can initiate genuine recovery but that some form of maintenance—booster sessions, ongoing group participation, or continued low-intensity support—may be needed to sustain the gains over the long term. For a population whose lives remain marked by insecure residency status, separation from family, and ongoing acculturation stress, the disappearance of treatment effects at one year is less a failure of the therapy than a reminder that trauma recovery is rarely a single event.

Why might moving the body help where words struggle? The theoretical rationale draws on a growing understanding of how trauma is encoded and expressed physiologically. Posttraumatic stress is not purely a cognitive condition; it involves autonomic dysregulation, muscular bracing, disrupted breathing, and a fragmented sense of bodily self. Survivors of violence often experience profound disconnection from their own bodies, and talk-based therapies depend precisely on the verbal reflective capacities that chronic stress and hypervigilance can suppress. Dance movement therapy targets these somatic dimensions directly: rhythmic group movement can regulate arousal, synchronized movement with others rebuilds experiences of trust and social connection, and improvised expression allows emotions to be externalized without requiring linguistic articulation. The incorporation of familiar music from participants’ own cultures may further enhance emotional engagement and safety, addressing a well-known barrier in cross-cultural mental health care where standardized Western interventions can feel foreign or intrusive.

The clinical and economic implications are significant. The authors describe DMT as a low-threshold and cost-effective approach, and the characterization is apt. Group therapy requires fewer therapist hours per patient than individual treatment. It does not depend on a shared spoken language between therapist and client in the way cognitive behavioral therapy does, although skilled, culturally competent therapists remain essential. It can be delivered in community settings rather than specialized clinics, and the participants in this study were recruited through psychosocial centers for refugees and torture victims rather than through psychiatric pathways. For health systems in Germany and across Europe that are chronically unable to meet the mental health needs of refugee populations—remember that fewer than one in ten refugees in need in Germany receives care—interventions that are accessible, acceptable across cultural backgrounds and scalable hold obvious appeal.

Honest appraisal requires acknowledging the study’s limits, and the authors are transparent about them. The within-group design, while strengthened by the waiting-period control, is less rigorous than a randomized controlled trial with an active comparison group; placebo effects, expectancy effects and non-specific therapeutic attention cannot be fully excluded. The sample of 24 women is small, although the authors note it was fully powered for the primary analyses, and the loss of more than half the sample at follow-up restricts the long-term conclusions. The trial was also retrospectively registered at the Center for Open Science in March 2023, which some methodologists would flag. The authors themselves emphasize that the lack of high-quality studies with proper control conditions and long-term follow-ups in this field points to a clear need for future research with more rigorous methodologies, ideally multi-site randomized trials that replicate the culturally adaptive elements that appear central to this intervention’s success.

Even with those caveats, the study adds meaningful weight to the evidence base for creative arts therapies in trauma care, a field that has often relied on smaller or less controlled studies. What makes these findings resonate beyond the statistics is the population at their center: women who survived violence in the countries they left, danger along the routes they traveled, and precarity in the places where they landed, and who in most cases had never before received any mental health treatment. That eight weekly sessions of moving together, accompanied by music that mattered to them, could pull their average trauma symptoms below a clinical threshold is a result worth taking seriously. It suggests that healing for survivors of displacement may not always require words—and that the body, so often the register in which trauma is written, can also be the medium through which recovery begins. The next step is to confirm these effects in larger, randomized trials and to determine how the benefits can be sustained over years, not months. For the twenty-four women who took part, however, the value of those eight weeks has already been measured.

Subject of Research: Effects of dance movement therapy on trauma, stress, depression and anxiety in traumatized refugee women

Article Title: The effect of dance movement therapy on traumatized refugee women – a clinical controlled trial

Article References: Koch, S. C., Nazemi, Z., Arnaud, C., Cook, K., Steltmann, S. J., & Tomaszewski, C. (2026). The effect of dance movement therapy on traumatized refugee women – a clinical controlled trial. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, 26(1), Article 277. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12906-026-05299-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12906-026-05299-1

Keywords: dance movement therapy, refugee women, PTSD, trauma, stress, depression, anxiety, creative arts therapies, RHS-15, clinical controlled trial, mental health, cultural adaptation