“All I did was cry”

This article explores how migrant women experience harm, resilience, and agency while in transit through the Americas. It focuses on the ways sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) shapes mobility, everyday life, and perception, drawing on women’s own words to trace how harm accumulates both through direct acts of violence and through the constant threat of it. The article situates these experiences within the continuum of violence framework, understanding violence as a process that crosses borders, stages, and forms rather than as isolated incidents. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Honduras in 2024, it centres on the testimony of one Venezuelan woman travelling with her three daughters whose narrative reveals the entanglement of fear, care, exhaustion, and determination that defines life on the move. Her story, like those of many others, challenges one-dimensional portrayals of migrant women as passive victims and instead foregrounds strategies of endurance, mutual support, and self protection. The analysis shows that even in extreme vulnerability, women navigate danger through acts of choice and solidarity that complicate conventional binaries of victimhood and agency. In highlighting these dynamics, the article calls for humanitarian and academic approaches that recognise women’s voices not only as evidence of suffering but as sources of knowledge and power for understanding the lived realities of migration and violence

Everyday life · Harm · Lived experience · Narrative · Solidarity · Intimate Partner and Family Violence · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Sex work and related issues