Roma Feminist Colective

The Roma Feminist Collective is a transnational Roma feminist network, Roma women- and member-led organization working at the intersection of racial and gender justice.

Our work aims to shift responsibility from individuals to the structures that sustain harm by documenting the different forms of systemic violence faced by Roma women and girls. We define violence as both physical and psychological harm, as well as epistemic violence, where systemic injustice is embedded in institutions and in economic, social, and political structures.

We understand violence as an oppressive state's operational tool, built on racist, patriarchal, and heteronormative systems that control gendered, racialized, migrant, queer, and poor communities. These systems are working as designed, denying justice through institutions rooted in racial capitalism and colonial logics, reproducing hierarchy and oppression while protecting existing power.

This reflects our Roma intersectional feminist and antiracist understanding, shaped by lived experience, collective struggle, and shared analysis. Our work documents that the violences faced by Roma women and girls are transgenerational, cross-border, and structural experiences. We do so to advocate for the abolition of gendered heteropatriarchal-racism and state violence across Europe.

We see that violence we face is multidimensional and works across generations. We see it in knowledge production, where the education and academic systems are a site of violence where Roma histories, languages, and epistemologies are erased and devalued. We see it in healthcare that denies care and imposes violent procedures on our bodies, in welfare and housing systems that monitor, segregate and force evict families, and in policing practices that criminalize Roma existence. These forms of structural, epistemic, and interpersonal violence continue to limit Roma women’s and girls’ safety, autonomy, freedom of movement, access to care, and political organizing across Europe.