ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marissa Daruwalla was born in 1976 in Luxembourg to a Parsi (Persian Indian) father and a half Surinamese and Dutch mother. She studied and worked as a professional social worker in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, before moving to Thailand and returning to Luxembourg in 2006.
Besides her general work experience since 1999 in many different fields (addiction, psychiatry and after care, child day care, child protection services, work coach, etc.), her specialization in gender violence prevention (prostitution, sexual exploitation of women and children, trafficking in human beings for sexual purposes, prevention work in sexual delinquency, Dutch national research team on sexual at risk behaviour, domestic violence, etc.) has allowed her to acquire a certain expertise within this particular domain.
In 2002 and 2003, she worked with the National Research Institute in the Netherlands in collaboration with the municipality of Rotterdam on a project that analyzed sexual at risk behavior among different populations in the Netherlands.
Her professional and personal journey led her to write her book, a study on our human sexual behavior from a decolonial, or socio-economic and political, point of view.
Sexuality and gender are subjects that we cannot escape, everyone is confronted with them. But, it was gender inequalities that made her want to research this topic in more detail. It took more than 10 years of literary and academic research to complete this work and draw the conclusion that colonialism aka capitalism, not patriarchy, is the root cause of all violence.