Marissa Daruwalla was born in 1976 in Luxembourg to a Parsi (Persian Indian) father and a half Surinamese, half 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 across many fields — addiction, psychiatry and after-care, child day care, child protection services, and work coaching — 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, the Dutch national research team on sexual at-risk behaviour, domestic violence) has given her deep expertise in this field.
In 2002 and 2003, she worked with the National Research Institute in the Netherlands, in collaboration with the municipality of Rotterdam, on a project analyzing sexual at-risk behaviour among different populations in the Netherlands.
Her professional and personal journey led her to write her book, a study of human sexual behaviour from a decolonial, socio-economic and political point of view. It took more than ten years of literary and academic research to complete, drawing the conclusion that colonialism — not patriarchy alone — is a root cause of gender violence.
That same research led her to a related insight: that the same colonial systems used to justify gender inequality were used to construct racial hierarchy. This led her to create The Sun People and the Ice People, an anti-racism educational package for primary schools — combining a multilingual animated cartoon, storybook, pupil activities and a 200-page teacher's guide — designed to help the next generation recognize racism, build empathy, and learn to repair harm.
Marissa is the founder of SEED – Sex Education Decolonized, Luxembourg representative of ENGOCCAR, and a project partner of the Maangamizi Educational Trust.
