ABSTRACT
Women and Girls Safe Spaces (WGSS) have become features of communities in diverse humanitarian settings. Typically, they are centres where women and adolescent girls are supported through processes of empowerment to seek, obtain and share information, access services, meet other women and girls, enhance psychosocial wellbeing, and more fully realise their rights. The authors of this chapter worked with staff and women in a large number of WGSS to develop a ‘Women and Girls Safe Spaces Toolkit’ which introduces technical standards and provides guidance for teams implementing WGSS. In this chapter, they draw on their learning from this process, describing the objectives of WGSS, the core concepts which underpin them and the benefits and challenges of such an approach. The authors explore how, grounded in feminist social groupwork, WGSS provide opportunities for transformative changes in women’s and girls’ lives, and they demonstrate that even in the most adverse contexts, women and girls can, together, find and create space for security, respite, healing, solidarity and hope.
