About: This article explores what women’s specialist services are, why women’s movements across Europe created them and how they put survivors’ safety, choices and needs at the centre of their work. Based on WAVE’s study Agents of Change, it also looks at what is putting these services at risk today and what they need from governments, institutions and the public to keep going.
By the WAVE Office
For more than 20 years, a woman in Bosnia and Herzegovina experienced domestic violence from her husband. One night, she reached out to Medica Zenica, a local women’s specialist service. She and her two children found a place in the organisation’s safe house, finally away from decades of abuse. For Medica Zenica, this was only the first step. When the team learned she had never finished primary school, they supported her to continue her education and find a job, and they stayed by her side even after she left the shelter. Later, she publicly shared her story.
This is what women’s specialist services make possible: supporting survivors along their journey, with their safety, choices and needs at the centre. Whether in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sweden, Poland, France or Italy, women’s specialist services, from shelters to helplines and women’s centres, are often the first places women turn to when they experience violence. WAVE’s study, Agents of Change: Women’s Specialist Services and Their Feminist, Multi-Level Approach to Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls, documents this work. In the episode of the WAVE podcast, “Agents of Change: Why Women’s Specialist Services Matter”, the researchers behind the study, Léa Dudouet, Elena Floriani and Marta Konrad, explore what these services are, why women’s movements created them, what is putting their work at risk and what they need from all of us to keep going.
Services rooted in a feminist movement
Women’s specialist services are feminist-run services that work to prevent gender-based violence and support women and their children who are experiencing violence or are at risk of it. Elena Floriani describes the many forms they take. Women’s helplines are very often the first point of contact for women seeking support. Women’s shelters offer women who have to flee a dangerous situation accommodation as well as psychological support and accompaniment. Women’s centres provide legal and psychological support and support women to find a job or new accommodation. Other services specialise in certain forms of violence, such as rape crisis centres for survivors of sexual violence, or in supporting certain groups of survivors, such as migrant and refugee women.
All of these services share the same values. They understand violence against women as a cause and a consequence of women’s unequal position in our patriarchal society, and therefore as a structural issue. They believe survivors, put their needs at the centre of each intervention and offer tailored support. General services, such as health, social or employment services, and generic victim support providers without a feminist or gender focus can complement this work. However, they cannot replace it, as they tend to offer standardised, one-size-fits-all options.
As Elena explains, awareness of violence against women grew across Europe from the late 1960s, and women’s rights activists were the first to name it as a public problem. Because the state was doing little to counter violence against women, activists opened the first services in the 1970s. Alongside the first shelters, they started feminist self-defence trainings and consciousness-raising groups. These were women-only political spaces where women could speak openly about violence for the very first time, and over time they radically changed how society understood violence. Many services started out relying on unpaid volunteer work. Survivors themselves opened many of them, and communities facing particular forms of marginalisation, such as Roma women and Black women, opened by and for services. “Women’s specialist services are born from a feminist political movement, and this is still at the very core of their work,” says Elena.
The speakers share examples from their own countries. In Italy, the feminist movement put violence against women at the centre of its work from the very beginning, and in 1991 activists in Bologna opened Casa delle donne per non subire violenza, one of the country’s first anti-violence centres, with some public funding. In Poland, Urszula Nowakowska, one of the co-founders of WAVE, founded the Women’s Rights Centre (Centrum Praw Kobiet) in 1994. The organisation first focused on legislative reform, education and gender equality, yet women started contacting the team for support before they had even finished furnishing the office. Seeing that legal reforms alone were not enough, the organisation opened its first shelter in Warsaw in 1999. In France, the Fédération Nationale Solidarité Femmes, also a WAVE member, grew out of feminist initiatives in the late 1970s and in 1992 set up 3919, the first national women’s helpline, which is still running today.
Putting survivors at the centre
Marta Konrad explains that survivor-centred support means placing women’s needs, safety, experiences and choices at the very centre of the support process and recognising women as experts of their own lives. Many survivors have lived under prolonged control over different aspects of their lives, so services work to restore women’s autonomy and avoid repeating that control within the support relationship. Practitioners share information about women’s rights and options, explain potential risks and support women in making their own informed decisions, for example, whether to report the violence, start legal proceedings or leave an abusive relationship. They respect each woman’s pace, knowing that recovering from violence is not always a linear process, and their support stays available without judgement.
Fenestra, a women’s specialist service in Slovakia, guides its work by three principles: safety, empowerment and social change. Women often first come to the organisation frightened and in crisis. Through continued counselling, safety planning and a trusting relationship, they gradually regain confidence and a sense of autonomy, become more rested and healthier and, in Fenestra’s words, return to their original selves.
This trust lies at the heart of trauma-informed practice: listening without judgement, validating women’s experiences and allowing them to share their experiences at their own pace. It matters all the more because many survivors have already faced disbelief, minimisation or inappropriate responses from other institutions. By believing women, respecting their decisions and accompanying them through potentially re-traumatising processes, women’s specialist services prevent secondary victimisation, the additional harm survivors may experience when they seek support.
Women do not experience violence under the same circumstances, and they do not face the same barriers when seeking protection and support. An intersectional approach examines how structural inequalities and institutional practices shape women’s exposure to violence, their access to services and the choices available to them. In Spain, WAVE member Asociación Por Ti Mujer works with migrant and refugee women through an intercultural team, combining psychological counselling, legal assistance and employment support. In Serbia, Iz Kruga – Vojvodina is led by women with disabilities, who also provide its services wherever possible. This by and for approach recognises lived experience as a form of expertise. Women’s specialist services also recognise children affected by violence as survivors in their own right, with distinct experiences, needs and rights, and offer them dedicated child-sensitive support.
What is putting this work at risk
Believing women, respecting their choices and staying with them for as long as they need is only possible if the services themselves are there. Léa Dudouet names anti-gender backlash as one of the major threats. The rise of populist and authoritarian political regimes has created an increasingly hostile environment for women’s specialist services, leading to reduced public funding and shrinking feminist civic spaces across Europe and globally. Gender-neutral approaches add to this by obscuring the gendered nature of violence, for example when women’s counselling centres are renamed victim counselling centres. These approaches divert resources towards generic service providers that lack a women-centred approach and expertise. In the study’s survey, 80% of responding members said they had experienced anti-gender backlash and/or challenges related to gender-neutral approaches in their country.
Funding cuts are another major risk. In WAVE’s 2024 membership assessment survey, 37% of responding members said they had experienced funding cuts in the past five years and/or were concerned about cuts to come, and most reported cuts of 33% to above 50%. Women’s specialist services increasingly have to compete with generic services for funding and prove their added value in a competitive marketplace, while donors, including European governments, are redirecting money from gender equality towards defence, economic recovery and national security.
Legal and administrative barriers are growing too. Foreign agent laws, which members in countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and Slovakia have mentioned, require NGOs that receive foreign funds to register as foreign agents and restrict their capacity to organise and participate. Almost half of the members who took part in the survey reported increased regulation by the state, local authorities or funders, often with heavy administrative demands and no funding attached. In some Italian regions, regulations now require migrant women to disclose private data such as tax codes and to submit documents regularly, which puts them at risk and discourages them from reaching out for support. Finally, partnerships with institutions often depend on one individual or a personal contact, so progress can quickly come undone when that person leaves. Where key professionals such as judges lack training, domestic violence cases can be mishandled or minimised, leading to secondary victimisation of women and their children.
What women’s specialist services need
First and foremost, women’s specialist services need ring-fenced funding that is long-term, covers core costs, is unrestricted and is not tied to projects. Léa also stresses the need to remove the barriers that keep services from receiving international funding and support, including foreign agent laws. As European institutions discuss the EU budget for the next seven-year period, WAVE is calling on the EU to protect funding for gender equality and to secure a dedicated share for ending violence against women.
Services also need to be available and accessible. The WAVE Country Report 2025 shows that only 12 of the 46 countries surveyed meet the Istanbul Convention’s recommended minimum for women’s shelter capacity, the gold standard among legal instruments protecting survivors. Across Europe, about 61% of the recommended number of women’s centres is missing, and only 37% of countries reported that all or most women’s shelters were accessible to women with mobility impairments. Women with insecure or undocumented residence status also continue to face significant barriers. “Just because a service exists does not necessarily mean that all women who need it can actually access it,” says Marta. Women’s specialist services also need resources to prevent violence before it happens, through education, challenging gender stereotypes, feminist self-defence, community initiatives and training for professionals.
For Elena, the deeper problem lies in policymakers’ lack of interest in working with civil society at all. Many decision-makers do not know what support for survivors involves or why it matters, and civil society organisations are no longer seen as valid partners. This affects more than the organisations themselves, because when civil society is no longer invited to the table or funded, fundamental rights are no longer protected. “Of course we need funding, but we also need to be listened to and recognised as partners, because dialogue is a part of democracy,” she says. “We all have a role in keeping civil society alive.”
Women’s specialist services are agents of social, cultural and political change. Listen to the episode, explore their work in the study Agents of Change and join us in making sure they are listened to, protected and funded.
About the speakers: Léa Dudouet coordinated the research for Agents of Change and co-authored the study. She was Project and Network Coordinator at Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE) until February 2026. She is now a sowi:docs fellow pursuing her PhD in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. Her research looks at how people navigate reproductive decision-making and gendered ideas of responsibility through fertility tracking apps and wearable technologies.
Elena Floriani is Senior Research Coordinator at WAVE and co-author of the study. She leads the network’s publications and manages a range of international projects and initiatives on gender-based violence and women’s rights.
Marta Konrad is Project and Research Officer at WAVE and co-author of the study. She works on research and projects addressing gender-based violence and strengthening women’s specialist services across Europe.
