Justice
Fighting Domestic Violence With Architecture and Design
A new generation of shelters is changing the way women and children recover from abusive environments.
What should a domestic violence shelter look like?
It’s not something most people think about, or even want to think about. For so long, the whole issue of domestic violence has been pushed out of the public eye. Back in the 1970s, when the movement to provide safe places for women and children to escape their abusers was just getting started, shelters were often makeshift and improvised. They were usually single-family homes converted to communal dwellings, where several families would stay together while awaiting more permanent placement. No one in the larger community knew much about these shelters, because they were mostly kept secret – a tactic that was, at the time, thought to be the only way to keep survivors safe.