Rape and domestic violence shelters

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Vulnerable women will be placed at risk and made to suffer additional stress if rape and violence shelters – which should be spaces of safety and healing -  allow men to enter.

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The first women’s shelter in Switzerland was opened in Zurich in 1979. Today, there are a total of 23 shelter houses reserved for women, with 200 family rooms and around 400 beds, but even these are insufficient. In 2024, approximately 2400 women and children sought refuge in a shelter. The Council of Europe recommends one room per 10’000 inhabitants; Switzerland is below the recommended number with only 0.23 family rooms per 10’000 in habitants. 

Despite the fact that there is insufficient shelter space for women in Switzerland, some women’s shelters are now extending their services to include men who identify as women. This is the case for Stiftung Gegen Gewalt in Bern, which offers an emergency phone service to “transgender” victims of domestic violence. Although at the time of writing, this women’s shelter has not yet housed a man, this eventuality is currently being discussed.

In Canada, the case of Kristi Hanna in 2018 is instructive. Kristi attended a women's addiction recovery shelter in Toronto. She was forced to share a room with a pre-operative “transgender”  male. As a victim of sexual assault and a recovering drug addict, she spent two nights in the shelter suffering enormous stress. “It’s affecting everyone in the house. This can completely ruin your recovery, let alone your safety, let alone your life,” Kristi said in an interview with the National Post. When she complained about having to share a room with a man, Kristi was asked to leave the shelter. When a friend inquired about Kristi's rights at Ontario's Human Rights Legal Support Centre, the representative abruptly ended the call when her friend used male pronouns to refer to the person she was complaining about.

Femina Helvetica will work to ensure that this kind of incident never happens in Switzerland. 

We observe that the term "gender-based violence" is now slowly muddying the meaning of the well-established concept of male violence against women. This shift in focus away from sex-based toward gender-based services – in effect, denying women's sexual reality and making way for gender self-identification – is compromising outcomes for women in rape and domestic violence shelters in Switzerland.

Femina Helvetica calls for sex-based services not to be replaced by “gender-based” services.