How women build their own safety

When the police do not come, when the law is a distant rumour, when the house is no longer a shelter, what happens? The world assumes paralysis. It expects waiting. It is wrong. Women do not just wait for rescue. They become architects. They become engineers and builders of their own safety. They survey the dangerous landscape and draft blueprints with nothing but their wits and their will. This 16 Days of Activism, we must spotlight this relentless, ingenious work. This is not a story about coping. It is a testimony to profound agency. It is also a brutal indictment of every system that forces this labour upon them. Their methods are a blueprint for what real support must look like. Recognising these strategies is not an acceptance of the status quo. It is a critical step in moving from pity to partnership, from providing aid to amplifying existing power.

What does a safety net look like when you have to weave it yourself, in the dark?

Their methods are born of a stark necessity and a deep, communal intelligence. They are the science of survival, developed in laboratories of perpetual threat. These are not random acts of desperation. They are formalised, repeatable systems of protection. They function as a parallel, often invisible, infrastructure where formal structures have crumbled or never existed. To support women effectively, we must first map this existing infrastructure. The following are not mere anecdotes. They are documented, strategic frameworks.

One: The Early-Warning Network

Long before an official hotline exists, women create their own transmission lines. A specific, pre-agreed song sung loudly from a compound wall. A particular coloured scarf hung over a windowsill. A child sent on a deliberate, coded errand to a neighbour. These are not casual acts. They are sophisticated, distributed alert systems. They signal Danger is here. The storm is inside the house. This triggers a pre-arranged response—a neighbour’s sudden visit, a gathering of women outside the gate, a loud, distracting conversation started at the fence line. This grassroots network turns isolated, vulnerable homes into connected cells of vigilance. It is a human security system, running on trust and acute attention. For organisations, this represents a critical insight: communication infrastructure already exists. Support can mean providing discreet, durable communication tools—basic mobile phones, solar chargers, airtime—to strengthen these existing signals, not replacing them with a centralised number survivors may not trust or access.

How do you build a firewall when you have no bricks?

Two: The Economic Collective

Understanding that financial dependence is the strongest chain, women quietly forge their own keys. They form table banking groups, merry-go-round savings circles, and informal credit associations. To the outside world, this is entrepreneurship. And it is. But it is also covert safety engineering. These pooled funds have a dual purpose. Yes, they buy stock for a small business. But they also, silently, function as an emergency escape fund. They are money for a sudden doctor’s visit after an assault, for a prescription not covered by shame. They are a collective pot to pay a child’s school fees when a father withholds money as punishment. Economic solidarity is not just wealth creation. It is strategic safety planning. It is the material foundation for a possible exit. For policymakers and funders, the lesson is direct: the most effective economic empowerment programmes are those that recognise and resource these existing collectives. Provide financial literacy training, facilitate secure group savings accounts, and offer match funding. Do not disband them to start your own programme.

Where do you find a safe space when nowhere is safe?

Three: The Redefined Safe Space

Safety is not always a physical location. Sometimes, safety is a role, a purpose, a social position. A woman makes herself the indispensable community birth attendant. She becomes the respected prayer group leader. She is the owner of the only grinding mill or sewing machine in the village. This cultivated social capital becomes a protective shield. To harm her is to disrupt a service the entire community relies upon. It generates a collective investment in her wellbeing. This role also grants her something precious: a legitimate, unquestioned reason to be out of the house. Her visits to other women are "work." Her gatherings are "meetings." She builds a lattice of connections under the guise of service, creating a web that can catch her if she falls. For those building formal safe spaces or shelters, this model is instructive. A shelter must be more than a roof. It must be a platform that helps survivors build or reclaim this kind of social and economic capital, transforming them from vulnerable people into valued community assets.

What survival manual is written in whispers from mother to daughter?

Four: The Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer

There is an oral tradition of safety, a library of survival scripts passed from mother to daughter. It contains no theory, only brutal practicality. A mother teaches her daughter to always keep a separate, hidden store of beans or maize. She makes her memorise the phone number of a cousin in a far-off town. She identifies which aunt, in which village, can be a refuge. She might teach her to sleep lightly, to recognise the sound of a particular footstep, to always have her shoes near her mat. This knowledge is a heartbreaking inheritance. It is not about thriving. It is about enduring. It is the handing down of tools for a war they did not declare. For educators and those designing prevention programmes, this underscores a gap. Formal curricula often ignore this lived, tactical knowledge. Bridging that gap means creating spaces where this intergenerational wisdom can be shared safely and integrated into broader community safety plans, honouring it as expert data.

What court do you petition when there is no judge?

Five: The Spiritual Armour

When earthly justice is absent or corrupt, women often seek a higher jurisdiction. They claim a moral and spiritual authority that no man can easily assault. A woman may loudly pray for her abuser’s soul in the market. She frames his violence not as her shame, but as his spiritual failing, a demon he must fight. This clever narrative shifts the community’s perception. It isolates the perpetrator under a cloud of divine disapproval. It wraps her in a cloak of unshakable righteousness. It is a form of social power that draws its strength from a realm her abuser cannot touch with his fists. For faith leaders and community elders, the implication is clear. There is a powerful, existing framework of spiritual armour that can be consciously reinforced. Public sermons and teachings that explicitly denounce violence as a spiritual corruption, and that publicly align the faith community with the survivor’s moral standing, can exponentially strengthen this individual strategy.

Do you see their work, or do you just see their struggle?

Our role is not to replace these intricate, lived systems. To bulldoze them with outside "solutions" is arrogance. It is violence. Our role is to see them, to respect their genius, and to reinforce them with resource and legitimacy. This requires a fundamental shift from a deficit-based model (what women lack) to an asset-based model (what women already create and control). The frontline of safety is not in a police station or a ministry office. It is in the savings group meeting, in the coded song, in the whispered lesson from a mother at night.

Why are we trying to be the architects, when our job is to supply the steel?

Effective support must do three things, each derived from the strategies above:

• Listen first, design second. Ask the simple, radical question: "What are you already doing to keep yourself and your children safe?" The blueprint already exists. They are holding it. Use participatory methods to map these existing protection strategies before proposing a single intervention.

• Resource their strategies, do not replace them. Provide the tools that strengthen existing networks: mobile phones for alert systems, formal financial products for savings groups, legal aid that follows the survivor's lead, safe spaces designed by the women who will use them. Fund what works, not what looks good on a proposal.

• Amplify their authority and integrate their knowledge. Position these grassroots female architects as the lead experts in community protection planning. Their knowledge is not anecdotal; it is empirical, forged in the fire of real danger. Bring them into policy rooms, training programmes for police and social workers, and grant-making committees. Weave their intergenerational knowledge into formal systems.

True safety is not delivered from the outside in. It cannot be. It is built from the inside out, floor by floor, by those who know the ground’s every fault line. This 16 Days, let us move beyond pity and pedestals. Let us honour the formidable, creative power of women as the primary architects of their own protection. Then, let us pass them the tools. Not the blueprint. They already have that. Pass them the steel, the capital, the policy, the amplifier. And then, get out of the way. The architects are already at work. It is time we started working for them. Our metric for success must change. It is not how many services we deliver. It is how effectively we strengthen the safety they are already building.