The Spazio Donna/Woman Space programme, which is active in the cities of Milan, Brescia, Bologna, Rome, Naples and Cosenza, has the purpose of increasing female empowerment as a primary means for the prevention and surfacing of gender-based violence.
In fact, this type of violence - although it occurs throughout the territory and covers all generations and social classes - has a higher impact in scenarios characterised by low literacy rates, poverty, unemployment, crime and heavily patriarchal households. In these cases, violence - economic and psychological more specifically - is perceived as something normal and is seldom recognised as such.
In the Spazio Donna/Woman Space facilities, skilled female staff create a welcoming place where relationships of trust can be built and women’s awareness raised through interventions that can restore their self-esteem, abilities and independence. The proposed activities are free: from psycho-physical well-being to cultural activity, job orientation and territorial services, which can be complemented with more-structured individual approaches.
A specific attention is paid to the mother/child relationship and to the little ones, through a dedicated service. There is, in fact, a child care corner for children between 0 and 8 years old in all the facilities, supervised by skilled operators (educators and psychologists). Child care is a privileged observatory to understand and reveal situations of intra-family violence by monitoring the behaviour of boys and girls.
The different Spazio Donna/Woman Space facilities respond to local territory needs: they are true anti-violence centres and centres for the support of families in difficulty, covering a social field that is not supervised by any other public or private figure.