All Japan Women’s Shelter Network, Japan

In 1998, to extend care and assistance to domestic violence survivors (both women and children), we gathered with other non-government shelters to form the network – All Japan Women’s Shelter. In 2003, we officially registered as a non-profit organization.

The “Purple Ribbon Project” is the main project in our network providing diverse services for domestic violence prevention and intervention. “Purple Dial” is a 24-hour professional counseling hotline, which not only provides service in the Japanese language, but, also six other foreign languages ​​which are Tagalog, Thai, Korean, Chinese, English and Spanish. Even men can request for help through calling the hotline. “Purple Radio” is an Internet platform sharing relevant information to empower women, with seminars, campaigns, case sharing , sexual minority issues, women’s labor-related issues and legal aids, etc.

From the north of Hokkaido to the south of Okinawa, there is a total of more than 100 shelters in Japan, and 76 shelters have joined our network as partners. All Japan Women’s Shelter creates synergy by galvanizing the efforts of local women’s organizations to promote needed changes in the Domestic Violent Prevention Law. Furthermore, the network provides mutual support and sharing of strategies. Our final goal is eliminating all forms violence toward women and children; hence, we focus on domestic violence, and also rape, sexual exploitation, and sexual harassment. We organize the regular conference since 1998, inviting frontline social workers and experts globally to share their policies and implementation strategies/practices in their country. Apart from using a variety of channels to be a voice for the survivors, we also provides a series of comprehensive services, from professional psychological counseling, short-term placement, job training programs to help survivors gain ability to return to independent living in the society.

At present, the recovery support system for survivors is not very comprehensive; the social resources that is available for them is not sufficient, hence, depending on the network’s resource alone is not adequate to help survivors recover fully. As such, All Japan Women’s Shelter is currently emphasizing on training social workers to analyze the structure of sexual violence, as well as understand the physical and psychological situation of survivors. We’re also planning to expend more service stations to provide counseling, to make a good use of the social resources we have.